Paid ads managed against qualified leads, not clicks
Search and social run against cost per qualified lead. What works gets more, the rest gets cut.
Most ad accounts are badly measured, not badly run. We fix tracking, define a lead the way sales would, cut spend that never produced one, then scale what works.
Is it a fit?
Definition
A conversion means something the sales team would call a lead.
Tracking
The platform and the CRM agree on how many arrived, or every decision is guesswork.
Waste
Search terms and placements that have never produced one, still being paid for.
Start here. You get back the number a lead has to come in under before the spend makes sense.
What an inquiry is worthWork it out in a minute
Four numbers. Shows whether more inquiries or better conversion is the cheaper thing to fund next.
What you get
Tracking that still works
Server side where it has to be, because browser tracking now loses a real share of what it used to see. If the platform and the CRM disagree about how many leads arrived, every decision made from the platform is made on the wrong number.
A lead means a lead
Defined as something the sales team would recognize: reachable, in the market, roughly the right size. Optimizing to form fills teaches a platform to find people who fill in forms, which is a different species from people who buy.
Waste out before scale in
The first pass is subtraction. Search terms that have never produced anything, placements that spend on autoplay, audiences overlapping so you bid against yourself. It is unglamorous and it is usually the largest single move available.
The right answer about the offer
Traffic cannot fix an offer people do not want, a page that loads slowly, or a sales team that calls back in three days. We will say which of those is the constraint, including when it means spending less rather than more.
Why the platform report and the sales team disagree
Almost every account has this gap. The dashboard says forty conversions, the sales team says they spoke to nine people worth quoting. Both are telling the truth. The platform is counting what it was told to count, and at some point it was told a form submission counts, so it went and found the people most likely to submit forms. That is exactly what it is built to do.
Fixing it starts by sending the platform a better signal. Not the form fill, the qualified lead, and ideally the closed deal, passed back from the CRM with its value attached. Once the machine is optimizing toward revenue instead of toward events, a lot of the tuning people do by hand stops being necessary, because the bidding is finally aimed at the right target.
Questions we get
Which channel should we start with?
Search, in almost every case, because it reaches people who are already looking. Social is for demand you have to create, and it is a harder first win.
The exception is a product nobody is searching for yet. Then there is no demand to capture and the work is to build it, which is a longer commitment and should be entered with that understood.
How long before we know if it is working?
Enough qualified leads to tell signal from noise, which for most businesses is four to eight weeks. Anyone promising a read in week one is describing luck.
The lower the volume and the higher the value of each deal, the longer it takes, because the maths needs events to work with. We say at the start roughly how long your numbers will take to speak.
Do you need access to our CRM?
Read access at minimum, and the ability to pass outcomes back. Without it we are optimizing to form fills and so is the platform.
If that is not possible for now, there is a lighter version using a qualified stage marked by hand. It is worse, and it is still much better than counting clicks.
What if our ads are already running?
Better. An account with history is an account with evidence, and the first month is mostly reading it.
We do not rebuild from scratch as a matter of habit. That throws away learning the account has paid for. What usually changes first is what counts as a conversion and what the budget is allowed to touch.
On which channel deserves the budget, SEO or paid ads. On what happens to a lead after it arrives, email marketing flows.
More in the guides and every answer in one place.
Read next
Which channel deserves the budget, what an inquiry is worth, and what happens to it after it arrives.
Shaheer leads the work, with engineers, writers, filers and analysts behind him. C-suite operations for a San Francisco AI company, Six Sigma on the process side, Anthropic certified on the Model Context Protocol, ten years across eight industries. See what we have built