500 Leads Per Month
$100 Cost Per Lead in Just 6 Months

For years, the company relied almost exclusively on canvassing to drive growth. While they had tested Google Ads in the past, the spend was minimal, and the results were inconclusive. 


Aside from limited Google Local Service Ads lead brokers like Angi, digital marketing wasn’t a priority, and the CEO was skeptical it could outperform their proven door-to-door strategy.


That changed when Christian Riley joined as Chief Marketing Officer. With a track record of scaling companies through digital channels, he knew online lead generation would be critical to sustained growth.

The Challenge

Google Local Service Ads had been performing well, but had reached their limit, and there was no room to scale. Christian needed to prove that Google Ads could deliver qualified leads at a cost that made sense for the business.


With only a small amount of outdated and unstructured campaign data to go off of, Christian quickly realized he’d need to start from square one.

The Strategy

Christian called in the Hutch team to help him revamp and revive Axiom’s Google Ads portfolio. We launched with call-only campaigns, using CallRail tracking numbers to measure results. 


Our first target: Axiom’s home base in Portland, Oregon. Early testing revealed that:

• Brand campaigns generated too many calls from existing customers, so we shifted to focus solely on new customer acquisition.


• Competitive Conque sting campaigns underperformed because the sales team wasn’t equipped to convert customers away from competitors, so we paused those campaigns.

Instead, we concentrated on generic, non-brand keywords, using brand exclusions and negative lists to avoid both Axiom’s name and those of local and national competitors.


The strong initial results in Portland led us to expand into Seattle, Denver, Nashville, and, most recently, Dallas.


Once the custom landing pages were ready, we rolled out regular search campaigns with Responsive Search Ads. Extensive testing helped us strike the right balance: specific enough to attract qualified prospects without restricting volume, but broad enough to scale without attracting unqualified leads.


We also replicated the strategy on Microsoft Ads, manually building campaigns to avoid the disapproval issues caused by automatic imports from Google.

The Results

Six months in, and Axiom’s campaigns are now meeting their cost-per-lead targets with no signs of slowing down. To take optimization further, we’re building a data warehouse that’ll push actual revenue data from their CRM into the ad platforms, allowing us to optimize for ROI rather than CPL.


While that project is underway, our data specialist built a system to log every form submission with tracking parameters. Combined with CallRail call recordings, this allows us to monitor lead quality and attribution in real time.

Since launching in March, Axiom’s lead volume has grown month over month, and its CPL continues to drop. August was our best month yet, with over 451 leads at an $82 CPL (their goal was $100 or better). Thanks to Christian’s smart moves and a lot of hard work from the Hutch team, they’re back on track to healthy, sustainable growth.