Landscaping case study · Local Services Ads
$250K booked in 30 days, from $2,500 of Local Services Ads
Pristine Landscaping came to us in February 2026 with no Local Services Ads presence at all. Their first charged lead arrived on 24 February. Six months later they have taken 358 of them at about $28 each.
Jason Tepes, owner of Pristine Landscaping, on the first 30 days.
Where they started
Pristine came to us through a mutual connection, the CMO of one of our hospitality clients is a close friend of Jason's. They were a well-run landscaping business with no Local Services Ads presence whatsoever. Not a badly configured account: no account.
What we did
Every step, start to finish. We created the accounts, ran the verifications, set the service radius and the job types, wrote the ad copy, and rebuilt the website underneath it all. Jason did not have to learn any of it.
Then the part that does not show up in a setup checklist: we watch every lead that comes in and dispute the invalid ones. On Local Services Ads you are charged per lead, so a wrong number or a caller outside the service area is money leaving the account. Someone has to be looking, every week, or the cost per lead quietly climbs.
The part we are most pleased with is smaller than it sounds. We turn individual job types on and off depending on what the crew can actually take. When the calendar fills, we switch off the work that would overbook them. When there is capacity, we open it back up. Most agencies treat an ad account as something you set and then optimise for volume. Volume is not the point. A booked lead the crew cannot reach for three weeks is a bad review waiting to happen, and on Local Services Ads your reviews feed straight back into your ranking. Matching spend to capacity is how the $28 cost per lead has held.
Verification took under a week. That is not the usual number, and it is not luck. Google needs a certificate of insurance, a licence number and background checks on the business and its owner before a single ad runs. When all of that is sitting ready on day one and the owner clears the background checks straight away, the whole thing closes inside a week. When it is chased down a piece at a time, the same process takes a month or more, and that month is one nobody is buying leads in. Getting the paperwork in front of you before we start is most of what makes the difference.
What we switched on, and what we deliberately did not. On day one the account ran four job types: landscape design, landscape installation, driveway landscaping and walkway installation. That was the work the crew could take on at the time, and nothing else went live. Stone masonry, concrete masonry, hardscapes and driveway or walkway paving all stayed off, not because the demand was missing but because Jason could not yet staff the concrete work. Once he had hired enough people to deliver it, we turned those four on. A job type you enable is a category of call you have agreed to pay for, so the ones you cannot yet fulfil are the ones you leave dark.
The numbers
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| First charged lead | 24 February 2026 |
| Charged leads to date | 358 |
| Total LSA spend | $10,000 |
| Cost per charged lead | $28 |
| Booked revenue reported by client | $400,000+ |
| Return on ad spend | 40x |
| First 30 days | $250,000 booked on $2,500 |
Revenue figures are as reported by the client. Lead counts and spend are from the Local Services Ads account.
Why it worked
Nothing here was clever, and that is the point. The paperwork was ready before the account existed, so verification took days rather than a month, and the ads were live while a competitor would still have been waiting on a background check. The job types matched the crew rather than the wishlist, so every call was one Jason could actually book, and the reviews stayed clean because nobody was being turned away after they had already rung. The website was rebuilt at the same time, so the leads landed somewhere built to close them. And every lead was read, with the invalid ones disputed, which is the unglamorous weekly work that held the cost per charged lead at $28 across 358 of them.
Four ordinary decisions, made in the right order and kept up. That is most of what a good Local Services Ads account is.