Foundation repair and waterproofing are some of my favorite trades to work with. The jobs are large, the problems are real, and a good company genuinely protects someone’s biggest investment. They’re also trades where a lot of generic marketing advice doesn’t quite fit.
Most ad platforms and agency playbooks are built around quick, low-cost purchases. A homeowner who notices a crack in the wall or water in the crawl space isn’t making a quick purchase. They’re worried, they’re researching, and they often want more than one inspection before they decide. Your marketing has to work with that, not against it.
Here’s what I focus on when I work with foundation repair and waterproofing companies, and the numbers I’d want any owner in these trades to know.
Why these trades are different
- High job values. A single pier job or a full waterproofing system can be worth thousands of dollars, so one extra booked job a month can change the math on your whole budget.
- Long, careful decisions. Homeowners compare quotes, talk to family and sometimes wait for the next big rain. A lead from this week might not book for a month.
- Inspections in the middle. Most of the sale happens at the inspection, not on the phone. That means getting leads onto the calendar matters as much as getting leads at all.
- Weather and seasons. Dry spells bring foundation movement and wet spells bring water calls. Demand moves, and a flat budget doesn’t move with it.
- Search terms that look similar but aren’t. Plenty of people search foundation-related words for reasons that have nothing to do with hiring you.
Where I’d start: tracking every lead
In these trades, most good leads arrive as phone calls. If calls aren’t tracked back to the campaign, keyword or listing that produced them, the ad account is working half blind. It ends up optimizing toward form fills, which may be only a small part of the picture.
The first thing I check is whether every call, form and booked inspection is being counted once, and only once. I’ve seen a new site go live for weeks with the tracking set up but never actually filled in, so the account couldn’t tell which ads were working. Nothing in the platform warns you when that happens. If you’d like to see how call tracking fits together, I wrote a plain-language guide to call tracking for home service businesses.
The number that matters most: cost per booked inspection
Cost per lead is useful, but in foundation and waterproofing work I care more about what it costs to get someone onto the inspection calendar. That’s where your sales team gets its shot.
One foundation repair company I work with had healthy lead volume, but only about two out of every three leads were reaching a scheduled appointment. Tightening up that step was worth roughly 50 more appointments a month without spending another dollar on ads. You can read that story in the booking rate case study. The ads were doing their job. The gain was in what happened next.
Here’s the worked math I walk owners through. Say your average job is $8,000 and you close about 30 percent of inspections. Each inspection is worth about $2,400 in revenue. If it takes two leads to get one inspection on the calendar and leads cost $200, your cost per booked inspection is $400. Now you can decide whether that’s a good trade, instead of guessing from the cost per lead alone. I explain the difference in more detail in cost per lead vs cost per booked job.
What I look at in the ad accounts
- Search terms. Foundation and waterproofing accounts tend to pick up DIY searches, product searches and searches that share a word with your trade but mean something else. My post on negative keywords shows how to find these yourself.
- Service area. Big tickets mean it can be worth driving farther, but only where your crews actually go. I check that the targeting matches the map you really serve.
- Budget against demand. When the weather turns and calls pick up, a flat daily budget often runs out by early afternoon. Impression share lost to budget tells you how often that happens. It means the money ran out, not that customers chose someone else. More on that in seasonality and your ad budget.
- Local Services Ads and Performance Max. Many foundation companies relied on Local Services Ads, which are moving into Performance Max pay-per-lead. I make sure the new setup is tracked properly and the budget is set on purpose. My guide to budget setup on Performance Max pay-per-lead covers that.
- Your Google Business Profile. Reviews, photos of real jobs and the right categories carry a lot of weight when someone is choosing who to let under their house.
This approach isn’t limited to foundations. A concrete lifting company I work with went from about $151 per lead to $75 at the same monthly spend, mostly from tightening up the account. That one’s written up in the concrete lifting case study.
Where a fractional CMO fits
Most foundation and waterproofing companies already have someone running ads, someone answering phones and someone doing inspections. What’s often missing is one person looking across all of it, connecting the ad spend to booked inspections and closed jobs, and setting the priorities each month.
That’s the seat I fill. I work alongside your existing agency or team, not instead of them, and I teach you to read the numbers yourself so every agency meeting gets easier. You get senior marketing leadership without the cost of a full-time hire. If you’re new to the term, here’s what a fractional CMO actually does.
A quick self-check
If you run a foundation repair or waterproofing company, these questions are a good place to start:
- Do you know your cost per booked inspection, not just your cost per lead?
- Are phone calls tracked back to the campaign or listing that produced them?
- Does your budget change when the weather does?
- When did someone last read your search terms report?
- Is your Local Services Ads to Performance Max transition tracked and set up the way you want it?
If any of those are a shrug, that’s normal. These reports aren’t built for owners, and most of this never gets surfaced on its own.
Want a second set of eyes?
If you’d like me to look at your accounts, you can request an audit here. I’ll go through your ads, tracking and Google Business Profile, explain what I find in plain language, and give you a short list of priorities you can act on with or without me.