Google Ads: from 5 calls a month to 90+.

What the account was reporting

We took over the ads at the end of May 2025. The account looked incredible on paper: leads at $4.57 and $7.10 across the prior campaigns, one of them named after the agency that built it.

Then the arithmetic stopped working. Back out the clicks from spend and cost-per-click and the account was reporting a 59% conversion ratein Q1 2025. Fifty-nine percent. Nobody in junk removal turns six of every ten clicks into a lead. Not one account we’ve ever seen, ours included. Across the account’s lifetime the number was 22.9% — still impossible.

A number that good isn’t good. It means you’re counting something that isn’t a lead.

What was actually in the conversion column

We went through it one action at a time. Counted as “conversions” in a junk removal account:

• Page views — someone landing on the site
• Get directions — a maps tap
• YouTube channel subscriptions
• YouTube follow-on views
• GA4 events — firing alongside the real ones, double-counting

Every one of those inflated the lead count and pulled the cost per lead down. The owner was being told he got 345 leads in November 2025. He didn’t. He was making hiring and truck decisions against a number that was mostly page views.

Worse, Google’s automated recommendations were auto-applying bid strategy changes on top of it — at one point switching campaigns to optimize for “conversion value,” where the values attached were $1.00 defaults on things like YouTube subscriptions. The machine was buying more of the garbage because the garbage was what it had been told to want.

The rebuild — dated, in the account’s own change history

• Dec 16, 2025 — Moved the flagship campaign off account-default goals and onto phone-call and contact goals only, which took page views out of what it counted. Raised target cost per lead from $15.00 to $48.45, because that’s what a real lead actually costs. Reported conversions fell from 345 in November to 15 in December. Nothing about the business changed that month. The two sibling campaigns moved the same morning but kept page views in their goals — those came out later.
• Jun 4 & Jul 13, 2026— Page views, Get directions, and YouTube engagement goals removed across the remaining campaigns. Display Network switched off. Bidding moved off “maximize conversion value” onto real target CPAs.
• Jul 21, 2026 — Built two real conversion actions from scratch: Quote Form Submission (counted once) and Click to Call. Both primary. Both things a customer actually does.
• Aug 7, 2026 — Demoted the last five to observe-only: YouTube follow-on views, YouTube channel subscriptions, two GA4 duplicates, and a redundant call action.

Alongside it, the traffic itself: 8,181 negative keywordsadded in dated batches across fifteen months, plus a “Waste Management & Free Seekers” exclusion list — free junk removal, where can i dump my mattress for free, city of tucson bulk trash pick up, donde tirar basura gratis, republic services. People looking for the dump, not for a company. Location targeting tightened to people physically in Tucson rather than anyone reading about it.

What a real lead costs

The reported conversion rate walked down as the fiction came out: 59% → 42.7% → 36.6% → 22.1% → 9.5% → 5.1%. Cost per lead moved the other way, from a fictional $4–9 to $33–50.

That’s not us getting worse. That’s the number becoming true. Across the other operators on this page — Tucson, Houston, York, Portsmouth, Portland — real junk removal and dumpster leads land in the $26–99 range. Haul It Off now sits inside that band for the first time in the account’s history.

He is not getting fewer customers than he was. He is getting an accurate count of them.

What we’re not claiming

We are not claiming we lowered his cost per reported conversion — on paper we raised it. We are not claiming his reported conversion volume grew; we can’t compare that across a measurement change, and we won’t pretend otherwise. (Calls from ads, above, are counted by Google’s call reporting, not by these conversion goals — that’s why they can be compared.) No full quarter has run on the rebuilt tracking, so this page reports none. What we’re claiming is narrower and, we’d argue, worth more: his numbers are real now, and they weren’t before.

Early signal, offered as a trend and not a result: August 2026 recorded 89 leads in its first nineteen days, against 52 in all of July — on the rebuilt tracking.

How the ads figures were measured

Paid ads figures come from account-level Google Ads exports for the account Adimize manages (quarterly cost, conversions and average CPC; the full campaign list; device totals; and filtered extracts of the complete change history report for August 19, 2024 – August 19, 2026), all pulled August 19, 2026. Every dated action in the rebuild timeline is recorded in that change history with its user attribution; the extracts committed here carry every cited row plus all 287 negative-keyword batches verbatim — row selection only, no field edited — rather than the full 974-change export, which remains a backfill item. Conversion rates are derived, not exported: clicks are calculated from quarterly cost divided by quarterly average CPC, then conversions divided by clicks. The lifetime 22.9% figure uses exported device-level totals (22,182 clicks, 5,075 conversions) and requires no derivation. We took over the ads at the end of May 2025; Q2 2025 straddles the takeover. Figures before and after the December 2025 goal changes are not directly comparable — that is the point of this chapter — and no cost-per-lead improvement is claimed. Monthly reported-conversion counts (345 → 15, and the July and August 2026 figures) come from the committed monthly conversions export (August 2022 – August 19, 2026), which reconciles to the quarterly series in every quarter. The August 2026 figure covers August 1–19, 2026 and is labeled as a trend, not a result. Cross-account cost-per-lead ranges cited are drawn from the other case studies published on this site. No revenue or ROAS claims.