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£22.27 an enquiry, 26.87% conversion — an account built right from day one.
Ferguson Forestry is a tree surgery and forestry business. The owner wanted a paid-search channel for domestic tree surgery work in North London, and there was no old account to fix — so this page tells the other kind of story: what Google Ads produces when the audit, the pages, the negatives and the tracking are all in place before the first click is paid for. The last 30 days: 36 enquiries at £22.27 each, converting 26.87% of clicks (14 Aug – 12 Sep 2026, live account data).
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A channel that did not exist yet
Most case studies open with an account in trouble. This one opens with no account at all. Ferguson Forestry wanted domestic tree surgery enquiries in North London from paid search, starting from zero.
The market was almost empty. When we looked at the searches these customers actually type, there was barely any paid competition bidding on them. That sounds like free money, and partly it is — but an empty market also means no rival accounts to learn from and no going rate to steer by. Every keyword, bid and page had to be reasoned from the searches themselves, not copied from whoever was already winning, because nobody was.
The budget was modest — around £30 a day. That number shapes everything. A £3,000-a-month account can afford a sloppy first month while the data teaches it; a £30-a-day account cannot. Whatever went live had to be right on day one, because there was no spare budget to buy the lessons with.
So there is deliberately no before-and-after on this page. No previous cost per lead, no rescue arc. What follows is the more useful thing for anyone starting from where Ferguson Forestry started: the exact build order, and what it produced.
The build, in the order it happened
Everything below was finished before the account spent its first pound. That sequencing — audit, structure, pages, negatives, tracking, then launch — is the whole method.
- Before a pound was spent: the intent audit. We read the live results page for every candidate search and culled the ones where nobody is buying. "Crown thinning" is the clean example — its results are dominated by non-buying content, so a click on it is a reader, not a customer. Terms like that never entered the account at all, rather than being discovered and cut after they had eaten budget.
- The structure: 63 keywords in 7 ad groups. Small on purpose. Each ad group holds one kind of job with ads written for exactly that job, so at £30 a day the budget concentrates on searches the audit had already shown to be buyers.
- Four landing pages, message-matched to the ads. Each page repeats the promise of the ad that sent the click, with the enquiry form in the hero — not below three screens of scrolling — and a sticky call bar for the majority who would rather ring.
- The negatives library, live from day one. The audit's rejected searches went straight into negative keyword lists at launch, so the account was fenced against known waste before its first impression rather than after its first bad fortnight.
- Call and form tracking, wired before launch. Both enquiry routes were tracked from the first click, which means the very first conversion the account recorded was real — and Google's bidding has been fed clean data for its entire life.
Why the conversion rate looks the way it does. A 26.87% rate is not a clever bid setting. It is what is left when the non-buying searches were removed before launch, the ads only enter auctions the audit approved, and every click lands on a page about the exact job it searched for. Each step is unremarkable; the compounding is not.
What you are looking at: the Ferguson Forestry account screen for the last 30 days — 36 conversions at £22.27 each, a 26.87% conversion rate, at an average click price of £5.98 (14 Aug – 12 Sep 2026, live account data). Recent seven-day windows have run higher still: 39–40% conversion at £15.85–£17.33 per conversion (6–13 Sep 2026, live account data). Two things said plainly. First, these conversions are enquiries — calls and forms — not booked jobs; the booking happens in Ferguson Forestry’s diary, not in the account. Second, a small account’s weekly numbers swing, which is why the 30-day window is the honest baseline and the seven-day figures are noted, not headlined.
Start where this account started
Ferguson Forestry began with an audit of the searches, not a media plan. If you already run Google Ads, the 12-Point Wasted-Spend Audit reads your live account the same way — read-only access, findings in writing within 48 hours. Not live yet? Say so on the form and we will tell you whether your market is worth entering before you spend a pound in it.