A respected brokerage with almost no digital pipeline.
An established brokerage with a strong referral base and a loyal walk-in flow. They were not in trouble. They were in stasis. Every year looked like the one before.
Their previous Google Ads account had been managed by a generalist agency on a percent-of-spend model. Broad-match keywords, near-zero negative-keyword work, no conversion tracking beyond “click on phone number”. The account was spending real money, and nobody could say which clicks turned into customers.
What we inherited at kickoff:
The state of the account
A thin campaign structure built on broad-match keywords, many of them irrelevant (“insurance jobs vancouver”, “icbc claim form”, “life insurance for dogs”). No negative keyword list. No conversion tracking inside Google Ads itself, just a phone number swap that fed everything into one bucket.
The owner's diagnosis was correct: “We're paying for a lot of clicks that aren't even our customers.”
We're paying for a lot of clicks that aren't even our customers.
The first month was almost entirely demolition. We turned off every broad-match keyword, replaced them with phrase and exact match variants, built a first negative-keyword list from search-term reports, and rebuilt conversion tracking from scratch: calls, forms, and call-duration thresholds (a 12-second call is rarely an opportunity).
Then we waited. Soft-launched the new build with a capped daily budget. The first thirty days were quiet on purpose. We were learning what the account actually looked like when the broad-match noise was gone.
