Home services · Colorado Springs, CO

Cutting lead response from 9 hours to 4 minutes

A seasonal landscaping business generating plenty of leads and converting few of them. The problem wasn't lead quality — it was that nobody replied until the following morning, by which point three competitors had.

Median lead response time
4 min
Down from 9 hours 12 minutes
Booked jobs per month
2.2×
From 28 to 62 during peak season
Event Match Quality
8.4
Up from 4.1 after Conversions API setup
Client
Brightleaf Outdoor
Duration
6 weeks
Year
2026

The situation

Where they started

Meta Ads were producing leads at a reasonable cost, but the pixel was double-firing and Event Match Quality sat at 4.1 — the algorithm was optimising against a badly blurred picture of who converted.

Leads arrived in an inbox. Someone got to them the next morning, or after the weekend. Median response time was over nine hours.

There was no follow-up beyond the first call. A lead that didn't answer was effectively discarded.

What we did

Three moves that mattered

  1. 01

    Fixed the signal before touching spend

    Deduplicated the pixel against server-side events via event_id, implemented the Conversions API through a GTM server container, and added hashed customer parameters. Event Match Quality moved from 4.1 to 8.4 in eleven days.

  2. 02

    Automated speed to lead

    A GoHighLevel workflow now sends an SMS within 60 seconds of a form submission, notifies the on-call estimator, and opens a pipeline card. If nobody responds in ten minutes it escalates.

  3. 03

    Built the follow-up nobody had time for

    A seven-touch sequence over fourteen days across SMS and email, plus a dormant-lead reactivation campaign for the previous two seasons' unconverted enquiries.

Stack
  • Meta Ads
  • Conversions API
  • GTM Server-Side
  • GoHighLevel
  • Twilio

The result

What changed

  • Median first response fell from 9 hours 12 minutes to 4 minutes.
  • Booked jobs rose from 28 to 62 a month across peak season, with ad spend up only 15%.
  • The reactivation campaign against old leads produced 19 booked jobs in its first month — from contacts the business already had and had written off.

The ads were never really the problem, which is not what we expected to hear from an ads agency. They fixed the thing that was actually broken and told us to leave the budget alone for a month.

Sample ClientOwner, Brightleaf Outdoor

Same problem?

Most of these start with a free audit

Two days, no cost, and you keep the findings regardless of what you decide.