A multi-location home services brand running Google Ads across 8 locations cut its blended cost per acquisition by 40 percent within 90 days of switching to fully managed Google Ads through groas. The brand had been spending north of $80,000 per month across HVAC and plumbing service lines, managed by a regional agency with an in-house marketing coordinator bridging the gap. Rising CPAs, inconsistent location-level performance, and broken conversion tracking finally forced the switch. This is the story of what was wrong, what got rebuilt, and what the numbers looked like on the other side. It is a representative pattern groas sees across multi-location home services accounts, not a single named customer’s proprietary data.
The Business Situation: 8 Locations, Significant Spend, And A Setup That Looked Fine On Paper
This is a home services operator running HVAC and plumbing across 8 metro-area locations. Each location serves a distinct market with different competitive dynamics, seasonal demand curves, and service mixes. Google Ads is the primary lead generation channel, responsible for the bulk of inbound calls and form submissions.
The prior setup was common for businesses at this scale: a regional agency managed the Google Ads account on a 12-month retainer, and an in-house marketing coordinator handled day-to-day communication, budget approvals, and reporting. On paper, the structure made sense. In practice, it created a gap where no single party owned the full conversion path from click to booked appointment.
Monthly spend sat around $80,000 to $100,000 depending on season. The account had grown organically over several years, layering campaigns on top of campaigns without ever stepping back to audit the foundation.
What Was Going Wrong: Rising CPAs, Tracking Gaps, And An Agency That Kept Rotating Staff
CPAs Climbed While Budget Stayed Flat
Over two consecutive quarters, the blended CPA across all locations rose steadily. Some locations saw increases of 30 percent or more. Budget had not changed materially. The agency’s explanation rotated between “increased competition,” “seasonality,” and “Google’s algorithm changes,” but no specific diagnosis was ever presented with data to back it up.
Location-Level Variance Nobody Was Managing
Some locations were generating leads at half the cost of others. That variance is expected in multi-location accounts to some degree, but in this case, nobody was actively reallocating budget based on location-level efficiency. High-performing locations were underfunded. Low-performing ones kept spending at the same rate because the budget was set at the account level, not managed dynamically by market.
Conversion Tracking Was Fundamentally Broken
This is where the real damage hid. Phone call tracking was partially implemented. Some locations used one call tracking provider, others used a different one, and two locations had no call tracking at all. Form submissions were being double-counted in some campaigns due to redirect-based thank-you pages firing the conversion tag twice. The agency was optimizing toward conversion data that did not reflect reality.
When your bidding strategy is fed bad data, every automated decision Google makes gets worse over time, not better.
Agency Account Manager Turnover
In 18 months, the account cycled through three different account managers at the agency. Each transition meant weeks of ramp-up, lost institutional knowledge, and strategy resets that never fully completed before the next rotation. The in-house coordinator spent more time onboarding new agency contacts than actually improving performance.
This is one of the structural weaknesses of traditional agency relationships that is hard to solve. Staff turnover at agencies is high, and multi-location accounts need structural discipline that survives personnel changes.
The Diagnosis: A Structural Problem, Not A Tactical One
The instinct when CPAs rise is to look for tactical fixes: adjust bids, test new ad copy, try different keywords. The in-house coordinator had pushed the agency to do all of those things. None of them moved the needle meaningfully.
The actual root cause was structural. Three layers of it.
First, the conversion data feeding Google’s automated bidding was wrong. No amount of bid adjustment fixes an account optimizing toward phantom conversions. This is a problem that costs real money in any account, but it compounds in multi-location setups because the errors are distributed and harder to spot.
Second, the campaign architecture had no logical relationship between locations, service lines, and budget allocation. Campaigns had been added reactively over years. There was no framework for isolating performance by market, which meant nobody could answer the question “what is our CPA for plumbing leads in Location 4?”
Third, the landing pages were generic. Every location pointed to the same set of pages regardless of the service being searched for or the market being targeted. In local services, landing page relevance directly impacts Quality Score, conversion rate, and ultimately CPA.
This was not a case where better execution within the existing framework would have worked. The framework itself needed to be replaced.
What Got Rebuilt In DFY Onboarding
The business applied for groas DFY, fully managed Google Ads, after evaluating two other agencies and deciding the same model would produce the same result. The application process evaluated the account’s history, the business’s goals, and whether the operator was willing to share full business context and give groas ownership of the full conversion path.
The onboarding priority list was deliberate: tracking first, structure second, spend third.
Conversion Tracking Rebuilt From Scratch
Every conversion action was audited and rebuilt. Phone call tracking was unified across all locations under a single provider with proper attribution. Form submissions were de-duplicated. Offline conversion imports were set up so that the account could eventually optimize toward booked appointments rather than just leads. This gave Google’s bidding algorithms clean data for the first time.
Campaign Structure Redesigned By Location And Service Line
The entire account was restructured around a location-by-service matrix. Each location got its own campaign set, broken down by service line (HVAC install, HVAC repair, plumbing emergency, plumbing maintenance, and so on). This structure made budget allocation, bid strategy, and performance analysis possible at the level that actually matters for multi-location operators.
