A finance business
in crisis
The client lost its funding and had to cut back until new investment landed. The brief was to spend materially less without losing the pipeline that would be needed on the other side.
Cost per lead, halved, on a smaller budget
Cutting spend usually costs you efficiency, because the cheap volume goes first and the expensive auctions are the ones you are left in. Getting the cost per lead down at the same time as the budget came down was the entire point of the engagement.
What the brief actually was
- Reduce media spend quickly, without switching the pipeline off.
- Hold or improve lead quality, with fewer people left to work the leads.
- Bring acquisition cost down faster than the budget was coming down.
- Keep the account in a state that could be scaled back up on short notice.
That last one mattered more than it sounds. Accounts that are stripped back to survive usually have to be rebuilt from scratch when the money returns.
The job changed overnight
A large business in financial services lost its funding and had to scale operations back until new investment could be secured. Headcount came down, sales capacity came down, and the media budget came down with them.
Up to that point the account had been built to scale. Every assumption in it, from the keyword set to the bidding, was built on the idea that more volume was always worth buying. None of those assumptions survived the funding gap.
What we inherited
A tight keyword set concentrated in the most expensive head terms, with Search carrying almost the entire account. Conversion measurement stopped at the form fill, so bidding was optimising toward enquiries rather than toward customers.
No offline conversion data flowing back into the platforms, which meant the algorithms had no idea which leads were worth anything.
What we solved for
Profitability and control, not growth. With a smaller sales team, a bad lead is not a neutral cost, it is a slot that a good lead should have had.
So the target was never enquiry volume. It was the cost of an acquired customer, and how much of the remaining budget could be pointed at the people most likely to become one.
Five moves, in this order
The order matters. Nothing in steps four and five is possible until the measurement underneath it is fixed, and there is no point improving lead quality before you can see which leads were good.
Widen the keyword set
We expanded into longer tail and less contested auctions instead of trying to defend the head terms on a fraction of the budget. Lower competition means a lower entry price, and it spreads the spend across auctions where the client is not bidding against businesses with ten times the funding.
Reduce the reliance on Search
An account that depends entirely on Search has no cheap volume left once you cut it back. Moving a share of budget onto additional platforms gave the account somewhere to buy attention at a lower cost per click, and stopped demand capture carrying the whole thing on its own.
Fix the website
The cheapest lead you will ever buy is the one you are already paying for and losing at the form. Conversion rate work on the site brought the cost per lead down without spending an extra pound in the auction, which is the only lever that gets cheaper as budgets get tighter.
Measure lead quality properly, then optimise to it
We rebuilt tracking so the account could tell the difference between a form fill and a real opportunity, then moved optimisation onto that signal. Before this point, every campaign in the account was being rewarded for producing enquiries regardless of whether anyone could sell to them.
With a reduced sales team, this was the change that protected the business day to day. Fewer wasted conversations, and the ones that happened were worth having.
Send closed business back into the platforms
Offline conversion data was uploaded back into the ad platforms so bidding could optimise toward the leads that actually converted into customers, not toward the leads that were easiest to generate.
This is the step most accounts skip, and it is the one that separates a lower cost per lead from a lower cost per customer. It is also why the account could be handed a bigger budget later without needing to be relearned.
When the budget is fixed and falling, the only growth available is efficiency.
What the numbers did
Cost per lead halved. Cost per acquisition came down by just over a third. Both are measured against the equivalent period before the restructure, on the client's own records rather than platform reported conversions.
The gap between those two figures is explained in the section below. We would rather explain it than round it away.
- Cost per lead
- −50%
- Cost per acquisition
- −35%
- Monthly media spend
- −XX%
- Website conversion rate
- +XX%
- Leads from outside Search
- XX%
- Leads disqualified by sales
- −XX%
Source: Google Ads and Meta Ads Manager combined with the client's own CRM records, P3: dates. Absolute spend, lead volume, revenue and client identity withheld at the client's request.
Which change did what
Five changes, three of which move the cost per lead and two of which move the cost per customer. Both numbers matter, but only one of them pays wages.
| Change | What it moved | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Wider keyword set | Lower average auction price, less exposure to head term competition | Cost per lead |
| New platforms | Volume no longer bought exclusively at Search prices | Cost per lead |
| Website conversion work | More leads from the same clicks, at no extra media cost | Cost per lead |
| Lead quality tracking | Optimisation moved off form fills and onto real opportunities | Cost per customer |
| Offline conversion uploads | Bidding pointed at the leads that historically closed | Cost per customer |
What we are not claiming
Sales volume fell during this period. The business had cut capacity and could not work the same number of opportunities, so fewer leads became customers than in the year before. Anyone comparing the two figures above will notice that the cost per lead fell further than the cost per acquisition, and that is why.
We are not claiming we grew a business through a funding gap. The claim is narrower and, we think, more useful: every pound of the remaining budget worked substantially harder, acquisition stayed viable at a fraction of the previous spend, and the account came out of it in a state that could take a bigger budget the day the money arrived.
How it ended
The business stayed profitable through the gap and secured new investment. We are now rebuilding the account back toward the position it held before the funding was lost.
Because the measurement and the bidding signals were rebuilt during the lean period rather than after it, scaling back up has been a budget decision rather than a rebuild.
P7: client quote goes here Two sentences on what changed for the business, not on how good the ads were. Something along the lines of "we kept acquiring customers on a budget we did not think could support it" beats "great results" every time. Anonymised attribution is fine and arguably more credible for a story like this.
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