Home services · 6 cities
Found that four of six cities were losing money on every booking
One national cost-per-lead target hid wildly different economics. Pricing each city separately moved a third of the budget and lifted booked jobs on flat spend.
42 service areas against their own break-even
Cost per booked job vs monthly spend
- Within break-even
- Above break-even
- Client
- Appliance repair and home services group
- Industry
- Home services · 6 cities
- Region
- North & West India
- Engagement
- Local SEO and paid search, 9 months
- Ad budget
- ₹1.8 lakh monthly ad spend
The challenge
What was actually going wrong.
Usually not the thing the business thought it was.
Six cities, one national cost-per-lead target, and a monthly report that looked perfectly healthy in aggregate.
It was not healthy. Average job values ranged from about ₹850 in one city to over ₹3,200 in another, depending on service mix. Two profitable cities were quietly subsidising four that lost money on every booking.
The unit was also wrong. A lead was not the business — a booked, completed job was, and that lived in a job management system disconnected from anything Google could see.
Technician capacity varied by a factor of five between cities, so in two of them additional leads had nowhere to go and were simply being wasted.
The approach
What we did, in sequence.
- 01
Priced break-even for every city and service
Job data joined to spend to establish an allowable cost per booked job per city, weighted by service mix and average ticket value.
- 02
Connected completed jobs to bidding
Booked and completed jobs imported as offline conversions with real values, so bidding stopped treating an ₹800 servicing call and a ₹4,000 compressor replacement as the same result.
- 03
Built local profiles city by city
Separate Google Business Profiles, service area pages and review generation per city — which in the two strongest markets reduced dependence on paid clicks entirely.
- 04
Paced budget against technician capacity
Automated rules pulling spend back when a city's job queue filled, so money stopped buying leads that could not be serviced for four days.
- 05
Gave each city manager a page they would read
One view per city: spend, booked jobs, cost per job and the local break-even line. Readable by someone who has never opened Google Ads.
The result
What moved, and what caused it.
About a third of the media budget moved between cities over two quarters. Booked jobs rose 29% across months four to nine on effectively flat total spend.
Two cities had paid spend reduced by more than half and held their volume, because local rankings and reviews had picked up the difference.
The reallocation was the whole story. The ads did not get much better — the money simply stopped going where it could not produce a profitable job.
The group now reviews city-level economics monthly and has applied the same break-even model to its offline advertising.
Measured outcomes
- more booked jobs on flat spend
- 29%more booked jobs on flat spendAcross months 4–9 versus the six months before, measured from the group's job management system rather than from ad platform conversions.
- of budget moved between cities
- 33%of budget moved between citiesReallocated out of four cities operating above their own break-even cost per job and into two with technician capacity to spare.
“Cutting spend in cities that felt busy was the hardest thing to agree to. The job data made the argument for us.”
Next step
Bring us a problem shaped like this one.
Forty-five minutes, no slide deck. We will tell you which of these engagements yours most resembles, where we think the bottleneck sits, and what it would realistically take to move it.
Or call +91 93060 49784 and email support@exponentialy.com — we reply within one working day.
What the call is
- 01
45 minutes, no slide deck
You talk to the person who would run the work, not a salesperson.
- 02
Your numbers on the table
What a customer is worth, where enquiries come from, and what you have tried.
- 03
A written plan afterwards
What we would fix first, and in what order. Yours to keep either way.