Ottawa & GTA, Ontario
Meta Ads
2 months
In two months, running on Meta alone, we brought Fortify’s cost per lead from $26 down to $15.80 — with no drop in lead quality and the same conversion into sales. Their previous paid channel had been costing closer to $100 a lead. The win didn’t come from running more ads. It came from building the right funnel first, then putting real installation work on camera.
Cost per lead · down from $26
Cost to win a customer · was ~$250
Close rate · unchanged
On Meta · $3K/month
Client
Fortify Services
Industry
Garage door repair & installation
Service in focus
New garage door installation
Market
Ottawa + GTA, Ontario
Period
2 months
Channel
Meta (Facebook & Instagram)
What we did
Built and tested the funnel, then the creative
Budget
$3,000 / month, split across Ottawa and GTA
By the time Fortify came to us, they weren’t new to this. Two years in business, and they’d tried just about everything for a steady flow of leads — Meta, Google, and a serious investment in SEO.
Only two things actually brought in money: word of mouth, and that SEO work. The catch was those leads arrived unpredictably — never in the numbers the business needed to plan around.
Paid ads were supposed to fill that gap. They didn’t. Google delivered leads, but at around $100 each, and roughly $250 to turn one into a paying customer. The conversion was strong — the people who called tended to buy. But at those prices the math didn’t work. Paid acquisition was the broken piece.
Meta is very good at one thing: handing you a lot of leads for very little money. But cheap isn’t the same as good — and in Fortify’s case that mattered more than usual.
The people answering those leads weren’t a sales team. They were the technicians who install and repair garage doors. Bury skilled installers under low-quality “just curious” enquiries and two bad things happen: they burn their day on tire-kickers, and the genuinely good leads get lost in the noise.
A plain “request a quote” form would have let everything through. So, with a developer, we built an interactive calculator — a homeowner picks door type, colour and options, and gets a real consultation on cost.
That one tool did three jobs: it gave people a reason to engage, let them qualify themselves so serious buyers rose to the top, and bought the brand time before a technician ever picked up the phone.
We watched for bottlenecks all through the campaign and moved fast — cutting steps that lost people, adding conversion elements where they earned their place.
With the funnel taking shape, we needed ads that pull leads cheaply. We started fast, using an AI creative generator to spin up dozens of variations.
Almost all flopped. If we’d stopped there, the tidy conclusion would’ve been “AI creative doesn’t work.” But the failures were the map. We pulled the handful with signs of life, studied what they got right, and designed our own creatives by hand.
After ~20 visuals, several landed leads at $26 each with a ~30% close rate. Fortify was happy — but we treated it as a checkpoint, not the finish line.
People trust what they can see. A homeowner choosing a garage door doesn’t want a polished graphic — they want proof these people do good, real work.
So we drove to an actual job site with one of Fortify’s installers and filmed the whole thing — real crew, real installation, start to finish. Edited it, launched it as an ad.
That broke the cost open. The video brought cost per lead down almost in half — from $26 to $15.80 — with no drop in quality.
By the end of the two months, the numbers told a simple story. In the GTA, Fortify’s cost per lead landed at $15.80 — down from the $26 we’d already worked it to, and a long way from the ~$100 their previous paid channel had been costing. More important for a business owner: the cost to actually win a customer fell to $108, versus roughly $250 before. And none of it came at the expense of quality — the close rate held steady at around 30%.
Ottawa: ~30–35% higher than GTA, same trend. · Budget: $3,000/mo, split evenly. · Source: Meta Ads Manager, 2-month period.
Researched the market and set the positioning Fortify didn’t have
Designed the interactive calculator and wrote the developer brief
Tracked funnel quality — found drop-offs and fixed them live
50+ AI creative variations to test messaging fast
20 ad creatives designed by hand from what testing revealed
Filmed and edited a Reel on a real job site with the crew
Built and set up the full Meta campaign
Ran it day-to-day across the entire two-month period
The approach — qualify leads with an interactive tool, test creative fast, then film real work on a real job site — transfers to any home service where the homeowner compares options: roofing, HVAC, painting, fencing, landscaping.
Fortify ran on $3,000/month across two cities. A single service area can start leaner, but under ~$1,500/month the data comes in too slowly to optimize against in a competitive trade.
Because your technicians answer the phone, not a sales team. Cheap unqualified leads bury the good ones and burn your crew’s time. The funnel filters first — that’s why the close rate held at ~30% even as lead cost dropped.
First leads arrived within weeks; the $15.80 cost per lead landed at the end of a two-month test-and-optimize cycle. Expect a similar 60–90 day ramp.
30 minutes.Three concrete fixes.
Whether we work together or not.
