Septra01Executive Summary
Summit Peak spent $18,400 across Google Ads and Meta Ads in the four weeks ending July 6, generating 157 tracked leads at a blended $117 cost per lead. Underneath the stable topline, this audit found approximately $3,600/month in recoverable waste — and one measurement defect serious enough that it should be fixed before any budget decision is made: GA4 is over-counting form conversions by roughly 2.7x, which means the CPL your dashboards report is not the CPL you are actually paying.
On Google Ads, the three biggest leaks are search-term waste ($1,470 spent on 214 clicks from do-it-yourself and job-seeker queries that produced zero conversions), Performance Max cannibalizing brand traffic at 3.5x the CPC of the dedicated brand campaign, and the top-performing AC Repair campaign hitting its daily budget cap by early afternoon during the highest-demand week of the period. On Meta, the primary issue is creative fatigue: the lead ad set's frequency reached 4.8 and its CPL nearly doubled from $61 to $118 over the four weeks.
The action plan below is ordered by expected impact against effort. Items P1–P3 are execution-ready — negative keyword lists and replacement creative briefs are attached as tasks — and together address roughly $2,400/month of the identified waste with under two hours of implementation work.
02Google Ads
Search-term waste: $1,470 with zero conversions
11.7% of Google spend went to search terms with no purchase intent — dominated by DIY queries (“how to fix ac yourself”, “diy furnace repair”) and job-seeker queries (“furnace repair jobs denver”). These 214 clicks produced 0 conversions across the full period.
AC Repair campaign is budget-capped during peak demand
During the June 22–28 heatwave week, “AC Repair — Denver Metro” exhausted its daily budget by ~2pm on five of seven days. Lost impression share (budget) reached 38% in the exact week search demand peaked — the account was turned off during its best hours.
Performance Max is cannibalizing brand traffic at 3.5x the CPC
PMax captured 31% of brand-term clicks this period at an average $8.12 CPC. The dedicated brand campaign pays $2.35 for the same clicks. This inflates PMax's reported performance while adding no incremental leads.
Water Heater campaign has outgrown manual CPC
The campaign has accumulated 46 conversions in 30 days on manual bidding — comfortably above the volume where Target CPA typically outperforms manual bids for lead-gen accounts of this size.
03Meta Ads
Creative fatigue: CPL nearly doubled in four weeks
The top lead ad set's frequency climbed to 4.8 over the period while its CPL rose from $61 (week 1) to $118 (week 4). The audience has seen this creative too many times; performance decay is textbook fatigue, not auction pressure.
Two ad sets are bidding against each other
“Homeowners 35+ Denver” and the Advantage+ audience ad set show 64% audience overlap. Both target the same conversion event from the same pixel, so they compete in the same auctions and inflate each other's CPMs.
Lead quality gap: 38% of Meta leads unreachable
Per the shared call log, 38% of Meta instant-form leads never answered the phone, vs 12% for Google leads. Instant forms are pre-filling too much — low-intent users submit without friction.
04Google Analytics 4
Conversions are over-counted ~2.7x — fix before any budget decision
The form_submit event fires on every step of the multi-step booking form, not just completion. GA4 reported 421 “conversions” this period; the CRM logged 157 actual leads. Every CPL your dashboards show is roughly 2.7x better than reality, and any bid strategy fed this signal is optimizing for form steps, not leads.
41% of paid sessions lose click attribution
The /book flow's redirect strips URL parameters, so 41% of paid sessions arrive without a gclid and get bucketed as direct/none. Channel-level ROAS comparisons are unreliable until this is fixed.
Mobile landing page is losing the clicks you pay for
/ac-repair takes 6.1s to largest-contentful-paint on mobile. 71% of paid clicks this period were mobile, and mobile bounce (68%) runs 27 points above desktop (41%).
05Search Console
Paying $14.60 CPC for a query you almost rank #3 for
The site sits at average position 4.2 for “emergency furnace repair denver” (2,900 impressions/mo) while simultaneously bidding $14.60 CPC on the same query. A modest on-page push could capture this traffic organically and let paid focus on terms without organic coverage.
18 high-intent queries have no dedicated page
Queries like “tankless water heater installation cost denver” rank position 5–12 against generic service pages. These are page-one-adjacent terms where a dedicated page typically moves the needle within a quarter.
06Prioritized Action Plan
| # | Action | Expected impact | Effort |
|---|---|---|---|
| P1 | Apply 23-term negative keyword list (attached) | ~$1,470/mo waste stopped | 30 min |
| P2 | Fix GA4 form_submit double-counting | Restores true CPL — unblocks every other decision | 1 hr |
| P3 | Add brand exclusions to Performance Max | ~$900/mo back to prospecting | 20 min |
| P4 | Shift $1,200/mo Water Heater → AC Repair (seasonal) | Recovers 38% lost impression share in peak demand | 15 min |
| P5 | Launch 3 replacement Meta creatives (attached) | CPL back toward the $61 week-1 baseline | 1–2 hrs |
| P6 | Fix /ac-repair mobile LCP (6.1s → <2.5s) | Fewer paid clicks bounced; quality score tailwind | 2–4 hrs |