Paid Advertising · Lead Generation
Most of your ad budget goes to people who were never going to call.
Job hunters. DIY researchers. People three counties away. Competitors checking your pricing. Google Ads will happily charge you for all of them, and cutting them out is half the work. The other half happens after the lead arrives — because a form fill isn’t a customer, and the two can cost very different amounts.
Before the click
Lead generation starts as subtraction.
Everyone searching terms related to your service is a pool you can pay to reach. Almost none of them will ever become a customer. A well-run account narrows that pool before it spends your money on it.
Everyone searching your terms
The raw pool a broad-match campaign will happily buy for you.
Wrong intent
Job seekers, students, DIY researchers, people comparison-shopping for fun.
Removed with negative keywords and match-type control.Outside your area
Searches from places you don’t serve or won’t drive to.
Removed with geographic and radius targeting.Wrong moment
Clicks at 2am when nobody answers, on devices that never convert for you.
Removed with schedule and device bid adjustments.Proven non-converters
Search terms that have taken your money and never produced a lead.
Removed by reading the search term report every month, which is where most accounts quietly leak.What you should pay for
People who want what you sell, near enough to buy it, at a time you can answer. Now the budget concentrates instead of scattering.
Bar widths are illustrative, not a projection. The proportions differ in every market. The point is that the discipline is subtraction, and most underperforming accounts have simply never done it.
After the lead
The same budget has three different prices.
A lead is an intermediate event, not the business outcome. Divide the same spend three different ways and you get three very different numbers — and only the last one has anything to do with whether the advertising paid for itself.
Cost per lead
What the platform reportsEvery form submission and tracked call, whether or not it was a real prospect. The easiest number for an ad platform to produce, and the easiest to make look good.
Cost per qualified lead
What we optimise towardThe same spend, divided only by inquiries that met your criteria — right service, right area, real intent, reachable. Junk, wrong-fit and duplicate inquiries drop out here.
Cost per customer
The one that pays youThe same spend again, divided by the ones that booked, showed up, and bought. This is the number to compare against what a customer is worth to you.
Two accounts with an identical cost per lead can have completely different costs per customer. Lead quality matters more than lead volume, and cost per acquisition matters more than cost per click.
What widens the gap between price 01 and price 03
- Response time
- Qualification
- Booking rate
- Close rate
- Capacity
- Service area
- Schedule availability
- Offer fit
- Landing experience
Where the control sits
Our control narrows as the lead moves downstream.
We control this
The advertising itself
Targeting, match types, negatives, bids, budget allocation, ad copy, and what the account stops paying for.
We can usually influence this
Lead quality and the landing page
Filtering out wrong-fit inquiries before they arrive, and aligning the page and offer with the ad. Sometimes that means fixing the page.
This depends on you
What happens after the handoff
Response speed, how leads get qualified, whether they get booked, and how well they close. We’ll report on it and flag what we see, but we’re not running your sales process.
How it runs
Four stages, then it repeats.
The first three set the account up properly. The fourth is the one that actually determines whether it works, and it never stops.
Market & intent assessment
What people in your market actually search, which of those searches signal buying rather than browsing, and what competitors are already paying for. This decides where the budget points before a dollar is spent.
Account build & tracking
Clean segmentation, deliberate match types, and a negative keyword list from day one. Conversion, form and call tracking installed before launch — and wherever your systems allow it, tracking extended past the form fill, because price 02 and price 03 don’t exist without it.
Landing page alignment
Paid traffic sent to a generic homepage converts badly and costs more per click, because Google prices relevance. We align the ad, the page, and the offer — reviewing what you have, or building a dedicated page through web development as an add-on.
Ongoing subtraction
Search term reports read, waste cut, bids adjusted, creative tested, geography and schedule tightened. Where downstream data is available, we judge changes against qualified-lead cost rather than raw lead cost. This is the stage most accounts skip.
Straight answer
Four things we won’t do with your account.
These are the shortcuts that make an account cheap to manage and expensive to run.
01
Hand it to automated bidding and walk away
Smart Bidding is a useful tool with oversight and a liability without it. It optimises toward whatever you told it to value, including the wrong things.
02
Leave broad match running unsupervised
Broad match will find you traffic. Left unchecked, most of it is traffic you’d never have chosen to buy.
03
Ignore the search term report
This is where the waste is visible in plain text. Not reading it monthly is the most common reason accounts underperform.
