The numbers looked better than they were. Once we could see clearly, we hit the CPA target — then built the tracking to find leads worth having.
This resin driveway installer covered a large part of England. They had a clear goal — get cost per lead down to £80 — and a clear reason for it: once CPA was under control, they wanted to scale. They weren't chasing vanity metrics. They knew what the number needed to be and why.
The problem was that the account was reporting a CPA that didn't reflect reality. Quote request conversions were being counted twice. Click-to-call and click-to-email — lower-intent actions that rarely turn into booked jobs — were mixed in with genuine enquiries and treated as equally valuable. On paper, performance looked acceptable. In practice, nobody had a clear picture of what the real cost per lead actually was.
At the same time, nearly half the non-brand spend was going through broad match — pulling in searches about DIY materials, suppliers, and competitors. Budget going to people with no intention of hiring anyone. Before the account could improve, it needed to be readable.
"Getting to £80 CPA was stage one. Stage two was making sure the leads at that price were actually worth having."
Conversions were tracking. Some terms appeared to be performing. But the numbers underneath told a different story.
The first job was cleaning up what the account could see. Until the data was honest, any optimisation was guesswork.
Once CPA was under control, the goal shifted. Getting to £80 was stage one. Stage two was making sure the leads coming in were worth as much as possible.
To do that, we needed to give Google something more useful than a binary yes/no on each conversion. A form submission isn't a sale — but some form submissions are far more likely to become one than others, and far more valuable when they do.
The form already had two fields we could use:
Combined, urgency and size gave each form submission a conversion value. Someone who needs the job done immediately and has a large driveway gets a high value. Someone who's unsure and has a small one gets a low one. Google could now distinguish between the two — and optimise toward the first.
Once that was in place, the account moved from optimising for CPA to optimising for ROAS. And as quoted values came in from the sales team, we started feeding those in too — so Google was learning from what jobs actually turned out to be worth, not just what we'd estimated from the form.
Lead quality improved. ROAS improved. The account was now doing what it was always supposed to do: finding the right people and spending more to get them.
The account hadn't just gotten cheaper. It had become readable — a foundation they could scale from.
This client knew exactly what they wanted and in what order. Hit the CPA target. Prove the account works. Then scale. Then improve quality. That kind of clarity makes the work easier and the results better.
The form value tracking in stage two is the kind of thing most agencies never get around to — not because it's technically difficult, but because it requires sitting down with the business data, understanding how jobs are actually won, and building something that reflects that. It's worth doing. The difference in what Google optimises for is significant.
20 minutes. Enough to spot the major issues, understand what you need, and give you a realistic idea of what we'd do and what it would cost.
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