Cutting half the budget and doubling the pipeline
The company sells scheduling software to private clinics. They were spending €61,000 a month on Google Ads and celebrating a €41 cost per lead. The leads were worthless.
The problem
The account was optimised to a conversion called 'Lead', which fired on any form submission including the newsletter box in the footer. Google's algorithm did exactly what it was told and bought the cheapest form fills on the internet.
Sales were drowning. Four hundred leads a month, of which maybe eleven were clinics with more than two practitioners — the only segment that ever closed.
Everyone knew the CPL number. Nobody could tell you what a customer cost.
What we did
- 1
Change what the machine optimises for
We piped closed-won revenue from HubSpot back into Google Ads as an offline conversion. Within six weeks the algorithm stopped buying newsletter signups and started buying clinics, because that is what we finally paid it for.
- 2
Let the cost per lead get worse
CPL went from €41 to €173 and that was the point. We were no longer buying the cheapest human with an email address. The hard part of this engagement was the three meetings it took to make that number acceptable.
- 3
Cut what never worked
Display and broad-match search accounted for 44% of spend and 3% of closed revenue. We turned them off. Half the savings came from simply not doing things.
What it returned
Spend halved, pipeline doubled, and sales stopped complaining about lead quality — which was the actual brief, dressed up as a CPL problem.
The uncomfortable version of this story: their previous agency was hitting every KPI in the contract. The KPIs were wrong.
“They came in and told us our best-performing metric was the problem. Nobody wants to hear that. They were right, and they had the revenue data to prove it before they said a word.”