How a Stalled Google Ads Account Went From One Lead a Week to a Peak of Fourteen

ECM Heating & Cooling had been running Google Ads for months on the same budget, getting one lead a week for it. The account itself, and the platform, agreed on the fix: expand reach, switch to Smart Bidding, open up the match types. Spend the same money wider.

I did the opposite.

The account was broad by default. General heating and cooling keywords, all of it landing on the homepage, no way to tell which service line was actually pulling its weight. Broadening a setup like that just spreads the same guesswork over a bigger number.

So I scrapped the campaign and rebuilt it around buying-intent search terms, the kind someone types when they already know what they want and are close to calling. Then I narrowed the whole account down to one service: heat pumps. ECM had the strongest local reputation there, the lowest competition, and the best margin of anything they sold. Every campaign got its own landing page instead of funnelling into a homepage trying to say everything at once, with real conversion tracking behind it so I could see what was actually converting.

Google flagged the account constantly through the narrowing. New advertisers get flagged more when they restructure hard and fast, and this was about as hard and fast as it gets. I left the flags alone and didn’t touch Smart Bidding until there was enough real conversion data for it to mean anything. Turning on automated bidding before that just spends the budget teaching Google’s model what a good customer looks like, on guesses instead of real behaviour.

The budget scaled more than 50% once the narrower account proved itself, and expanded into Local Service Ads on the same strategy. ECM now sees an average of 6 leads a week, with peaks of 14, and revenue is up more than 20% year-over-year. The site rebuild that followed added its own compounding effect: organic traffic up 177% in the first 12 months. Once the two heat pump brands were pulled under one roof as Kingston Heat Pumps, the unified microsite picked up 200+ tool submissions and 50+ newsletter signups in six months.

The pattern holds outside Kingston too. Same spend for months, one or two leads to show for it, broad match running everywhere: that’s usually the tell. It plays out the same way in Ottawa, Belleville, Napanee, and Brockville as it did here. If that’s where your own Google Ads management needs to start, narrower is the first move.