Fence painting Sydney: cost per lead down 33.68%

Nobody has a fence emergency

Sydney Fence Painting sells a job most people think about once. A fence or a run of Colorbond needs painting when it starts to look tired, which makes the work discretionary, seasonal and very easy to put off. In an advertising account that shows up as swing — cheap enquiries when the weather is good and people are out in the yard, expensive ones when they are not.

That opening line is not a throwaway. It sets the economics of the entire category. With no urgency there is no bidding war over the moment, so the clicks cost a fraction of what an emergency trade pays for theirs. The same absence of urgency means the buyer can walk away at any point, and plenty do. The job of an account like this is not to catch a panic. It is to reach somebody at the exact point in the year when the yard has started to annoy them, and to get there before the thought passes.

Timing is therefore the whole game. People look at their fence while standing in the yard, and they only stand in the yard when the weather is worth being outside for. When it turns, the yard goes unused and painting quotes get filed for later. This account shows that pattern about as plainly as a set of numbers can.

It also includes a stretch where things went the wrong way. Partway through the run the cost of an enquiry climbed steeply, and at the worst of it the business was paying $136.62 for one — well above where the account had been sitting. That is the honest shape of a seasonal trade in a competitive Sydney market, and it is the part most agencies leave out of a case study. We have left it in, because the interesting question was never whether it happened. It is what happened next.

What we took on

Three campaigns, covering residential fence painting, commercial painting and Colorbond work. The periods below were picked out of the account and reported without dates, deliberately, so nothing here maps back to the client's calendar. Over the whole account it was served 31,257 times, produced 1,843 clicks at a 5.90% click-through rate, and converted 12.86% of those clicks into an enquiry.

Enough of the months in that run have the trading behind them to plot honestly. Enquiries landed across a wide spread of separate days, which tells you this is not a business that gets one busy fortnight and then waits.

The problem was not solved by spending more. It was solved by going back through what people were actually searching for and rebuilding around the enquiries that end in a quote and a booked job, rather than the ones that merely arrive. We do not publish how that is done. We publish what it did.

Cost per enquiry down 33.68% in a single month

A month later the cost of an enquiry was back to $90.61 — a 33.68% drop on the $136.62 before it, on 14 enquiries in that month.

One full month against the next, with nothing selected in between.

The line is worth reading properly, because it is the seasonal argument in one picture. It opens at $15.83. The next two points sit at $24.52 and $24.06 — flat and cheap while the demand was still there. Then it drifts to $41.54. Then it spikes to $136.62, the highest point on the chart. The point after that comes back to $90.61. Everything to the left of the spike was a market that wanted the product. The spike was a market that had stopped, plus an account that had not adjusted to it yet.

The volume chart shows the same story from the other direction: 229 tracked enquiries across the complete months on it, peaking at 69 and bottoming at 14. Look at that first bar, though.

44 enquiries in the account's opening month, from only 14 days of trading, at $15.83 each.

That is the strongest half-month of the run, and it is what a fence painting business in Sydney looks like when the season is with it.

• Cost per enquiry $136.62 → $90.61 from one complete month to the next, a 33.68% reduction
• 237 enquiries and 24 tracked phone calls across the account's wider run
• Best month for volume: 69 enquiries at $24.06 each, including 6 tracked calls, converting at 18.65%
• Best month for cost: $15.83 per enquiry, from 44 enquiries in 14 days, converting at 25.88%
• Cost per enquiry taken over the whole account: $50.47

The opening month was a 14-day month in the account and a very good one. The volume peak came later. Later still was the worst of it. Each of those is a fact about that month, and none of them describes the others.

What actually drove the recovery is visible in the data and worth naming, because it is not the mechanism people assume. In the dear month, 4.85% of clicks became an enquiry. In the one after it, 8.33% did — a 71.67% improvement in the same month the cost came down. So the recovery did not come from buying traffic more cheaply. It came from buying traffic that converted. Click-through rate moved on a similar arc across the run: 5.57% early on, rising to 8.20% later, 47.31% higher.

Two other things the account records. It is an overwhelmingly mobile audience — 1,459 of the 1,843 clicks came from a phone and produced 200 of the 237 enquiries. And the enquiries arrived in a mix that suits a quoting trade: 137 clicks straight onto the phone number, 84 submitted forms, 13 tracked phone leads and 3 calls placed from the ad itself. The best single day saw 11 clicks produce 11 enquiries.

The three campaigns did very different jobs, and the difference is instructive. Residential fence work produced 221 of the 237 enquiries at $33.06 each. Commercial painting produced 8 at $163.06. Colorbond roof and fence produced 5 at $234.64. Those are facts about those campaigns over that window rather than a verdict on any of the three, but they are the sort of fact that decides where next season's budget points. Worth adding: the campaign behind those 221 enquiries held only 10.19% impression share, so nine in ten of the eligible searches were still going past.

What it meant for the business

For a painting business the number that matters is how many quotes you get to write. Across the window that was 237 enquiries plus 24 phone calls — Sydney homeowners and property managers asking for a price on a fence or a Colorbond repaint, from an account that averaged $50.47 to produce each one.

Seasonal shape has staffing consequences that are easy to underestimate. 69 enquiries in one month and 14 in another are not the same business. Knowing that shape in advance is what lets an owner put a second crew on for the busy stretch without carrying them through the quiet one, and it heads off both the panic hiring a good month causes and the panic cutting a bad one causes. The enquiry data is, in effect, a workforce plan nobody had to guess at.

The recovery is the more useful story though. Costs in a seasonal trade will drift. What decides whether a business can advertise year-round is how quickly somebody notices the drift and pulls it back. Here that took a month, and it took the cost of an enquiry down by a third.

Worth a conversation

If your cost per enquiry has crept up and nobody has explained why, that is usually a fixable problem rather than a market one. Send us your last three months and we will tell you which of the two you are looking at.