Doubling Lead Volume While Cutting Cost Per Lead in Half

Big win here: over the past year, this Sydney Search campaign nearly doubled its lead volume (+92.7%) and slashed cost per lead by almost half (−47.5%) — on basically the same budget. We're talking 434 leads a quarter climbing to 836, with cost per lead dropping from $35.72 to $18.75. Conversion rate jumped from 10.75% to 16.44%. And here's the kicker: this held up over both a 3-month AND a 6-month view, and even powered through a rough patch where an unrelated, account-wide tracking glitch was messing with conversion numbers. That's not luck — that's a genuinely stronger campaign.

Picture this: a mobile wheel repair service running ads across several Australian cities, in a category where timing is everything — someone's got a busted wheel and wants it sorted this week, not next month. Sydney is the biggest, longest-running Search campaign in the account, which gives us the deepest history to measure real progress against.

A year ago, though, the campaign was playing it safe — leaning almost entirely on narrow phrase and exact match keywords, with barely any broad match in the mix. That kept it boxed in, missing a ton of relevant searches that just phrased the same need a little differently.

added broad match versions of the account's bread-and-butter keywords right alongside the existing phrase/exact set. More reach, without losing any of the precision that was already working.

the page these ads send people to got a full refresh built around conversion, not just looks: clearer calls to action, less friction, a faster path to getting a quote. This is very likely doing a lot of the heavy lifting behind the conversion-rate jump.

 regularly auditing keywords, clearing out anything off-topic or duplicated, and keeping a close eye on Quality Score and impression share so nothing slips quietly.

This wasn't a rip-and-replace — it was building on what already worked and clearing out what was holding it back.