An exterior building products supplier in Ohio, running Google Ads and Meta over twelve months.

This one is about a single channel doing a single job unusually well: search became, in effect, a phone line. Call volume peaked at roughly 1,100 a month in summer, with thousands of calls across the year.

The problem

Exterior building products are intensely seasonal. Demand is close to flat in winter and compressed into the months the work can actually be done, which means the window to capture a contractor's business is narrow and crowded.

The enquiry also almost never arrives as a form. Contractors phone — about availability, specification, pricing on an account — which means a campaign measured on form fills would have looked like it was barely working.

What we did

  • Built search around the terms contractors use for products and availability, and treated the phone call as the conversion rather than a secondary action.
  • Scaled the budget into the season rather than holding it flat, so capacity matched demand instead of capping at the exact point clicks were worth most.
  • Ran Meta alongside for reach into the contractor audience ahead of the season, so familiarity existed before the searching started.
  • Reported on calls as the primary measure, which is the only way this programme reads correctly.

What the numbers show

Google Ads produced thousands of calls across the year from more than 21,000 clicks and more than 385,000 impressions, with call volume peaking at roughly 1,100 a month through summer.

Meta added more than 2.6 million impressions and more than 18,600 link clicks, reaching the contractor audience ahead of and through the season.

Clicks rose roughly fourfold from the winter floor to the summer peak. That is the shape you want in a seasonal trade: capacity following demand rather than a flat budget that is wasteful in January and capped in July.

Why calls are the only honest measure here

A contractor checking whether a product is in stock does not fill in a form. They call. A programme like this measured on form submissions would have shown almost nothing and been judged a failure while the phone was ringing eleven hundred times a month.

This is the single most common measurement failure we see in supplier and contractor accounts, and it is why call tracking goes in before any spend changes.