*Before you dive in – We’ve got an update on this Case Study. Drumroll….
In 2025, we have some YTD stats that can give you some perspective on what it’s like to work with our team. These stats are as of the end of February.
$3.3M in revenue, a 511% increase
Leads up 116%
Cost per job down 42%.
Every metric moving in the right direction.
Q: What happens when an established HVAC company with a strong budget and the drive to succeed within the digital space decides to take their marketing in-house?
A: Movement is mistaken for progress; creating a hypothetical digital marketing knot of duplicate conversions, indecipherable data, confusion, and wasted budget.
Challenges
- Challenges Faced: Several months prior to working with Imprint Digital, the managers of Fort Collins Heating & Air could feel a lack of leads from their ad campaigns despite increasing budget month after month.
After an preliminary audit, Imprint Digital identified numerous factors leading to under-performance:
THE GOOD
- Adequate resources to support effective campaigns.
- Large data set – Ample historical data to inform strategy.
- Collaborative efforts between Fort Collins Heating & Air and Imprint Digital.
- A robust library of ad copy and authentic to business visuals.
THE BAD
- Over-abundance of conversion actions led to muddied data and double-to-triple counted conversions; making analysis tedious and time consuming. This also led the managers of the Google Ads account to believe performance was double-to-triple what was occurring in reality.
- Broken conversion actions
- Zero-second threshold of call-based conversion actions
- Several auto-apply options enabled at the campaign level. This led to multiple issues:
- Keyword-overload.
- Overlap across campaigns and ad groups
- Overly leveraged brand campaign in combination with broad targeting led to added pressure on the monthly budget as well as over-inflated conversions (paying for clicks that normally would be received for free)
- Keywords: while not inherently bad, the organization of broad keywords used in certain campaigns/ad groups was causing more harm than good.
THE UGLY
- 3 weeks prior to officially working with Imprint Digital, Fort Collins Heating & Air unintentionally overspent through the ad account
Objectives
- Streamline Tracking: Detangle, verify, and establish an improved tracking enviroment across tracking platforms, ad platforms, and third party CRM’s (Service Titan)
- Optimize Budget Use: Increase performance relative to an upcoming cut to paid ads budget
- Scalable Structure: Structure Google Ads to be easily scalable while producing actionable, easy-to-understand, data
Approach & Strategy
- Establish communication between HVAC business leaders and ad specialists
- Gain a clear understanding of Service Titan and its tracking tools to ensure proper conversion tracking
- Build new campaigns/ad groups/ads designed with the newly established conversion actions
Results
“Deciphering data and making conclusions based on that data is like picking up a snake. If you know what you are doing and how to do it properly, it is relatively safe. But if you do not know how to pick up a snake and attempt to do so, you will probably get bit.”
Before Fort Collins Heating & Air began working with Imprint Digital, one look at the FCHA Google Ads account would lead a layman to believe results were outstanding but this was not the case. As a result of misconfigured conversion actions, the results prior to working with Imprint Digital were over-inflated.
Imprint Digital addressed these misconfiguratons in the tracking environment and then strategically structured the account to spend where intended. This would lead several KPI’s in the ad account to appear less performative in comparison to the period before working with Imprint Digital but this because the data became more accurate.
- Quantitative Results (Google Ads):
- Ad Spend reduced by 15%
- Conversions* reduced by 16%
- Impression Share increased by 68.90%
- Revenue increased by 93%
*Conversions – due to the original tracking environment, many conversions were being double and tripled counted. After Imprint Digital addressed these flaws in the tracking environment, conversion data was refined down to lower, but more accurate, volume of conversion data.
By addressing fundamental tracking and structural issues, Imprint Digital empowered Fort Collins Heating & Air to achieve better results with a more efficient budget. The account is now primed for sustainable growth and long-term success.