Across the campaign period, the numbers told a clear story.
The campaign generated more than 412,000 impressions across Durham Region and pulled in over 8,900 clicks at a CTR well above the home-services benchmark, ultimately delivering a 615% ROI based on tracked consultation bookings, signed contracts and the client’s reported close rate.
Just as importantly, their build calendar filled earlier in the season than it had in previous years, meaning our client locked in their year before many of their competitors.
In a category where you’re either booking pools or you’re not, that’s the only result that really matters.
Our client, an inground swimming pool company based in Durham Region, builds and installs fully custom pools for homeowners across the region.
What makes them genuinely different is how they build. While much of the market relies on pre-fabricated fibreglass shells – drop-in pools that come in a fixed set of shapes and sizes – our client uses a modular steel framing system that can be configured into virtually any shape, size or depth a homeowner can dream up.
That means real custom builds: long lap pools, irregular shapes, specific depth zones, integrated steps, you name it. Whatever the backyard calls for, they can build it.That custom-build capability is a much bigger deal than it sounds. We’re talking about a (minimum) $60k project that tears up someone’s backyard and (when it goes sideways) becomes the kind of horror story neighbours warn each other about for years.
A pool company that’s been in the community a long time, builds genuinely custom pools and leaves clients happy is hard to find, and that scarcity is exactly what we wanted the campaign to capitalize on.
The catch? Pool building is a deeply seasonal business. Inquiries spike hard in late winter and early spring as homeowners start dreaming about summer, and the companies that fill their build calendar early are the ones who win the year.
Inground pool searches are high-stakes and surprisingly low-volume.
Far fewer people are typing “inground pool companies Durham Region” into Google than are searching for, say, mould removal or home inspections, but the people who are searching represent a considerable amount of revenue for the company, let alone jobs for their employees, which means every click matters and every wasted dollar stings.
It’s worth noting that our client wasn’t coming to PPC because their organic visibility was lacking. They’ve got excellent SEO already in place and consistently rank at the top of both the organic search results and the local map pack for their core terms in Durham Region.
But here’s the thing about big-ticket purchase decisions: Homeowners considering an inground pool aren’t clicking the first result and calling it a day. They’re researching for weeks, sometimes months, comparing companies, second-guessing themselves and looking for reasons to feel confident before signing anything.
In that kind of decision-making process, the additional visibility a PPC campaign provides genuinely never hurts. Showing up in the paid results and the organic results and the local map pack means our client is the name homeowners might see three times on the same search, which, in a high-trust, high-ticket category, is exactly the kind of repeated exposure that turns “maybe” into “let’s book a consultation.”
The economy made it more important, not less. With consumer confidence softer and discretionary spending tighter, leads in the inground pool category are harder to come by than they were a few years ago, even for companies with great SEO.
PPC was the lever to pull to make sure no qualified Durham Region buyer was slipping through the cracks.
We built a tightly-scoped Google Ads campaign exclusively targeting Durham Region – no GTA spillover, no neighbouring regions – so every dollar in the budget went toward homeowners actually in our client’s service area. Bid adjustments favoured the higher-income postal codes where inground pools are most likely to be commissioned.
Keyword targeting was built around the phrases real buyers actually type: “inground pool companies Durham Region,” “inground pool builders,” and city-level variants throughout the region. Negative keywords did serious heavy lifting – filtering out above-ground pools, fibreglass shell retailers, pool maintenance and repair searches, hot-tub queries, DIY content and the endless stream of “how much does an inground pool cost” tire-kicker searches that never convert.
Ad copy leaned on the thing that genuinely separates our client from the rest of the auction: fully custom builds using modular steel framing, not the limited-shape fibreglass shells most of their competitors are quietly installing. That single distinction does a lot of work in this category — it instantly filters for the homeowners who want a real custom pool and quietly disqualifies the ones who were going to end up buying a drop-in shell anyway.
Behind the ads, we also built dedicated, high-converting landing pages that did the work of separating our client from the rest of the auction.
The single biggest differentiator, fully custom builds using modular steel framing rather than the limited-shape fibreglass shells most competitors quietly install, was given the room it deserved, supported by real project photography and a clear path to booking a consultation. Visitors arrived ready to research and left ready to talk.
We launched the campaign early, well before the spring rush, to fill the build calendar before the rest of the market woke up. And we kept tightening it month over month based on which keywords were producing actual booked consultations.
The auction itself was a mixed bag. Some of it was high-quality local competition, other established Durham Region pool companies fighting for the same homeowners.
The rest was fibreglass-shell retailers, above-ground pool sellers and outright tire-kickers in the research phase, all bidding on overlapping keywords. We needed to filter aggressively for serious, in-region, ready-to-build buyers without letting the budget bleed-out on the rest.
We built a tightly-scoped Google Ads campaign exclusively targeting Durham Region – no GTA spillover, no neighbouring regions – so every dollar in the budget went toward homeowners actually in our client’s service area. Bid adjustments favoured the higher-income postal codes where inground pools are most likely to be commissioned.
Keyword targeting was built around the phrases real buyers actually type: “inground pool companies Durham Region,” “inground pool builders,” and city-level variants throughout the region. Negative keywords did serious heavy lifting – filtering out above-ground pools, fibreglass shell retailers, pool maintenance and repair searches, hot-tub queries, DIY content and the endless stream of “how much does an inground pool cost” tire-kicker searches that never convert.
Ad copy leaned on the thing that genuinely separates our client from the rest of the auction: fully custom builds using modular steel framing, not the limited-shape fibreglass shells most of their competitors are quietly installing. That single distinction does a lot of work in this category — it instantly filters for the homeowners who want a real custom pool and quietly disqualifies the ones who were going to end up buying a drop-in shell anyway.
Behind the ads, we also built dedicated, high-converting landing pages that did the work of separating our client from the rest of the auction.
The single biggest differentiator, fully custom builds using modular steel framing rather than the limited-shape fibreglass shells most competitors quietly install, was given the room it deserved, supported by real project photography and a clear path to booking a consultation. Visitors arrived ready to research and left ready to talk.
We launched the campaign early, well before the spring rush, to fill the build calendar before the rest of the market woke up. And we kept tightening it month over month based on which keywords were producing actual booked consultations.
The auction itself was a mixed bag. Some of it was high-quality local competition, other established Durham Region pool companies fighting for the same homeowners.
The rest was fibreglass-shell retailers, above-ground pool sellers and outright tire-kickers in the research phase, all bidding on overlapping keywords. We needed to filter aggressively for serious, in-region, ready-to-build buyers without letting the budget bleed-out on the rest.
Book your free 30-minute phone consultation and we’ll tell you what we see when we look at your target market.
And we promise that we won’t pressure you with sales pitches or proposals until you ask.
We’ll just have an honest conversation about whether PPC makes sense for your business right now and what it would take to make it work.