“A proper specialist is too expensive.” We hear this from almost every business owner — right up until it becomes clear what badly performing marketing actually costs. This case study follows a construction company that went from 0 to 19 enquiries a month on exactly the same ad budget.
About this case. A Hungarian construction services company, 2026. The monthly ad budget was identical before and after, so the figures are shown as index values and counts rather than amounts — the change comes entirely from how the account was built, not from spending more.
The starting point: campaigns running, nothing happening
The contractor came to us saying his Google Ads campaigns were “just burning money”. The ads were running, the clicks were coming — but no enquiries came out of them.
The audit found the reasons quickly: the account was riddled with structural and configuration errors. A poorly built campaign structure, imprecise targeting, weak ad copy — and most importantly, unusable conversion tracking, which meant there was no way to see what was working and what was not.
Having seen the audit, the client asked us to rebuild the campaigns from scratch.
What we did
1. Rebuilt the account structure from the ground up. A well-organised account is not an aesthetic question: Google’s quality signals — and through them your click costs — depend directly on how relevant the keyword, the ad and the landing page are to each other.
2. Set up accurate conversion tracking. For a construction service the conversion is a phone call or a quote request. We made both measurable, so it finally became visible which keywords bring real prospects.
3. Wrote new campaigns and new ad copy. Instead of template text, the new ads were built on the company’s actual strengths and matched to search intent.
The results — on an unchanged budget
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly ad budget | index 100 | index 100 (unchanged) |
| Cost per click (CPC) | index 100 | index 33 |
| Conversions per month | 0 | 19 |
Cost per click fell to less than a third. That is not a trick: the Google Ads algorithm rewards relevant, expertly built campaigns with lower click costs. So the same money now brings three times as many visitors — and better quality ones.
The lesson: expertise is not the expensive part
Many owners avoid hiring a specialist because the fee looks like an extra cost. In reality, for this client the “saving” meant burning a full monthly budget every month, with zero results. Expertise is not a cost — it is the factor that converts a budget into revenue.
You can read about our e-commerce cases in the restricted-product case study.
If your campaigns are taking more money than they bring in, ask us for an audit — we will show you specifically where your profit is leaking away.
Written by Endre Kovács, Google Ads and SEO specialist, managing director of Marketing Kalkulátor Kft.