7 to 17 conversions in 28 days, at $80.94 each.

The situation

LSA had established position. What it couldn't do was cover everything — LSA's job categories are narrow, and plenty of junk removal demand comes through searches and surfaces that LSA never touches. The question was whether paid search could add volume at a cost that still made sense against what a haul is worth.

Why Performance Max

Performance Max puts one campaign across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Discover, and Maps, and lets Google's models decide where to spend. That's either very good or very expensive, and the deciding factor is almost entirely whether the conversion data feeding it is clean.

Running PMax on an account with broken or missing conversion tracking is one of the fastest ways to lose money in Google Ads — you're paying the algorithm to optimize toward a signal that doesn't mean anything. This account had real conversion data, which is why it worked.

What I did

1. Conversion tracking verified before scaling. Calls, click-to-call, and form fills all recording properly, so "conversion" meant a real contact rather than a page view.
2. Asset groups built around actual services. Headlines and descriptions written for the jobs Spartan wanted, not generic hauling copy.
3. Geographic targeting held to the real service radius. Same discipline as the LSA campaign — PMax will happily spend outside your radius if you let it.
4. Weekly monitoring, incremental changes. PMax punishes constant interference. The work is watching the trend and adjusting deliberately, not touching it daily.

The honest caveat

7 to 17 is a real, meaningful improvement for a business this size, and it's not the same as 700 to 1,700. A percentage without its base number is a magic trick, so there's the base number. Four weeks is also a short window; seasonality in junk removal is real and 28 days doesn't capture it.

What I'd do for a similar business

• Fix tracking before touching PMax. If your conversion numbers don't match the calls you actually received, everything downstream is guesswork.
• Start with Search, graduate to PMax. Search builds the conversion history PMax needs to be smart. Running PMax cold is how budgets vanish.
• Know your job value first. $80.94 per conversion is excellent for a $600 cleanout and terrible for a $150 single-item pickup. The number is meaningless without your math.
• Compare like for like. A 28-day window against the previous 28 days tells you more than a raw month-to-month number, because it controls for the length of the period.
• Run it alongside LSA, not instead of it. They cover different demand.