Stone Fabricator Case Study: Fixing Lead Quality, Not Volume
A seven-figure stone fabricator in Pennsylvania came to Nova Marketing with a problem most countertop shops would recognize instantly: plenty of leads, almost no good ones. Eighty-plus enquiries a month, a close rate under 5%, and a sales team burning days quoting price shoppers hunting the cheapest slab in the county. Sixty days after we rebuilt their campaigns around premium intent, the ledger read differently: lead quality up 73% (3.1 to 8.2 on their scoring), close rate up 275% (4.8% to 18%), average job value up 81% ($3,200 to $5,800), and monthly revenue from ads up 333% ($12,000 to $52,000). The lesson generalizes to almost every fabricator buying ads today: your problem probably isn't lead volume, it's who the leads are. Full numbers on the case study page.
The diagnosis: paying to attract the wrong buyer
The previous agency had done what lazy accounts always do: bid on generic terms ('countertops', 'granite near me') with no negative-keyword strategy at all. In stone, generic terms are a trap with a specific shape: the same searches that contain buyers also contain DIYers, prefab hunters, and cheapest-option shoppers, and without negatives you pay for every one of them. Eighty leads a month sounds like success until you score them: at a sub-5% close, the sales team was really running a free quoting service for people who were always going to buy on price somewhere else. Volume was the vanity metric hiding the disease.
The rebuild: position premium, pay only for premium intent
- Quality-intent keywords: campaigns restructured around searches that name craft and premium materials, 'custom granite fabrication', 'premium quartz countertops', the phrasing of a buyer who has already decided not to buy the cheapest thing.
- 200+ negative keywords: the unglamorous hero of the whole case study. Budget-oriented and DIY terms excluded en masse, so the ad simply stops appearing in front of the searches that never close. Negatives are how you fire your worst leads before they cost you a click.
- Ad copy that leads with craftsmanship: when the ad itself says premium, the price shopper self-selects out at zero cost: copy as a filter, not just a pitch.
- Meta aimed at the right households: homeowners with household incomes above $150k, engaged with luxury home content: the audience whose kitchens carry $5,800 tickets.
- Performance Max on real assets: showroom and project photography, not stock renders: the proof layer doing double duty as creative.
- Lead scoring from day one: a system to grade every enquiry, so 'quality' became a measured number instead of a feeling, and the 60-day quality shift was visible in data, not anecdotes.
Why fewer, better leads out-earn more leads
Do the arithmetic the case study proves: revenue from ads went from $12,000 to $52,000 a month without chasing more volume, because every stage improved at once: better leads closed at nearly four times the rate, and the jobs they brought were 81% larger. That's the compounding most fabricators miss when they judge campaigns on cost per lead: a $40 lead that never closes is infinitely expensive, and a dearer click from a premium-intent search is the cheapest revenue in the account. In the owner's words: "We went from dreading lead calls to being excited every time the phone rings. Andy understood that we needed better leads, not just more leads."
The self-audit any stone shop can run this week
- Pull your search-terms report: read what you actually paid for last month. Count the DIY, prefab and 'cheap' searches: that's your waste line, in dollars.
- Score last month's leads 1-10 against your ideal job. If the average is under 5, you have this case study's disease.
- Check your negative keywords: fewer than 50 in a countertop account almost always means the filter was never built.
- Read your own ad copy as a price shopper: if nothing in it repels you, it's inviting everyone, and everyone is expensive.
- Track close rate and average ticket by source the two numbers that turned this account around, and the ones cost-per-lead dashboards hide.
The takeaway
Lead quality is a buildable outcome, not a market condition: choose the searches that signal premium intent, exclude the ones that never buy, say craftsmanship in the ad, aim the audiences at households that carry your ticket, and score everything so the shift shows up in numbers. Sixty days was enough to see it here, and the full before-and-after lives on the stone fabricator case study.