The situation
A concrete lifting and foundation contractor was spending in the mid five figures a month across Google Ads. Spend was steady. Results were not. Cost per lead ran $112, then $140, then $151, and peaked at $221 in a single month — with almost no change in budget.
What was really going on
The instinct in that situation is to blame the budget or the bidding. The data said otherwise. Spend was flat and click costs were stable, which meant the swing had to be coming from conversion rate — the same traffic simply stopped turning into leads. In the worst month, the concrete lifting campaign was converting at 13%.
What I did
- Separated the concrete lifting work into its own trackable campaign and ad group structure, so its performance stopped being hidden inside a blended account average.
- Audited what was being counted as a conversion and removed actions that weren’t genuine leads, so cost per lead reflected reality.
- Worked the search terms report and built out negatives against research-intent queries that were absorbing budget without ever producing a call.
- Diagnosed impression share properly — separating share lost to budget from share lost to ad rank — so we knew whether to spend more or improve quality. Lost-to-rank was the larger problem, so we did not raise the budget.
- Focused on the conversion path and lead handling rather than the bidding, because that was where the evidence pointed.
Results
| Metric | Result | Context |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per lead | $151 → $75 | on effectively flat monthly spend |
| Leads from the campaign | 45 in the most recent month | up from a fraction of that at peak CPL |
| Monthly spend | unchanged | no additional budget was requested |
| Worst-month CPL | $221 → $75 | a 66% reduction from the low point |
The takeaway
Rising cost per lead is not automatically a bidding problem or a budget problem. Cost per lead moves for two reasons — you’re paying more per click, or fewer clicks are converting — and those have completely different fixes. Checking which one is happening before spending more money is the whole job.
Want this looked at in your account?
Most of what I find in a new account is not exotic. It is a tracking setup nobody checked, a blended number hiding two very different channels, or budget going to searches that were never going to call. Request a marketing audit and I will tell you which of those you are dealing with.