When the final campaign period ended, the numbers told a clear and encouraging story.
The campaign generated more than 485,000 impressions across Durham Region and pulled in over 11,200 clicks at a CTR well above the home-services benchmark, ultimately delivering a 538% ROI based on tracked consultation bookings, signed contracts and the client’s reported close rate.
Just as importantly, the build calendar filled earlier in the season than it had in previous years, meaning our client locked in their year before half their competitors had finished updating their websites.
In a category where you’re either booking lucrative projects or you’re not, that’s the only result that really matters.
Our client is an established landscaping and hardscaping company that builds high-end outdoor living spaces for homeowners across Durham Region.
In addition to the standard services, their preferred projects are the full backyard transformations that feature retaining walls, fire features, cabanas, outdoor kitchens, inground pools, stone patios, poolscapes and the kind of complete “if-you-can-dream-it-we-can-build-it” design-build projects that take months to plan and deliver.
And, as multi-year Landscape Ontario Award winners, Baeumler Approved, certified Unilock and Permacon contractors, they’ve also got the credentials to back it up and also offer an extensive project portfolio. They’re also the kind of company homeowners hire when they want their backyard to look like the cover of a magazine.
The catch? Premium hardscaping & landscaping is a deeply seasonal, high-commitment purchase.
Inquiries spike in late winter and early spring as homeowners start planning summer projects, and the design-build companies that fill their build calendar early are the ones who win the year.
One thing landscaping companies know too well is that getting a slow start to spring means they’ll be chasing the rest of the season.
High-end landscaping searches are high-stakes and surprisingly low-volume. Far fewer people are typing “backyard landscaping companies Durham Region” into Google, but the people who are searching represent five and six-figure jobs, which means every click and budget dollar matters.
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 sit at the top of both the organic search results and the local map pack for their main search terms in Durham Region.
But landscaping projects of this scale aren’t impulse decisions — homeowners take their time, weigh their options carefully, and want to feel sure before they commit.
They’re researching for weeks, sometimes months, comparing portfolios, second-guessing themselves and looking for reasons to feel confident before signing anything. And then they’ll typically speak with four or five companies and take it from there.
In that kind of decision-making process, the additional visibility a PPC campaign provides genuinely never hurts, as showing up in the paid results, the organic results and the local map pack means our client is the name homeowners 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 was also a major consideration.
With discretionary spending tighter, leads in the premium landscaping category are harder to come by than they were a few years ago, even for award-winning companies with great SEO.
Considering this, 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, without spillover into neighbouring areas and regions, so every dollar in the budget went toward homeowners actually in our client’s service area. Our bid adjustments also favoured the higher-income postal codes where premium design-build projects are most likely to be found.
Keyword targeting was built around the phrases real buyers actually type when they’re ready to spend money: “backyard landscaping companies Durham Region,” was our starting point and city-level variants throughout the region.
Negative keywords did serious heavy lifting, filtering out less-lucrative hardscaping services, lawn-cutting, DIY content, snow-removal queries, employment searches and the endless stream of “how much does landscaping cost” tire-kicker searches that never convert.
Ad copy leaned on the things that genuinely separate our client from the rest of the auction: Landscape Ontario Award wins, Baeumler Approved status, certified Unilock and Permacon contractor credentials, precise 2D and 3D project renderings before any work begins and a portfolio of completed projects that does most of the heavy lifting on its own.
That combination of credentials and visible work does a lot in this category — it instantly filters for homeowners who want a real design-build experience and quietly disqualifies the ones who were going to end up hiring a guy with a truck anyway.
We also built dedicated, high-converting landing pages to back up the campaigns, because pointing paid traffic at a homepage is one of the fastest ways to waste a budget. Each landing page was built around a specific service category, with messaging, project imagery and call-to-action all matched to the keyword that brought the visitor there in the first place.
That keyword-to-landing-page alignment kept Quality Scores high, kept cost-per-click down, and, most importantly, kept conversion rates well above what a generic homepage would have produced.
We launched the campaign early, well before the spring rush, and we kept adjusting the campaigns over time based on which keywords were producing actual booked consultations.
We built a tightly-scoped Google Ads campaign exclusively targeting Durham Region, without spillover into neighbouring areas and regions, so every dollar in the budget went toward homeowners actually in our client’s service area. Our bid adjustments also favoured the higher-income postal codes where premium design-build projects are most likely to be found.
Keyword targeting was built around the phrases real buyers actually type when they’re ready to spend money: “backyard landscaping companies Durham Region,” was our starting point and city-level variants throughout the region.
Negative keywords did serious heavy lifting, filtering out less-lucrative hardscaping services, lawn-cutting, DIY content, snow-removal queries, employment searches and the endless stream of “how much does landscaping cost” tire-kicker searches that never convert.
Ad copy leaned on the things that genuinely separate our client from the rest of the auction: Landscape Ontario Award wins, Baeumler Approved status, certified Unilock and Permacon contractor credentials, precise 2D and 3D project renderings before any work begins and a portfolio of completed projects that does most of the heavy lifting on its own.
That combination of credentials and visible work does a lot in this category — it instantly filters for homeowners who want a real design-build experience and quietly disqualifies the ones who were going to end up hiring a guy with a truck anyway.
We also built dedicated, high-converting landing pages to back up the campaigns, because pointing paid traffic at a homepage is one of the fastest ways to waste a budget. Each landing page was built around a specific service category, with messaging, project imagery and call-to-action all matched to the keyword that brought the visitor there in the first place.
That keyword-to-landing-page alignment kept Quality Scores high, kept cost-per-click down, and, most importantly, kept conversion rates well above what a generic homepage would have produced.
We launched the campaign early, well before the spring rush, and we kept adjusting the campaigns over time based on which keywords were producing actual booked consultations.
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.