The Client
The Lint Guys is a dryer vent and duct cleaning company serving Morris County, New Jersey. Dryer vent cleaning is a local service people search for the moment a dryer starts taking two cycles to dry a load, and they call the first company that picks up.
Before we started, The Lint Guys ran one Search campaign. In its first two months it spent $1,119 and produced 3 leads, $373 each.
3 leads in two months. 220 in the thirteen since we built the campaigns. Cost per lead down from $373 to $77.
The Challenge
Google Ads for a dryer vent cleaner is a small, expensive market:
- Narrow demand. "Dryer vent cleaning" is a specific search, and clicks on it are costly. The first campaign paid $20.35 a click.
- Mixed intent. The same searches bring homeowners who want a cleaning kit or a brush to do it themselves.
- Two kinds of lead. Customers call or fill out a form. A campaign that counts the wrong actions finds the wrong people.
- Local competition. National duct cleaners and neighbors compete for the same few searches.
What We Built
1. Tracking that counts real leads
We set two counted conversions, phone calls from the website and contact-form submissions, and set the account's soft actions (website visits, directions, menu views and other engagements) not to count. Performance Max optimizes toward whatever you tell it matters, so it optimizes toward calls and forms.
2. A lead-generation Performance Max campaign
Built on those conversions, with more than 150 campaign-level negative keywords and account-level exclusions for 30,970 mobile apps, 30,968 websites and 7,759 YouTube channels. Google's own search-category report shows the searches it matched are dryer vent searches: "who cleans out dryer vents", "dryer vent cleaning near me", "dryer vent cleaning" and "cost to clean dryer ducts".
3. A second Performance Max for the Business Profile
A separate campaign built to bring clicks and calls from local searches. Its best-performing search was "dryer vent cleaning morris county nj", which alone produced 12 of its leads from April to October 2026.
4. Search tests, then focus
We tested two Search campaigns, one on cost-per-lead bidding and one on maximize conversions. They cost $120 to $200 a lead, so the budget went to Performance Max and the Search tests were paused.
The Results
The numbers below are from The Lint Guys' Google Ads account, before us (July 21 to September 12, 2025) against since we built the campaigns (September 13, 2025 to October 2, 2026).
| Metric | Before us | Since we built the campaigns |
|---|---|---|
| Leads | 3 | 220 |
| Leads a month | about 2 | about 17 |
| Cost per lead | $373 | $77 |
| Ad spend | $1,119 | $17,026 |
| Impressions | 1,174 | 599,775 |
| Clicks | 55 | 13,599 |
| Average cost per click | $20.35 | $1.25 (94% less) |
- Leads: 220 since September 2025: 129 phone calls, 89 form submissions and 2 clicks to call.
- Performance Max did the work: 206 of the 220 leads, 94%, on 78% of the spend. Once the Search tests were paused, it averaged $63 a lead.
- Best quarter: April to June 2026, 86 leads at $45 each.
- Reach: 599,775 impressions and 13,599 clicks, up from 1,174 and 55.
Leads Every Month
The campaigns went live in mid-September 2025. Winter is the quiet season for dryer vents, and the account shows it, with the strongest months in spring and early summer.
Cost Per Lead by Month
Nearly One in Four Local Searches, on a $35 a Day Budget
Impression share is the percentage of eligible Google searches where your ad actually appeared. Before we started, a single click in this account cost $20.35, so a $35 daily budget bought less than two clicks a day.
On that same small budget, the main Performance Max campaign now appears on 24% of the Google searches it is eligible for (September 2026), nearly one in four, and the Business Profile campaign, on just $18 a day, reached 27% at its peak. Over the twelve months from October 2025 to September 2026, the main campaign averaged 16% and the Business Profile campaign 15%, across every Google placement a Performance Max campaign covers, not search alone.
Key Takeaways
- Tracking decides who Performance Max finds. Count calls and forms only, and the campaign hunts for calls and forms.
- In a narrow market, the negatives are the work. Every irrelevant click is expensive when the whole market is small. Over 150 negatives and tens of thousands of excluded apps and sites kept the spend on dryer vent searches.
- Test Search, but follow the data. In this account Performance Max beat both Search tests on cost per lead.
- Plan for the season. Leads dip in winter and rise in spring, so budgets and expectations should follow the calendar.
About This Campaign
Dryer vent and duct cleaning lead generation on Google Ads, built with our proprietary Ad Campaign Concierge™ optimization system.
Industry: Home Services (Dryer Vent & Duct Cleaning) Platforms: Google Ads (Performance Max, Search) Location: Morris County, New Jersey Campaigns Built: September 2025 (still running today)
Leads are counted conversions in Google Ads: phone calls from the website and contact-form submissions, plus clicks to call. Website visits, directions and other engagements are excluded. "Before us" is the account's first Search campaign, July 21 to September 12, 2025, a small sample of 3 leads. We built the campaigns in September 2025 and they are still running. Results after our engagement reflect the client's continued operation of those campaigns. Impression share is Google's search impression share for the Performance Max campaigns, Oct 2025 to Sep 2026.