G! Marketing/Case Studies/Elite Ambulance
From a March 2020 launch to a 15-state acquisition conversation. Demand generation, workforce recruiting, student enrollment, and organic community, all under one roof, all measured.
● Google Ads account record · Mar 17, 2020 to Jul 21, 2026 · every figure reconciles
Tracked conversions by quarter
Google Ads, Q1 2020 to Q3 2026. Hover any point for the quarter's numbers.
Q2 2024: client-side full budget freeze (internal rebalance), the account went dark for the quarter. Q4 2024 and Q1 2025 include expanded conversion measurement added in 2024 to capture the full picture of phone and contact response. Q3 2026 is a partial quarter (3 weeks). Full quarterly table in the appendix below.
01 / The record
02 / The problem
Patients and facilities who need transport on one side. The EMT workforce required to serve them on the other. These two markets pull against each other. Understaffed means recruiting is the constraint. Overstaffed means call volume is the constraint. Most marketing treats them as one audience. We built independent engines for each side, with one throttle between them.
Demand engine
Search campaigns capturing patients, families, and facilities looking for medical transport. The revenue engine.
Holding steady
Workforce engine
A regional grid of hiring and certification campaigns feeding EMT applications and course enrollments.
Surging
Understaffed? The hiring engine surges. Overstaffed? It goes dark and every dollar moves to demand. Six years. Both directions. Documented.
03 / Act one: zero to engine
G! Marketing took over the Elite Ambulance Google Ads account in March 2020, the same month the world shut down. Elite was a respected operator whose digital presence did not match its real-world standing. We started building anyway. We started in March 2020. You know what else started in March 2020.
The build was a three-engine architecture, run across three brands in three states: Elite Ambulance in Illinois and Northwest Indiana, Erickson Ambulance in southern Wisconsin, and Advance Ambulance in Chicagoland.
ENGINE 01
Search campaigns capturing patients, families, and facilities actively looking for emergency and non-emergency medical transport across Chicagoland and Northwest Indiana. The revenue engine. It became the backbone of the account: $863,787 in lifetime spend, 40,698 conversions at $21.22 each.
ENGINE 02
Branded search capture and competitor defense, protecting the demand Elite's reputation and our organic work generated. $146,050 in lifetime spend, 7,836 conversions at $18.64 each, the cheapest conversions in the account.
ENGINE 03
A regionally segmented grid of hiring and certification campaigns across six Chicagoland and Indiana sub-markets. The certification side feeds Elite's own training academy, which feeds the hiring pipeline. A workforce flywheel, not a job ad.
Tracked phone calls per year, with cost per call. Same conversion action, same definition, all four years.
Result: annual tracked phone calls nearly tripled, from 3,047 in 2020 to 8,945 in 2023, while cost per call held flat in the low twenties. No hockey sticks. Compounding.
Elite Ambulance
Illinois + NW Indiana
Erickson Ambulance
Southern Wisconsin
Advance Ambulance
Chicagoland
04 / Act two: the stress tests
Two events happened that most agency relationships do not survive.
Stress test 01
In Q2 2024, Elite zeroed all marketing budgets during an internal budget rebalance. The account went completely dark for a full quarter. When budgets returned, G! relaunched the engine and delivered the two largest quarters in account history within 90 days.
The client froze every budget for a quarter. Ninety days after relaunch, we posted the two biggest quarters in account history. Restart velocity is a capability. We proved it.
Record quarters on total tracked actions, with conversion measurement expanded in 2024 to capture the full picture of phone and contact response.
Stress test 02
EMT turnover spiked and Elite hit a staffing wall at the exact moment demand was growing. We overhauled the workforce constellation and scaled it hard: a 14x surge in 24 months, executed without cannibalizing the Services engine, which delivered its biggest year ever alongside it. In the same window we deployed the account's peak spend, $443K in 2025.
Hiring-cluster conversions per year. Reversed to near zero in 2026 by design, when Elite reached full staffing.
Result: 2025 closed as the account's record year on every volume metric, with the workforce pipeline refilled.
05 / Act three: the realignment
By late 2025 the seesaw had tipped. Elite was fully staffed, and inbound call volume became the new constraint. Working directly with ownership on goals for the coming year, G! shut down the entire recruiting constellation and concentrated spend on demand generation.
That is the point of the architecture. Marketing throttles to match operational reality, in either direction, on command. 2026 spend through July 21 is $86,382 with 2,115 tracked calls, a deliberately smaller, demand-only footprint in a category where search costs keep rising. Understaffed, the workforce engines surge. Overstaffed, they go dark and every dollar moves to demand.
