60% of the budget saved, 25 SQLs booked

What was not working

Paid search spent most of the budget on broad category terms that brought students, competitors and job seekers. The CRM showed almost no qualified pipeline from any of it.

What we did

1. 01Matched ad spend against closed deals in the CRM instead of against form fills.
2. 02Paused the campaigns that had never produced a qualified lead and kept the queries that name a problem.
3. 03Sent qualified lead events back to the ad platform, so bidding optimises on pipeline rather than on forms.
4. 04Rewrote the landing pages to answer the exact query instead of describing the whole platform.

Published with written permission from the client, who asked not to be named. That is why the business is described by industry and location rather than by its name, and why every number here carries the system it came from.