Image360 Calgary North is a signage and large-format graphics studio serving businesses across Calgary’s north end — storefront and building signs, vehicle wraps, banners, trade-show displays, and interior graphics. They came to Big Fox Agency with a clear brief: turn Google Ads into a dependable source of qualified quote requests, not just clicks — and prove the spend was working, dollar for dollar.
The challenge: profitable demand on a deliberately small budget
Signage is a considered, quote-driven purchase. A business decides it needs a sign or a wrap, searches for a local shop, and reaches out to a few to compare. The window to win that customer is narrow and the intent is high — which makes paid search a natural fit, if the money is spent with discipline.
The mandate had two hard constraints. First, the budget was deliberately modest — roughly $1.5–2K a month — so there was no room for waste on broad, curiosity clicks that never become quotes. Second, every dollar had to be traceable to a real outcome. The measure of success wasn’t traffic or impressions; it was tracked conversions at a cost that left the work comfortably profitable.
The approach: managed for outcomes, not clicks
We built and ran a Google Ads search program focused on genuine commercial signage and graphics intent in the Calgary market, with conversion tracking on quote and contact actions so spend could be judged on results rather than visits. From there, the edge came from disciplined, hands-on management:
- Tightly themed search campaigns mapped to the services that actually sell — not a single catch-all campaign, but structure that let budget follow intent.
- Continuous search-term review and negative-keyword pruning, cutting the irrelevant and curiosity searches that quietly drain a small budget.
- Bid and budget tuning toward what converted — concentrating spend on the keywords and timing that produced quote requests, and pulling back where they didn’t.
- Six months of compounding optimization, not a set-and-forget launch — each month’s data sharpening the next.
On a small budget, this is the whole game: the difference between a 762% return and a money-loser isn’t the ad platform, it’s whether someone is pruning waste and steering spend toward conversions every week.
The return: 762% on tracked spend
Over six months and $7.18K of managed spend, the program delivered a return well above break-even — verified directly in the client’s Google Ads account:
- 762% return on ad spend (Google Ads “Actual ROAS”).
- 186 conversions from 2,690 clicks.
- $2.67 cost per click and a $38.62 cost per conversion.
In plain terms, the campaigns returned roughly $7.62 in tracked value for every $1.00 invested — a signage studio turning a small, carefully managed ad budget into a steady, traceable stream of qualified quote requests. Every figure here is taken straight from the account dashboard; we show a scrubbed crop of it with the client’s identifying details removed.
Why it worked
There’s no trick in these numbers — just the fundamentals done consistently. High-intent demand was captured the moment it appeared. Conversion tracking made outcomes, not clicks, the scoreboard. And relentless pruning kept a small budget aimed only at searches that turned into quotes. That’s what makes a result like this repeatable and scalable: the same discipline that earned a 762% return on $7.18K is the discipline that holds up when the budget grows.
