A 44% reduction in cost per lead within five weeks.

Significant spend, insufficient qualified leads

The company was running substantial paid search spend but struggling with cost per lead. Leads were arriving, but at a cost that made the unit economics uncomfortable — and a meaningful proportion were not converting into paying customers.

Campaigns had been built broadly. Keywords were grouped too loosely, ad copy did not address specific customer intent, and landing pages were not doing enough to convert clicks into calls. Conversion tracking also had gaps, meaning the account was optimising toward incomplete data.

Three interconnected levers

The restructure focused on who we were targeting, how we were speaking to them, and whether we were capturing the full picture of what was working.

• Keyword intent segmentation — separating high-intent commercial terms (emergency plumber, boiler repair) from informational and brand terms, each with a distinct bid strategy
• Ad copy overhaul with relevance matched tightly to search intent — emergency copy for emergency searches, installation copy for installation searches
• Landing page improvements — clearer calls to action, faster load times, trust signals, and copy aligned to the specific ad group driving the traffic
• Extensive negative keyword additions to eliminate irrelevant clicks inflating spend without delivering leads
• Offline conversion tracking improvements to feed real lead-quality data back into the bidding algorithm

Lower cost, higher quality

Within five weeks, cost per lead had fallen by 44%. This was not achieved by simply acquiring fewer, cheaper leads — quality improved alongside the reduction in cost, because targeting now reached people who needed the service rather than casual browsers.

The offline conversion tracking improvements meant the account was learning from real outcomes rather than form submissions alone, positioning the campaigns for continued improvement beyond the initial restructure.