Figures are the client’s own, reported the same way each month. Every study here is sector-framed and anonymised.
A podcast production company came to us with a Google Ads account that had been running for a while but was not being properly managed. Money was going out of the door every month, but nobody could say with any confidence what it was actually buying. There was no reliable way to tell a genuine qualified lead from noise, so every decision about the account was really a guess dressed up as data. The brief was straightforward to state and harder to deliver: turn a drifting, unaccountable account into one that could prove what it was doing and be improved on purpose.
You cannot optimise what you cannot measure, so we made the account prove what it was buying first.
Audited it before changing anything
We started with a full audit rather than tinkering, so we understood exactly where the spend was going and which parts of the account were working against the business. That gave us a clear list of what was broken and a strategy we could agree on before touching the budget, rather than optimising blind.
Rebuilt the campaigns from a clean strategy
With the audit agreed, we rebuilt from there: fresh campaigns that addressed every issue we had flagged, structured around the searches most likely to bring in the right kind of enquiry. Starting clean meant the account was legible enough to keep improving, rather than carrying forward the problems that had built up under light management.
Made the account accountable with qualified lead data
We set up qualified lead uploads so the account could be judged on the leads that actually mattered to the business, not just raw form fills. Once real ROI was visible, budget could move towards what was genuinely working and away from what was not, which is the difference between managing an account and simply keeping it running.
Conversions rose 332% while cost per acquisition fell 69%, and both moved at once because the work was about accuracy before volume. Rebuilding the account on a clean strategy stopped spend leaking into searches that were never going to convert, and feeding qualified lead data back in meant every optimisation after that was steering towards real enquiries rather than vanity clicks. More of the right conversions, each one cheaper, is what you get when the account can finally tell the two apart.
The gains came from managing to proof rather than to guesswork. Once the account could show which campaigns produced qualified leads, it stopped being a monthly cost nobody could explain and became a channel the business could actually plan around.