Painting case study · Houston, Texas
Burned once, back in, and paying $54 for a $5,000 job
Liberty Painting had already been let down by a marketing provider before we met them. This is the version of the story that matters to anyone who has been through that.
What the last agency got wrong
Liberty had run Local Services Ads before, through another agency, and it had not worked. The reason turned out to be a single configuration choice: the account was set so leads arrived as booking requests through their Google Business Profile rather than as phone calls to someone sitting in their office.
For a painting contractor that is the difference between a live conversation and a request form nobody opens for two days. The ads were running. The money was being spent. The leads were arriving somewhere nobody was looking.
This is exactly the kind of thing that is invisible from outside the account and obvious from inside it.
What has happened since
We restarted their Local Services Ads at the end of May 2026. First charged lead came in on 28 May.
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| First charged lead | 28 May 2026 |
| Charged leads since | 65 |
| Total ad spend | $3,500 |
| Cost per charged lead | $53.85 |
| Leads per month | ~20 |
| Minimum job value | $1,500 |
| Average job booked through LSAs | $5,000 |
Before
AfterThat is a deliberately modest budget, and the point of this one is not a big number. It is the ratio. A lead costs about $54. The average job it turns into is worth $5,000. Even their smallest job, at $1,500, is worth roughly twenty-eight leads.
Cost per lead is the number every contractor asks about first and it is close to meaningless on its own. Fifty-four dollars is expensive for a business selling $200 jobs and almost free for one selling $5,000 repaints. The only version of this number worth quoting is the one sitting next to what the work is actually worth.