Small Budget.
Specific City.
2 to 3 Booked Jobs Every Week.

About Letty's House Cleaning

Letty's House Cleaning is a residential cleaning service operating in Lincoln, California. A genuine local business built on word-of-mouth, referrals, and the quality of every job done, Letty's was ready to grow beyond their existing network but had never run paid advertising before.

The goal was straightforward: reach homeowners in Lincoln who were actively looking for a reliable cleaning service, generate enquiries, and convert those enquiries into booked jobs. The budget was limited. The geography was specific. The expectation was practical, not aspirational. That clarity made it possible to build something that actually worked.

The Problem

Running Meta ads for a local service business sounds simple. In practice, it has a specific failure mode that most campaigns fall into: generating a high volume of cheap leads that never convert into booked jobs, burning through budget on contacts that were never serious enquiries to begin with.

For Letty's, the risk was compounded by three constraints:

• Very limited budget: At $50 per day across four ads, there was no room for a long optimisation runway. Every dollar needed to work, and the campaign needed to reach conversion efficiency quickly rather than spending weeks in the learning phase.
• Hyperlocal targeting only: Lincoln, CA is a specific, contained geography. Broad local service targeting — even within a single city — often pulls in people who are outside a practical service radius, or who are casually browsing rather than actively ready to book. We needed buyers, not browsers.
• No existing lead qualification system: When leads arrive through a basic contact form, the business owner spends time chasing contacts who never had genuine intent. That time cost is real, and for a small operator like Letty's, it directly affects capacity to serve actual clients.

Our Approach

The strategy was built around one core idea: get fewer, better leads rather than more, cheaper ones. Every decision from targeting to form design to daily optimisation was made in service of that goal.

1. Hyper-Local Targeting Built Around Real Buyer Geography

We targeted Lincoln, CA specifically, not a broad radius that swept in surrounding cities or suburbs. The audience was further refined by homeowner signals, household income indicators, and behavioural data suggesting active interest in home services. This kept impression volume lower than a broad campaign but meant every impression was reaching someone who could realistically book a clean.

The four ads ran simultaneously with identical targeting but different creative angles, allowing us to identify which message resonated most strongly with Lincoln homeowners within the first two weeks.

2. SQL Qualifying Forms, Not Basic Contact Capture

Standard Meta lead forms ask for a name, email, and phone number. That captures volume, but not intent. We built the lead forms with custom qualifying questions designed to surface serious enquiries and filter out casual interest before it ever reached Letty's inbox.

The qualifying questions covered: the type of clean required (standard, deep, move-in/out), the approximate property size, how soon they were looking to book, and whether they had a regular cleaning service already. Anyone who completed the full form was signalling meaningful purchase intent. Anyone who dropped off partway through was self-selecting out, which was the point.

3. Daily Lead Qualification Through Meta Business Suite

This is the element most agencies skip, and the one that made the biggest difference. Every day, we reviewed incoming leads through Meta Business Suite and manually marked each one as qualified or unqualified based on the form responses. That signal was fed back into Meta's algorithm continuously, training it in real time on which lead profiles were actually converting to booked jobs and which were not.

This daily feedback loop is what separated this campaign from a standard lead gen setup. Instead of the algorithm optimising for raw form completions, it was learning to find people who matched the profile of someone who books and shows up. The cost per qualified lead dropped progressively over the 90-day window as the algorithm's buyer model became more accurate.

4. Four Ad Variants, One Winning Angle

We ran four ads within the same campaign, each testing a different creative approach: social proof led, service benefit led, price anchoring, and urgency led. By week three, one variant was consistently outperforming the others on cost per qualified lead. Budget was reallocated toward the winner while the underperformers were replaced with new variants to continue testing.

This iterative process kept the campaign improving throughout the 90 days rather than plateauing after the initial setup.

Ad Performance Breakdown

Four ads ran across the campaign. Combined results across the full Jul 1 to Sep 30, 2025 window:

Individual ad performance varied significantly, which is expected and by design. The best-performing ad delivered 41 leads at $19.68 per lead. The weakest delivered 7 leads at $52.22. Daily qualification data meant we were constantly shifting weight toward the ads that were generating bookable enquiries, not just form completions.

The Results

Within a 90-day window, on a budget that most agencies would dismiss as too small to run meaningful paid advertising, Letty's House Cleaning had a functioning lead generation system producing consistent, bookable enquiries every week.

Our Responsibilities