Six years. Both directions.
Documented.
06 / The community engine
Twelve months of community-first recruitment content, March 2024 to March 2025. Education, real EMT experiences, career pathways, and community impact. No interruption ads. Documentary-style filming of real EMTs and real training sessions, never actors. Content people actually sought out.
views: "Types of calls a unit may get"
views: AED shock demonstration
views: rig identification
The content bridged online engagement to offline enrollment: filming Elite's free training classes generated the content that drove sign-ups for the next classes. Organic video engagement outperformed the paid social benchmarks that preceded it, which is why Elite exited paid Meta entirely.
We made an ambulance company the most-watched EMS brand on Chicagoland social feeds. The audience it built was the exact demographic Elite needed to hire.
07 / The workforce factory
G! Marketing designed, built, and managed the intake systems behind every application type: forms, routing, and tracking. In an industry where labor supply is the number one operational constraint, this is the difference between an ad vendor and an operating partner.
| Pipeline | Applications | Conversion rate |
|---|---|---|
| EMT student applications (academy enrollment) | 17,982 | 20% |
| EMT applications (operations hiring) | 3,526 | 6% |
| Medicar applications | 1,587 | 15% |
| Dispatch applications | 2,134 | 14% |
| Total applications processed | 25,229 | G! intake systems |
The loop feeds itself: marketing manufactures the workforce that serves the demand marketing generates.
08 / Why this scales
"Every market in a multi-state EMS portfolio sits at a different point on the staffing-versus-demand curve. We built the architecture that throttles between them, and ran it for six years through a pandemic launch, a budget freeze, and a staffing crisis. This is what it looks like installed across a portfolio."
09 / The verified data
Every number on this page reconciles against the Elite Ambulance Google Ads account export dated July 21, 2026, covering March 17, 2020 to July 21, 2026. If you own the account, audit us.
| Headline total | Value |
|---|---|
| Managed ad spend | $1,241,423 |
| Impressions | 6,986,788 |
| Clicks | 375,055 |
| Tracked phone calls (Calls from ads) | 36,737 |
| Total tracked conversion actions (all types) | 54,849 |
| Blended cost per tracked call | $33.80 |
| Blended cost per tracked action | $22.63 |
| Account-wide interaction rate | 5.37% |
| Account-wide conversion rate | 14.62% |
| Year | Spend | Clicks | Tracked calls | All tracked actions | Cost per call |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | $104,457 | 26,989 | 3,047 | 4,218 | $34.28 |
| 2021 | $52,777 | 22,372 | 2,714 | 2,714 | $19.45 |
| 2022 | $135,308 | 46,421 | 5,524 | 5,524 | $24.49 |
| 2023 | $211,013 | 67,270 | 8,945 | 8,945 | $23.59 |
| 2024 | $208,591 | 70,286 | 5,627 | 12,776 | $37.07 |
| 2025 | $442,966 | 132,056 | 8,637 | 18,549 | $51.29 |
| 2026 * | $86,382 | 9,663 | 2,115 | 2,123 | $40.85 |
* 2026 through July 21. "Tracked calls" is the Calls from ads conversion action, the consistent measurement backbone across all years. "All tracked actions" includes additional contact and click actions added to measurement in 2024 and 2025, which is why the two columns diverge from 2024 on. 2024 annual figures include the completely dark Q2 freeze quarter.
| Engine (lifetime, 42 campaigns) | Spend | Conversions | Cost / conv | Spend share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Services (patient + facility demand) | $863,787 | 40,698 | $21.22 | 69.6% |
| Brand (branded search + defense) | $146,050 | 7,836 | $18.64 | 11.8% |
| Hiring (EMT, Medicar, dispatch) | $159,177 | 5,105 | $31.18 | 12.8% |
| Enrolling (EMT course + certification) | $35,701 | 940 | $38.00 | 2.9% |
A fifth line, $36,707 in experimental high-value lead sprints, targeted contract-level transport leads (dialysis, chemo, hospital) where a single win is worth an ongoing facility relationship.
| Quarter | Clicks | Conversions | Cost / conv | Cost |
|---|
10 / Next
No pitch deck. The numbers above are the pitch. Tell us who you are and we will set up a working session with the source exports on the table.
info@gmarketing.digital
01 / The record
02 / The problem
03 / Act one: zero to engine
06 / The community engine
07 / The workforce factory
The loop feeds itself: marketing manufactures the workforce that serves the demand marketing generates.
09 / The verified data