Two UK home-improvement installers — windows and composite doors, and a premium Yorkshire windows/doors/conservatories/orangeries business — both started Google Ads from a brand-new account with zero historical data. Here's what happened.
Get in TouchWindows, doors, conservatories and orangeries sit in an unusual spot for paid search. The purchases are high-ticket — often thousands of pounds per job — and considered, usually involving a home visit before anyone signs anything. That combination means two things: a wasted click is expensive, and a lead that never converts to a booked survey is worse than no lead at all.
Most Google Ads advice is written for ecommerce, where the goal is transactions and the feedback loop is instant. Home-improvement lead generation needs a different lens — one built around cost-per-genuine lead, not cost-per-click or raw lead volume. These two anonymised case studies show what that looks like in practice, at two very different stages of account maturity.
Industry: windows & composite doors
Account status: brand-new Google Ads account, zero historical data at the start
Timeframe: 16 months
Leads: ~272 a year
Click-through rate: 5.31%
Cost per lead: £159.34
This account began with no conversion history, no Quality Score to lean on, and no data to inform bidding. That’s the hardest starting point in Google Ads — the algorithm has nothing to learn from, so early weeks have to be managed by hand, conservatively, while tracking is built and verified.
Over 16 months, disciplined structural work — proper campaign segmentation by product line, tight negative keyword management, and consistent tracking to genuine enquiries rather than clicks — took the account from zero to a steady pipeline of roughly 272 leads a year. The 5.31% click-through rate and £159.34 cost per lead reflect an account that’s matured: search terms have been refined, wasted spend has been cut, and bidding has shifted from manual, cautious control toward automation with a clear cost ceiling.
There’s no shortcut in this story. It’s what a from-scratch account looks like after consistent, structured management over more than a year.
Industry: premium windows, doors, conservatories & orangeries
Region: Yorkshire
Account status: brand-new Google Ads account, launched from a standing start
Timeframe: first ~4 weeks live
Leads: 21 (first month, not annualised)
Click-through rate: 6.03%
Cost per lead: £205.65
This second account is genuinely early — just over a month old at the time of writing. It’s included here precisely because it’s honest: these are first-month numbers, not a projection or an annualised figure, and the account is still in the phase where bidding is managed manually while enough conversion data builds to move toward automated bidding.
21 leads and a 6.03% click-through rate in month one, from an account with zero history, is a strong foundation — a £205.65 cost per lead on a brand-new account is broadly in line with what you’d expect before an account has had time to mature, and it’s already tracking toward the kind of efficiency the first case study reached at 16 months in. The honest version of this story is: it’s working, and it’s still early.
Windows and doors is one of the most fought-over verticals in Google Ads — every installer in a region bids for the same searcher, so individual click costs vary wildly. Competitive terms can run up to £50 a click, and some individual clicks are genuinely, stupidly expensive, even while the campaign average sits far lower.
The average isn’t what matters — the targeting is. Neither account was chasing someone Googling how to fix a cracked pane; that’s a low-value repair, not a lead worth competing for. Both were targeting full house window replacements, full door replacements, full conservatory and orangery builds — jobs running into the thousands. At that value, even a genuinely expensive click is cheap. Disciplined targeting kept both accounts’ average CPC to roughly £6-7, well under what the most competitive terms in this niche can cost.
If you’re a window or door company considering Google Ads for the first time — or moving to a new account — the honest expectation is that it takes time. A brand-new account with no history won’t match the efficiency of a mature one on day one, and anyone promising otherwise isn’t being straight with you.
What you can expect, if the account is built and managed properly, is steady improvement: tracking that actually reflects genuine enquiries, campaigns structured around your specific product lines, and a cost-per-lead that trends downward as the account matures — the way both of these accounts have.
Early weeks focus on tracking setup and manual bid management, since a brand-new account has no conversion history to inform automated bidding. One account here took 16 months to reach a steady 272-leads-a-year pipeline.
New accounts start with no data, so early cost-per-lead is naturally less efficient — £205.65 in month one versus £159.34 after 16 months of optimisation. That gap is expected and typically narrows as the account matures and tracking data accumulates.
Not against deal value. This is a brutally competitive niche where individual clicks can cost up to £50, some genuinely eye-watering. It’s justified: targeting is full house and conservatory builds, jobs worth thousands, not repairs. It only looks expensive in isolation.
The same approach — cost-per-genuine-lead focus, manual-then-automated bidding, product-line campaign structure — applies to any high-ticket, considered-purchase home-improvement niche: conservatories, orangeries, composite doors, and similar trades.
Management fees start from £300/month, covering ad spend up to £3,000/month; above that, the fee is 10% of spend. Ad spend itself is paid directly to Google with no markup.
If you're a window, door, conservatory or orangery company looking to build a Google Ads account properly — or fix one that's underperforming — I manage accounts personally, with the same discipline used in both these case studies. Management from £300/month.
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