04
Report on clicks and impressions
Traffic is not the product. Cost per qualified lead is the number that decides whether this was worth doing.
Measured outcomes
Cheaper, and bigger.
Two lead generation accounts, two different problems. Every figure is published in full on the case study it links to.
Efficiency — towing
68%
Decrease in cost per lead
Roughly a third of the spend, and the phone rang just as often
- Monthly ad spend decreased 69%
- Lead volume remained essentially steady
Scale — legal
372%
Increase in average monthly leads
More cases from a smaller budget, sustained
- Average monthly ad spend decreased 27%
- The account later reached 12–20 conversions per week
Scope & commitment
Where these campaigns run.
Search and display platforms, where people are actively looking for what you sell rather than being interrupted while scrolling. Platforms are how the work gets executed, not how it gets decided.
- Google Search
- Google Display
- YouTube
- Microsoft (Bing & Yahoo)
- Display remarketing
Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok are handled separately under Paid Social — different targeting model, different creative, different management. Plenty of clients run both. This service sits under Paid Advertising; the e-commerce side is handled separately too. Industry shapes the mix — see industries we work in or the full case studies.
Minimum management commitment, and worth knowing up front. The first 30 to 60 days go to data collection, keyword refinement, and cutting the traffic that doesn’t convert. Judging an account before that is judging it mid-setup.
Regulated healthcare
Running ads for a HIPAA-regulated organisation?
Standard conversion tracking wasn’t built for patients. We build privacy-safe tracking architecture that keeps protected health information out of the ad platforms while still feeding campaigns the conversion signal they need. It’s a technical capability that sits alongside campaign management.
Fit check
Who this works for.
A good fit
- You make money through calls, forms, or booked appointments
- You care what a lead costs and whether it was any good
- You can tell us, or can start tracking, what happens after the lead arrives
- You’re willing to fix conversion or follow-up problems rather than only buy more traffic
- You have capacity for more work, or are building it
Probably not
- You expect profitability in week one with no testing
- You judge performance by clicks and impressions
- You want traffic but won’t invest in conversion tracking
- Cheapest possible form fills is the goal, regardless of what they turn into
- You’re shopping for the lowest management fee available
Questions
Lead generation FAQs.
What’s the difference between cost per lead and customer acquisition cost?
Cost per lead is your ad spend divided by every tracked inquiry. Customer acquisition cost is the same spend divided by the inquiries that actually became customers. In between sits cost per qualified lead — spend divided by the inquiries that were genuinely worth pursuing.
The three can be wildly different in the same account. Broadening targeting usually lowers cost per lead and raises cost per customer at the same time, which is why optimising to the first number alone can quietly make an account worse. Where your systems let us see booking and close data, we judge changes against the later numbers instead.
What is a good cost per lead?
There isn’t a universal figure, and anyone quoting one without knowing your market, service, and margins is guessing. What matters more is the relationship between what a lead costs and what a customer is worth to you. A $200 lead can be excellent and a $20 lead can be a loss, depending entirely on what happens next.
How do you stop budget being wasted?
Six levers, applied continuously rather than at setup:
- Deliberate keyword targeting and match-type control
- Negative keyword lists, maintained monthly
- Geographic and radius targeting
- Device and time-of-day bid adjustments
- Ongoing bid optimisation
- Quality score improvement, which lowers what you pay per click
Most underperforming accounts aren’t badly conceived. They were set up broadly and never pruned.
Do you handle tracking and conversion setup?
Yes, installed before launch rather than bolted on afterward — analytics, conversion tracking, form tracking, call tracking through approved third-party platforms, and landing page alignment.
Where your CRM or intake process allows it, we’ll also connect what happened after the lead, so qualified-lead cost becomes visible rather than assumed. An account without working conversion tracking can’t be optimised, only guessed at.
Do I need dedicated landing pages?
Often yes. Paid traffic sent to a general website page converts worse and costs more, because Google factors landing page relevance into what you pay per click. We’ll review what you have and tell you honestly whether it’s good enough. If it isn’t, building a dedicated page is available as an add-on.
How long before this works?
Faster than SEO, but not instant. The first 30 to 60 days go to data collection, keyword refinement, bid adjustment, ad testing, and cutting traffic that doesn’t convert. Accounts get better as data accumulates, which is why the commitment is three months.
Next step
Let’s look at where your budget is going.
If you’re already running ads, the search term report usually tells the story within a few minutes. If you’re not running yet, we’ll work out whether paid search is even the right first move for your business.