Summary
Doors Direct is a family owned, QBCC licensed garage door company on Brisbane’s northside. They supply, install, motorise, service and repair garage doors across every suburb in the city.
We built their website in 2016 and we have run their Google Ads account ever since. Ten years, $120,000 of managed spend, and close to 5,000 recorded calls and enquiries.
The interesting part is not the growth. It is what we took away. Over that decade we cut the number of people who see the ads by more than 80%, and the number who click went up. We run the account the way we would run it if the phone ringing was our phone.
What We Did
Campaigns Built Around Intent, Not Keywords
The garage door market does not behave like one category. Somebody searching “garage door installation Brisbane” is planning a purchase over weeks. Somebody searching “roller door spring broken” needs a technician this afternoon. Same industry, completely different person, completely different ad and landing page.
So the account is split by what the searcher is actually trying to do:
- Door Installs. New supply and installation, Brisbane metro. The planning buyer.
- Motors and Springs. Broken hardware, high urgency, same day intent.
- Repairs and Servicing. General repair, maintenance and call out work.
- Second Tier. Suburb specific coverage for the outer Brisbane corridors that convert.
- Remarketing. People who already looked and did not call.
Each one has its own structure, its own landing page and its own negative keyword list so the campaigns cannot bleed into each other and quietly compete for the same click.
Suburb By Suburb
Conversions do not spread evenly across a city. Some suburbs close jobs, some generate clicks and no customers. A standing part of the management is watching performance by suburb and moving budget toward the places where Doors Direct actually wins work. The targeting follows the evidence, not the map.
Remarketing Does The Cheap Work
The Performance Max remarketing campaign is the cheapest source of enquiries in the account by a wide margin. It spent $729 over the last twelve months and produced 695 conversions. These are people who had already been to the site, already knew what Doors Direct does, and just needed to be reminded while they were still thinking about it.
Results
Every year the account has been open. In 2017 the ads were shown 433,381 times and 2,952 people clicked. In 2025 they were shown 75,908 times and 6,237 people clicked. We cut the audience by 82% and doubled the clicks, because we stopped paying to reach people who were never going to call. 2026 is annualised from data to 15 September.
In 2017 the ads were shown 433,381 times and 2,952 people clicked. That is a click through rate of 0.68%, which is to say more than 99% of the money spent on being seen was spent on people who were never going to become customers.
In 2025 the ads were shown 75,908 times and 6,237 people clicked. The audience is 82% smaller and the clicks have more than doubled. Click through rate went from 0.68% to 8.22%, and in 2026 it is running above 10%.
That is the whole job in one chart. Most accounts are optimised toward reach, because reach is easy to report and it looks like progress. Reach is not the product. A tradesman with a van and a full diary does not want to be famous, he wants the right person to call before they call someone else.
How People Actually Get In Touch
Tracked enquiries by type over the last twelve months. The phone still wins. For a trade where half the jobs start with something broken, the measure of a campaign is whether it makes the phone ring.
Over the last twelve months the tracked enquiries split into 1,147 phone calls, 1,034 emails and 79 website form submissions. The phone is still the main way this business wins work, which is exactly what you would expect when half the jobs start with something broken.
It matters because it changes what you optimise. If you measure only form fills on a trade account, you are blind to most of your own results and you will make bad decisions with confidence.
Hosting And Security
We also host the site and look after its security and proactive maintenance. For a business whose enquiries arrive through a phone number and a form on that website, an hour of downtime is lost jobs, not an inconvenience. Keeping the ads, the search and the server under one roof means there is nobody to hand the problem to when something breaks.
Search
We also run their SEO, and on a trade account the two channels are judged together. Every position won organically is a click that does not have to be bought.
In a Brisbane garage door search, that matters more than usual, because the clicks are expensive. These are the kinds of terms Doors Direct holds in the top three organically, with what the same click costs in Google Ads beside it:
- garage door quote, position 1, around $4.20 a click
- garage door replacement brisbane, position 2, around $3.75 a click
- garage doors north brisbane, position 3, around $2.95 a click
- garage door repairs brisbane northside, position 3, around $2.80 a click
- garage doors brisbane northside, position 3, around $2.70 a click
- roller doors brisbane, position 3, around $2.00 a click
They also own the carport cluster outright. Carport doors, carport garage doors, carport roller door, roller door for carport, carport with roller door brisbane: position one or two across the set. That is an entire product category captured by one business.
Sixty keywords sit in the top three positions in Australia. The organic traffic those positions bring in is worth more than the entire monthly advertising budget, which is the point of running both channels under one roof rather than in two agencies that never speak.
Why It Matters Who Does This Work
Ten years on one trade account does not happen because of a clever campaign. It happens because somebody keeps turning up, keeps cutting the waste, and keeps telling the client the truth about what the numbers mean.
Shrinking an audience by 82% is not an obvious thing to put in a report. It looks like going backwards. It was the right call, and the clicks and the calls prove it.
That is what we mean by doing what matters. If you want an agency that will treat your advertising budget the way it would treat its own, talk to us.