How Riverline HVAC found $1.2M in mis-routed ad spend across four branches.
Four branches. Four ad accounts. Four different agencies. Cohesion Insight read them together for the first time and told Alicia Chen where the money was actually going.
The problem
Riverline HVAC runs four branches across the Front Range. Each branch inherited its own Google Ads account, its own local-service ads setup, its own agency, and its own weekly report. Alicia Chen, the company's COO, had four PDFs on her desk every Monday and no way to compare them side by side. The one branch that looked strongest on paper, the Boulder location, was also the one quietly spending the most on click categories that never converted to a booked job.
The problem was not that the data was missing. It was that no one was reading it in the same place, on the same schedule, with the same definitions. The agencies had incentives to keep their own dashboards. The internal ops lead had four spreadsheets and a full-time job dispatching techs.
What Cohesion Insight surfaced
In the first weekly brief, Cohesion Insight flagged that the Boulder branch was spending 34% of its ad budget on service categories that had a 1.8% conversion rate, versus a cohort median of 9.1%. The Denver branch had the opposite problem: a category converting at 14% was capped at $600 a week because the agency had not moved budget across in eight months.
The team did not build a new dashboard. Alicia already had four. What she did not have was a decision layer that read the four together and told her, on Monday morning, which branch to talk to first. That is what changed.
Two calls this week, Alicia.
Boulder is still spending $8,400 / week on "AC replacement" clicks that convert at 1.9%. Recommend capping that category at $2,000 / week and moving the delta to "furnace repair," which converted at 14.1% last week across the other three branches.
Denver's "furnace repair" category is capped by the agency at $600 / week. That cap has not moved in eight months. Recommend raising to $2,400 / week to test.
→ Expected upside: $34–41K in incremental booked revenue this month, no new ad spend.
What happened next
Alicia forwarded the memo to two of the four agencies with one line: "Please make these changes by Wednesday." The other two branches got the same treatment the following week. Within 90 days, $1.2M in cumulative ad spend had been reallocated. The same dollars, in different categories, at different branches. Booked revenue for the quarter grew 22% against a budget that had not changed.
Riverline HVAC did not fire an agency. They did not hire a fractional CFO. They did not build a data team. They started reading their four branches as one company, once a week, in the same place. That was the change.