Some markets are won with volume. Slater Spray’s market is not one of them. They operate in a niche most people have never had a reason to think about, the kind of specialised B2B work where there might only be a few dozen genuinely valuable searches in a month, but a single won job can be worth more than most businesses’ entire quarter.
That changes the whole shape of the campaign. You are not trying to catch a river of demand. You are trying to catch three or four phone calls that matter, without drowning in the thousands of searches that look similar and are worth nothing.
The headline number
Over two months, roughly $5,000 of Google Ads spend produced $500,000 in tracked work for Slater Spray. One hundred times the spend, in sixty days. And because the job values in this niche are so large, that number came the way niche B2B wins always come: not from hundreds of leads, but from the right enquiries reaching the right business at the right moment, tracked from the search that started them to the work they became.
“Working with Ozkan from Indi Creative has been one of the best business decisions we’ve made.”
Jaydon Slater, Slater Spray, Google review
The negative keyword war
Here is the part that made this account genuinely hard, and the part most agencies would have lost. The words that describe what Slater Spray does also describe half a dozen cheaper, completely unrelated things that ordinary consumers search for every single day. The same handful of core terms could mean a six-figure commercial job or someone looking for a ten-dollar product at Bunnings.
Left alone, Google’s matching happily serves ads to all of them, and a niche budget dies in a week. So the search terms report became a daily battleground. Every irrelevant search that triggered an ad got mined, categorised and excluded. The negative keyword list grew into the hundreds, easily the most aggressive exclusion work we have run on any account, and it kept growing week after week as new variations of the wrong intent crawled in.
It is unglamorous, repetitive, ridiculous work. It is also exactly why the account performed: by the end of the first month, nearly every dollar of Slater Spray’s budget was reaching the tiny slice of searches that could actually turn into work.
Why niche B2B is a different sport
In a high-volume trade, a leaky account still limps along, because there is enough demand to paper over the waste. In a niche, there is nowhere to hide. Every click matters, so we ran tight match types instead of trusting broad match to guess, wrote ads that spoke the industry’s language so the wrong searcher would not even bother clicking, and pointed everything at a landing page built for a buyer who knows exactly what they need. The right visitor converted. The wrong one bounced before costing anything more.
Smart bidding got adult supervision rather than blind faith, because automated bidding needs data, and niche accounts do not produce enough of it to learn on their own. Human judgement filled the gap the algorithm could not.
The results, in one place
- Around $5,000 in Google Ads spend turned into $500,000 of tracked work
- Sixty days from launch to the headline number
- A negative keyword list in the hundreds, protecting every dollar from consumer noise
- Tight match types, industry-fluent ad copy and a landing page built for one buyer
- Full tracking from search term to signed work, so the number above is provable
Could your business do this?
If your market is niche, this is the honest takeaway: Google Ads can work brilliantly for you, but only run with the discipline a small market demands. Slater Spray’s numbers are Slater Spray’s numbers. What transfers is the method: ruthless exclusion, tight targeting, and tracking that proves what the spend produced. The free growth session is where we look at your market and tell you, straight, whether the same approach makes sense for you.