Case Study · Matt's Moving
Five rungs from a spreadsheet to revenue bidding.
When we inherited this Google Ads account there was no conversion tracking at all. Someone read form emails and kept a tally. Thirty-one months later the account bids on real booked revenue and returns 22.7× on it.
The Results
- Booked revenue tracked in 2026
- $1.42MBooked revenue tracked in 2026On $62.3K of ad spend
- Return on ad spend, booked value
- 22.7×Return on ad spend, booked value2026 year to date
- Monthly booked revenue, January to June
- 4.9×Monthly booked revenue, January to June$58.7K to $289.7K at flat spend
- Completed job value above the booked estimate
- +45%Completed job value above the booked estimate$1,227 booked vs. $1,783 billed
Revenue is stated on booked value, the low estimate the Partner's job system produces at signing. Every dollar here is a floor.
The Short Version
What happened, in three paragraphs.
Before a clever campaign can be judged, something has to measure it. For the first five months of 2024 this account spent $24,525 and recorded zero conversions, because there was nothing to record them with.
Over thirty-one months we climbed the signal ladder one rung at a time: track something, track the right thing, attach a dollar to it, make the dollar true, then bid on it. Each rung took months, and each one made the account look worse for a while before it paid.
In 2026 the account has booked $1.42M on $62.3K of spend across Search, Performance Max, and Demand Gen, and we can prove the revenue is real because it reconciles against jobs the crews actually finished.
- Matt's Moving
- Moving & logistics
- Paid media, Conversion tracking, Value-based bidding, SEO
- Google Ads
- GA4
- CallRail
- Supermove
- BigQuery
- 2026 year to date, through August
The Problem
Nothing to bid on, and nothing to audit.
The previous manager counted leads by hand and emailed a number once a week.
- 01
No platform signal
Google Ads had no conversions to learn from, so bidding optimized toward clicks and no report could be checked.
- 02
A pipeline that went quiet
In mid-2025 the Partner's own CRM pipeline silently stopped passing jobs through. Six months of busy season read as 15 to 34 booked jobs a month.
- 03
Dollars that were wrong
When job values first flowed from the operations system they were double and triple counted. The platform briefly believed $32K of spend had produced $15.8M in revenue.
01 · The ladder
What each rung cost, and what it bought.
Each color is a different definition of success, and the handovers between them are the whole engagement. Leads count contact. Quoted jobs count real interest. Booked jobs, then booked value, then completed value, count money.
The drop from May to October 2025 was a measurement failure. The Partner's CRM pipeline had stopped passing jobs. In October they gave us access to find it, we fixed it, and November came back clean with dollar values flowing for the first time.
Monthly Google Ads conversions, by what was being counted
- Completed moves
- Booked jobs
- Quoted jobs
- Leads
FindingQuoted volume is high and cheap; completed moves are low and true. The account climbed from the first to the second one rung at a time.
02 · Estimate versus reality
Completed jobs bill 45% more than we were telling Google.
The Partner's job system produces a low and a high estimate per job. We push the low one, so every reported dollar is a floor. Completed jobs then report what the work actually billed.
Across 2026 the average booked job reports $1,227 and the average completed job bills $1,783. Understating a customer suppresses bids on exactly the demand the account wants most, so in August we moved the bid signal to completed value.
Average value per job, 2026
- Booked estimate
- Completed, billed
FindingThe Partner always said about 90% of booked jobs complete. Once reporting lag is accounted for, January to July comes in at 88.6%. Their instinct was right.
03 · Efficiency
Spend held flat. Booked revenue nearly quintupled.
Monthly spend stayed between $6.8K and $9.2K all year while booked revenue climbed from $58.7K in January to $289.7K in June. The account is buying better, because the bidding algorithm finally knows which clicks became jobs.
Moving is seasonal, and spring and summer would have been the strongest months under any measurement. Seasonality doesn't explain the return line, which is revenue over spend and already normalized for how much was bought. That ratio roughly quadrupled at flat budget.
Booked revenue and return on ad spend, 2026
- Booked revenue
- Return on ad spend
04 · Campaign mix
Where the money comes from.
2026 year to date by campaign, ordered by spend. Paused campaigns are included because their spend is real and counts against the blended return.
| Campaign | Spend | Booked value | Return |
|---|---|---|---|
| Performance Max | $23,401 | $472,657 | 20.2× |
| Search, brand | $13,469 | $745,168 | 55.3× |
| Demand Gen | $11,220 | $123,283 | 11.0× |
| Local Services | $10,729 | $22,259 | 2.1× |
| Search, long distance (paused) | $2,036 | $47,764 | 23.5× |
| Search, conquest (paused) | $1,005 | $5,005 | 5.0× |
Booked value per campaign, January to August 2026. Blended return is 22.7×.
The honest part
Bidding on a wrong dollar is worse than bidding on a right count.
When job values first flowed in, they were double and triple counted. For four months the platform believed it had generated $15.8M in revenue against $32K of spend. We held optimization on quoted jobs instead of letting Smart Bidding chase a number we knew was fiction, fixed the integration, and only moved to value bidding once the figures reconciled.
The tell was the ratio, not the total. A moving company completing fewer than a hundred jobs a month at roughly $1,200 a job can't bill $12M in a month. A platform will accept that number without complaint and spend against it.
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