Case Study: Cutting Cost Per Lead 87% for a Winnipeg Drain Company

The situation

Pro Drain Cleaning is a drain and sewer company in Winnipeg, Manitoba, working an emergency-led trade where most valuable jobs begin with someone searching on a phone with water on the floor.

The account we inherited had been built by a previous provider. It ran five campaigns, including a Performance Max campaign. On the account’s own numbers, a real lead was costing $716.65 — several times above independent benchmarks for the trade.

• —Five campaigns splitting a budget that could properly support far fewer
• —Broad keyword matching pulling in searches with no commercial value
• —Conversion tracking that did not reliably separate real leads from other activity
• —A cost per lead well above what drain and sewer work typically supports

What we changed

We rebuilt the account as two focused search campaigns rather than restructuring the five. The work was deliberately unglamorous: almost every gain came from removing waste rather than from finding anything clever.

• ✓Phrase and exact match only, so the account paid for searches from people trying to hire, not adjacent queries
• ✓Negative keyword lists built from the real search terms report — DIY searches, parts shopping and competitor brand names
• ✓Conversion tracking rewired to count only calls from ads, contact-form submissions and phone-number clicks
• ✓Keyword-level landing pages so each search reached the most relevant page on the site, which lifted Quality Scores
• ✓Ad scheduling weighted toward the hours emergency searches actually happen
• ✓Services the business does not offer removed from targeting entirely, so no budget went to jobs it could not take

The results

Measured against the inherited campaigns on the client’s own account: click-through rate rose from 1.40% to 8.01%, conversion rate from 0.97% to 10.63%, and cost per real lead fell from $716.65 to $90.23 — achieved on roughly a tenth of the previous spend.

For context, independent benchmark research on drain and sewer advertising puts the national average cost per lead at roughly $166–231 in CAD-equivalent terms, with campaigns described as well-optimised averaging around $78–141. At $90.23 the account sat inside the well-optimised band.

Alongside the ads, the client’s new website ranked first in organic results — directly beneath Google’s AI Overview — for a question Winnipeg homeowners search during freeze season: whether home insurance covers frozen pipe damage in Manitoba.

What this comparison does not show

We would rather state these plainly than have a buyer discover them.

• !A Google Ads “conversion” is a call or form submission — a lead, not a booked job. We did not have reliable visibility of how many leads became paid work. On one day where the account looked exceptional in-platform, the client reported a single closed job of around $200 against roughly $200 of spend.
• !The previous provider’s Performance Max campaign reached far more people than our search campaigns did — well over a hundred thousand impressions against a few thousand. Its conversion rate was very low, but its reach was real, and a search-only rebuild gives that up.
• !Comparing a mature account against a rebuilt one flatters the rebuild somewhat: much of the gain came from removing obvious waste, and that is a one-time improvement rather than a repeatable rate of growth.
• !Sample sizes over the campaign’s live run were modest. The direction of every metric is clear; the precise figures should be read as one account’s result, not as what any account will do.

What we took from it

The largest single lever was not in the campaign settings at all. Fixing what counted as a conversion changed which keywords the bidding algorithm pursued, and everything downstream improved with it. An account optimising toward the wrong action gets steadily better at producing the wrong result.

The second lesson was about response time. The account generated a genuine emergency call at midnight that the business could not service because its team works daytime hours. In an emergency trade, paying for after-hours clicks only makes sense if someone answers after hours.

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