Skip to main content
Legacy Home Group already knew how to sell houses.
What they didn’t have was much experience generating motivated sellers through inbound marketing.
That distinction became important when their Google leads started getting worse.
Over a 60-day comparison, poor-location leads climbed from 29% to 52% of contacted leads. Overall lead flow dropped 30% in a single month. And when the sales team did get a qualified seller on the phone, the seller’s price expectations weren’t always realistic.
The problem wasn’t that Legacy couldn’t close.
The problem was getting enough of the right sellers in front of a sales team that already knew what to do with them.
After working with Bateman Collective on PPC and SEO, Legacy brought cost per lead down from $452 to $250, increased its qualified lead rate from 18% to 45%, and generated three PPC contracts in August.
But the more important story is how they got there.
A Strong Sales Operation, But a New Inbound Channel
Legacy Home Group is a wholesaling company founded by Tommy Harr and Andy Karabinos in central Ohio. The company works Columbus and the surrounding towns and has been with Bateman Collective since June 2025.
For years, Legacy’s marketing engine was built around outbound.
Cold calling. Cold texting. Direct outreach.
Inbound marketing was relatively new.
As Andy put it:
“We have only done inbound marketing for one year. We’ve done cold calling and texting for all the years prior.”
That meant Legacy was entering a channel where the rules were different.
With cold outreach, the team controls who it contacts.
With Google Ads, Google controls which searches trigger an ad—and the company has to teach Google which of those people are actually worth pursuing.
That became the central issue.
The Problem Wasn't Just Lead Volume
Early on, the numbers looked concerning.
Poor-location leads had risen dramatically. Lead flow had fallen. And some of the sellers who did make it through were behaving more like retail sellers than motivated sellers.
Legacy Sales Director Kameron Herron described the issue this way:
“It seems like a lot of them have been closer to retail like as far as like their expectations on price.”
There was another problem underneath all of that: low equity.
Legacy’s sales team was already capable of closing. They didn’t need an entirely new sales process.
They needed more opportunities that actually fit their buying criteria.
That changed the question Bateman needed to answer.
It wasn’t simply:
“How do we get Legacy more leads?”
It was:
“How do we get Legacy more workable sellers without paying for a bunch of traffic they can’t use?”
And importantly, Legacy was willing to pay more for a lead if that meant getting rid of the out-of-area and otherwise unusable leads.
The First Step: Tell Google What a Good Lead Actually Is
Bateman rebuilt the Google Ads campaign around Legacy’s actual buying area, using radius-based geographic targeting.
But targeting the right geography was only part of the solution.
Bateman also introduced lead sculpting.
Instead of treating every form submission as equally valuable, Google was given credit for a lead based on whether the seller indicated that the property was not listed on the MLS.
That matters because a $200 lead and a $200 qualified lead aren’t necessarily the same thing.
The campaign needed to optimize toward the second one.
Bateman also moved bidding down to the ad-group level, allowing bids to reflect the cost of qualified leads rather than treating every part of the campaign the same.
Then the team went after the landing page.
Service-area sections were added to make Legacy’s geographic coverage clearer, and Bateman continued running A/B tests. One test ultimately beat the control by roughly 8% in conversion rate.
The campaign wasn’t being treated as something that could simply be launched and left alone.
It was being refined as data came in.
Then They Looked Beyond Cost Per Lead
This is where the economics of the campaign started to change.
A common mistake in PPC is to look at a keyword and decide whether it’s good based on its cost per lead.
But Legacy’s data showed why that can be misleading.
Bateman pulled two years of company-wide lead and contract data and looked at what happened after the lead came in.
Some keywords produced leads at a higher cost—but those leads were turning into contracts at a lower overall cost.
Other keywords looked efficient at the lead level but weren’t producing contracts.
So Bateman built new ad groups around the keywords that were producing contracts and shifted spend away from groups that were generating qualified leads without producing deals.
In other words:
The goal wasn’t to make the dashboard look better. It was to make the business economics better.
That’s an important distinction for anyone considering PPC.
A lower CPL is nice.
A lower cost to acquire a contract is what actually matters.
The Website and SEO Became Part of the Strategy
In March, Legacy also added a website rebuild and SEO.
Bateman rebuilt the site using Legacy’s existing brand materials rather than trying to turn the company into something it wasn’t.
Reviews, testimonials, and the team photo were moved higher on the page.
On the SEO side, the team set up Search Console, completed metadata across the site, and added a file designed to help AI platforms understand the site.
The initial location-page strategy focused on Newark, Pickerington, Lancaster, and Delaware.
That work wasn’t separate from the PPC strategy.
The goal was to build an inbound marketing system around the company—not simply buy more clicks.
The Numbers Started Moving
The results didn’t come from one change.
They came from improving several parts of the funnel at the same time.
Over comparable 60-day windows:
- Cost per lead fell from $452 to $250
- Qualified lead rate increased from 18% to 45%
- Contact rate increased from 70% to 93%
- Poor-location leads fell from 47% to 31% of contacted leads
- Cost per opportunity fell from roughly $1,900 to just under $1,200
The campaign also produced a 23% conversion rate in August, compared with an industry benchmark of roughly 8–12%.
And in June, lead volume increased 60% in a single month—even while search volume declined 20%.
The bigger test, though, was whether those leads turned into actual contracts.
They did.
The Results
Three PPC Contracts in August
By August, Legacy had generated three PPC contracts in one month.
At the latest check, confirmed closed assignments included:
- $37,000
- $30,000
- $20,000
- $17,000
- $15,000
- $13,000
- $10,000
- $5,000
- $4,500
There were also approximately $28,000, $15,000, and $10,000 in contract at the time of the last check.
The campaign was also sitting at approximately 4.3X ROAS at four months live.
And Legacy’s opportunities-per-contract ratio was 5.2, compared with a 5.5 benchmark.
The cost per contract was below target as of September; the exact figure is still being finalized.
What This Case Study Actually Shows
Legacy’s story isn’t really a story about getting a $452 CPL down to $250.
That’s the headline.
The more useful lesson is what happened in between.
Legacy already had a sales operation. They already knew their market. They already knew how to close sellers.
What they didn’t have was years of inbound data telling them which Google traffic was actually worth buying.
So the campaign had to learn.
Geography had to be tightened.
Lead quality had to be fed back into the campaign.
Landing pages had to be tested.
Bids had to change based on what happened deeper in the funnel.
And keywords had to be judged by contracts—not just leads.
That’s also why PPC shouldn’t be approached with the expectation that everything will be perfect in month one.
There is a learning curve.
Why This Matters
The first goal isn’t necessarily to produce the lowest CPL you’ve ever seen. It’s to establish a reliable baseline, identify where the funnel is leaking, and accumulate enough data to make better decisions.
For an operator with a proven acquisition process, that can be the difference between simply generating inbound leads and building another dependable source of contracts.
Legacy came into inbound marketing relatively new. They didn’t need Bateman to teach them how to close a seller. They needed a marketing system that could learn which sellers were worth putting in front of their team.
That’s what the campaign was built to do.
