Patch-It-Now case study

22 charged leads in April. 52 in July.

Drywall repair · Kansas City metro · Updated July 31, 2026

Same company. Same trucks. Ninety days apart. In April my father's drywall shop had ads going dark and one tech on the road. By July the phone wouldn't stay quiet — and because he's my dad, I get to show you all of it.

Below: what April actually looked like, the exact dated changes I made in May, and every month's dashboard after — the slow ones included. No agency publishes this. Their contracts won't let them. Mine started at the dinner table.

Get this built for your trade

Fill this out and I'll run your numbers the way I ran his.

The short version

In April the ads were stalling and my father was, in his words, maybe a third booked. Ninety days later: 52 paying ad leads in July, about one website quote request a day, and the map listing ringing for free on top. Two techs on the trucks now, booked out about three weeks — his report, not a dashboard. Everything below is the dashboards: dated, screenshot by screenshot, slow months included. If a chart ever confuses you, read its caption — each one says what you're looking at in plain words.

52
charged LSA leads — July 2026: 29
website quote requests — July 2026: 120
GBP calls — Feb–Jul 2026

Where it started

The Local Services Ads account wasn't new — it launched January 16, 2026 and produced 4 leads that first month. By spring it was stalling: decent weeks, then dead ones, and the ads went dark for the back half of April. One technician on the trucks. Dad's words, not a dashboard: "we were maybe a third booked."

I got home mid-May. What happened next has timestamps, because Google logs everything.

What I built, dated

May 15 — I moved home and took over the marketing.
May 16 — first Tag Manager container version in twenty-one months. The container had sat untouched since August 12, 2024.
May 20 — second container version: tracking for the new landing pages.
May 31 — the website quote form went live. It had never existed before; website leads were officially zero because there was nothing to submit.
June 10–11 — the SEO rebuild deployed: new service pages, a metadata pass across the site, redirect cleanup.

Local Services Ads, month by month

These are charged leads — what Google actually billed for, after its automated credits. Spend went up because volume went up; the point is the cost per lead went downwhile it did.

Month (2026)	Charged leads	Lead spend	Cost per charged lead
April	22	$1,026.57	$46.66
May	31	$1,286.39	$41.50
June	44	$1,617.81	$36.77
July	52	$2,074.03	$39.89

Google Local Services Ads report for April 1–30, 2026: $1,026.57 lead spend, 22 charged leads, cost per lead $46.66, with a visible flatline late in the month — Before — April 2026: 22 charged leads at $46.66. You can see the ads going dark toward the end of the month.

Google Local Services Ads report for July 1–31, 2026: $2,074.03 lead spend, 52 charged leads, cost per lead $39.89, 3,760 impressions, 92.77% top impression rate — After — July 2026, the full month: 52 charged leads at $39.89, with a 92.77% top-of-page impression rate. Same dashboard, ninety days later.

Daily charged-leads chart for January 1 through July 31, 2026 showing sparse activity in winter and dense daily leads in June and July — The whole year on one chart — 201 charged leads, January 1 to July 31, 2026. The density change starting in June isn't subtle.

The website and the Business Profile

The quote form went live May 31. June: 21 requests. July: 29 — about one a day, with the paid-search campaigns switched off entirely. The Google Business Profile added 120 calls from February through July, about 21 a month across May–July.

120 calls straight from the Business Profile, Feb–Jul 2026. This channel was alive before I started — the job was to keep it fed while everything else scaled.

Search, before and after

Organic clicks ran about 50 a month from January through April. May through July averaged about 94 — with the May climb starting before the June deploy, because the early trust fixes were already landing. And the part that matters for your wallet: organic sessions grew to 5.83 a day from 2.22 while paid search sessions fell from 304 to 27, because we turned the ads off.

Google Search Console 16-month performance chart: 899 total clicks and 99.6 thousand impressions, with a visible ramp beginning May 2026 — Sixteen months of Search Console, weekly view: 899 clicks, 99.6K impressions. Find May 2026 on the axis — you won't need help.

GA4 sessions by channel, January 1 to May 14, 2026: 1,049 sessions, Direct 423, Paid Search 304, Organic Search 298 — Before (Jan 1–May 14): paid search propping up traffic — 304 sessions bought.

GA4 sessions by channel, May 15 to July 31, 2026: 797 sessions, Organic Search 455, Direct 287, Paid Search 27 — After (May 15–Jul 31): organic carries it — 455 sessions, paid down to 27. More traffic per day, zero ad budget.

Where it stands today

Search "drywall repair lees summit" and the map pack answers with Patch-It-Now at the top — 5.0 stars, 89 reviews — above national franchise competition. Dad's answer when I ask about the schedule, for the record: "booked out about three weeks." Two techs on the trucks now. That last part is his report, not a dashboard — the booking calendar isn't public data, and I only publish what I can screenshot.

Google local pack for the search drywall repair lees summit on July 31, 2026, with Patch-It-Now ranked first at 5.0 stars and 89 reviews, above Mr. Handyman and BIRD Construction — July 31, 2026: home-turf map pack, position one, above a 471-review national franchise. (Competitor review snippets blurred.)

Want your version of this chart?

The honest caveats

Every case study you've ever read hid something. Here's what a skeptic should know about this one:

— The LSA account existed before me. It launched in January 2026 and produced 4 leads that month. My work was restoring and scaling a stalling channel — fixing the dead zones, the bidding, the profile — not inventing it.
— Part of the tracked-lead jump is better tracking. The conversion event barely existed before mid-May, so I don't use analytics events as growth proof. The growth evidence is the form inbox, Google's own charged-lead billing, and Search Console clicks — systems I can't inflate.
— May's organic climb started before the June deploy.The early-May trust and metadata fixes were already working. Rankings ramp; they don't jump on deploy day, and I won't pretend otherwise.
— Spend rose with volume. July's budget was bigger than April's. The win is that leads grew faster than spend — the cost per charged lead fell from $46.66 to $39.89 — not "same budget, triple the leads."
— Drywall has no Local Services Ads category. This account runs under Google's Handyman category with only the two drywall job types switched on — 2 of 14. That workaround is half the reason this case study exists.