Contents
01Why cheap leads get expensive
Bidding systems optimise toward whatever you report as a conversion. Report form fills, and you will get more form fills, including from students, competitors and people who misunderstood the ad. Cost per lead drops, the sales team quietly stops working the list, and revenue does not move.
The fix is not better targeting. It is telling the platform what a good outcome actually is.
02The five changes that move the number
In the accounts we take over, these five account for most of the improvement, in this order.
- One written definition of a qualified lead, agreed with sales and recorded in the CRM.
- Qualified leads and closed deals sent back to the platform as offline conversions, with their value.
- Call tracking, so the phone enquiries carry the campaign that produced them.
- Search term review every week, removing the queries that produce clicks and never produce a qualified lead.
- A landing page per intent, answering the exact query rather than describing the whole company.
If you do only one of these, do the second. Everything else works better once the platform is optimising on the right event.
03What to watch instead of cost per lead
Report three numbers weekly: cost per qualified lead, cost per booked call or appointment, and the share of enquiries sales accepted. The third one is the early warning: when acceptance falls while volume rises, the account is drifting toward cheap traffic again.
Revenue attribution lags because deals close later, so judge the recent weeks on qualified leads and the quarter on revenue. Judging this week on revenue is how accounts get thrown out before they have had a chance.
04What this does not fix
If enquiries wait hours for a reply, no bidding strategy saves the account. Response time changes outcomes more than any setting inside the ad platform, and it is cheaper to fix.
It also does not fix a weak offer. If the first reply is a generic brochure and a promise to call back next week, the problem is after the click, and spending more only buys more evidence of it.
05Where we start
Our growth work starts at $4,500 a month and begins with the measurement, not with the ads. Tracking and attribution repair, if it is needed first, is $4,800 as a one off. We report the cost of a booked call rather than impressions, which is the only version of this report worth reading.
Questions
Can we keep our current agency and just fix the tracking?
Yes, and sometimes that is the right split. The measurement work stands on its own and makes any competent agency look better, because it finally optimises on the right thing.
How long before the numbers move?
Expect four to eight weeks for bidding to learn from the new conversion signal, longer for businesses with a long sales cycle. Anyone promising a result in two weeks is describing a coincidence.
What budget is too small for paid search?
Below roughly $1,500 a month in most US markets you will not gather enough data to optimise, and the money is usually better spent on the site and on response time. We will say so rather than take the account.
Where we can help