Landing Pages Audited And Replaced
For the top-spend campaigns, generic landing pages were replaced with location-specific and service-specific pages. These were not minor copy tweaks. Page structure, calls to action, trust signals, and form placement were all rebuilt to match the intent of the search query and the market being served. This is part of what fully managed Google Ads through groas includes that most agencies do not touch: ownership of the page the click lands on, not just the ad that generates the click.
Negative Keyword Strategy Rebuilt Across All Markets
Years of accumulated campaigns meant years of accumulated waste. The negative keyword lists were sparse and inconsistent across locations. A comprehensive negative keyword framework was built to eliminate irrelevant spend across all markets, particularly for high-volume, low-intent terms common in home services (DIY queries, career searches, brand confusion with local competitors).
The First 90 Days: From Learning Phase To Consistent Performance
Weeks 1 Through 4: The Rebuild
The first month was about getting clean data flowing and letting the restructured campaigns exit the learning phase. CPAs during this period were volatile, which is expected when you rebuild an account’s conversion tracking and campaign structure simultaneously. The groas strategist managed the learning phase deliberately, resisting the urge to make reactive changes before the algorithms had enough clean conversion data to optimize against.
The proprietary groas engine ran execution around the clock during this period, processing performance signals across all 8 locations and adjusting bids, budgets, and targeting continuously. A dedicated strategist owned every decision and communicated weekly on what was being done and why.
Weeks 5 Through 8: Stabilization And Performance Max Introduction
By week 5, conversion data was clean and sufficient. CPAs began to stabilize and then trend downward. Performance Max campaigns were introduced for specific service lines where asset quality and conversion volume supported them. This was not a blanket Performance Max rollout. It was selective, with budget protections in place to prevent overspend in unproven campaign types.
Location-level performance variance started to close. The worst-performing location’s CPA dropped from more than double the best-performing location to within 25 percent of it. Budget was dynamically reallocated toward locations showing the strongest efficiency and volume.
Weeks 9 Through 12: Compounding Returns
The final month of the 90-day window showed the compounding effect of clean data, proper structure, and continuous optimization. Google’s automated bidding was now working with accurate conversion data inside a well-structured account, and the groas engine was layering its own optimization on top of that foundation 24 hours a day.
The Result: 40 Percent CPA Reduction, Lead Volume Maintained
At the 90-day mark, the blended CPA across all 8 locations was approximately 40 percent lower than the average of the prior two quarters. Lead volume was maintained at a comparable level, meaning the reduction was driven by efficiency gains rather than simply cutting spend.
The location with the worst prior performance saw the largest improvement. Two locations that had been considered “unprofitable” on Google Ads returned to positive unit economics once tracking was fixed and their campaigns were properly isolated.
The in-house marketing coordinator’s role shifted entirely. Instead of managing agency communication, chasing reports, and troubleshooting tracking issues, they focused on what they were actually hired to do: marketing strategy across channels. The groas team was reachable on Slack and email around the clock, and weekly reports plus biweekly strategy calls meant the business always knew what was happening without needing to log in or manage anything.
No onboarding fee. No long-term contract. Month-to-month, with groas earning the next month by performing.
What This Means For Multi-Location Home Services Operators
This pattern is not unique to one business. Multi-location home services accounts share a set of structural vulnerabilities that tactical optimization alone cannot fix.
Multi-Location Accounts Need Structural Discipline, Not Just More Budget
Throwing more budget at a broken account structure accelerates waste. If your campaigns are not organized in a way that lets you see and control performance by location and service line, you cannot make informed decisions about where to invest. The problem is architectural, and it requires someone with the authority and expertise to tear down and rebuild.
Full Conversion Path Ownership Changes The Math
The gap between “managing your Google Ads” and “owning the full path from search to booked appointment” is where most of the CPA improvement lived in this case. Fixing tracking, rebuilding landing pages, and connecting offline conversion data are not optional extras. They are the foundation that everything else depends on. Most agencies will not touch your landing pages. Most in-house coordinators do not have the bandwidth or technical ability to rebuild conversion tracking across 8 locations. A fully managed service that owns all of it eliminates the gaps between roles.
When To Apply For DFY
If you are a multi-location operator running significant Google Ads spend, and your current agency or in-house setup cannot tell you the true CPA by location and service line, you have a structural problem. If your agency has rotated account managers more than once in the past year, you have a continuity problem. If your landing pages are the same across all locations, you have a conversion rate problem.
groas DFY exists to own all of those problems end to end. A dedicated strategist runs your entire account, backed by a proprietary engine trained on over $500 billion in profitable ad spend that executes 24/7. Nothing to log into or manage. No onboarding fee. Cancel anytime.
If your multi-location home services business is spending meaningful budget on Google Ads and the numbers are not where they should be, the next step is to apply for groas DFY and find out what your account actually looks like under the hood.
