Driveway leads for Ace Concrete Construction: cheaper, not more.

Summary

Where it started

I started running this account in August 2026. The driveway campaign had been live since late February, and from April to August a lead cost between $95.95 and $115.84, month by month.

My first changes were groundwork. I switched off Google's auto-applied recommendations, which had been rewriting the ads from the website's text, and I rebuilt the negative keyword lists. August came in at $95.95: the low end of the range, but still inside it.

One thing had not changed in months. From April to mid-September, almost every driveway ad click landed on the website's general residential concrete page. Someone searching for a new driveway got a page about concrete in general.

What happened

September came in at $75.83 a lead, the cheapest full month since the campaign started. Clicks cost a little less than in August, and more of them became a call or a form.

By date, most of the drop came after the new page and ads went up on Sept 18. Some of it came before, in the days after the keyword changed.

Seven and sixteen leads can't tell a keyword from a page from an ad. All three moved the same way within three weeks, so I count the month as the result and don't credit any one change with it.

The outage is inside September's number. Those six days spent $263.32 for one lead, which pushed the month up, not down.

The 30 days to Oct 5 ran $79.95 a lead, so the September rate has mostly held so far. The newest days are still filling in.

What this does not show

More leads. September had about 25 leads against about 30 in August. Most of that gap is the outage: the other 24 days of September brought about 24, the same pace as August, for less money. What it didn't do is reach more people. It spends well under its daily budget, and in the week to Oct 5 it lost 57.8% of the searches it could have shown on to ad rank. Cheaper per lead is not more leads.

The whole account. Across every campaign, a lead cost $105.71 from April to July, then $138.20 in August and $141.17 in September. This is one campaign getting cheaper inside an account that got dearer.

Which change did it. The keyword, the page and the ads all landed inside three weeks. The table above shows when the cost moved, not why.

Jobs. A lead here is a call or a form. I don't have the client's job records for these months, so this page says nothing about how many became driveways.

Calls from the page. People who rang the number printed on a landing page never reach the Google Ads count. That holds for every month on this page, so each one leaves those calls out.

Who made every change. Other people can also edit this account, so I've listed only the changes I can show were mine. The keyword switch on Sept 2 and an edit to the driveway ad on Sept 7 are not on that list.

What's next

The second driveway ad has run beside the first since Sept 22. So far it has 9 leads at $44.04 each on 38 clicks, against the first ad's 6 at $104.64 on 58. That's too few clicks to call. I'll keep whichever is ahead once both have had about three weeks and enough impressions to compare.

More leads from this campaign would cost more each. Google's own model, run on the week of Sept 27 to Oct 3, prices each extra lead from a 10 to 25% looser cost target at $240 to $248. That's a model, not a result, and it has moved a lot from one week to the next. Whether those leads are worth buying depends on what a driveway job is worth to the business. That's the next decision on this account.

A garage-slab ad group joined the campaign on Sept 22 and has barely served. It's too early to say anything about it.

If an agency shows you a better month, ask which changes were theirs and what happened to the number of leads. Questions to ask any agency.

Elijah Nawrot, founder of Red Orca Digital. Three years on roofs, four running paid ads for roofing companies. Red Orca is a Google Partner. More about me.
Last updated October 6, 2026