We took over this Dutch short-lease operator’s Google Ads account at a point where the cost-per-conversion looked enviable on paper — around €12 per lead, well inside industry benchmarks. The problem was underneath: bids were pitched too low to win the auctions where the actual demand was happening. Conversion volume had plateaued. We made the contrarian-on-paper call: raise bids, accept slightly higher cost-per-lead, capture the auction share that had been silently leaking. Twenty-four months later the account settled around 600 leads per quarter at roughly €15 per lead — a +25% cost-per-conv adjustment in exchange for a multi-X increase in absolute conversion volume.
The chart shows what the diagnosis predicted: the red conversion-volume line steps up through 2021 and 2022 once bids were lifted off the auction floor, while the yellow cost-per-conv line drifts modestly higher — exactly the trade-off the client had asked for. Biggest changes panel: +€14,176 into a renamed Search cluster, +€7,871 into a Brand-defence campaign. Both were bid-driven, not volume-driven.
Diagnose the floor. Lift the bids. Hold the structure.
01 · Diagnose — a “good” CPL hiding an invisibility problem.
At handover the account looked fine by the only metric most agencies report on. Cost per conversion sat around €12 — comfortably inside the industry benchmark for short-lease leadgen. The trouble was on the page underneath: impression share was thin in the auctions where the high-intent searches were happening, search-lost-IS-to-rank was high, and the conversion-volume line was flat over a long enough window that you couldn’t blame seasonality.
A safe-looking CPL is also a ceiling. If the bid is below the level that wins the high-intent auctions, the conversions you do get are cheap because they're the easy ones — not because the account is efficient.
02 · Raise the bid floor — strategic increases on the campaigns the client cared most about.
The client’s goal was unambiguous: more conversions, even at a slightly higher cost per conv. We worked through it cluster by cluster, lifting bids on the campaigns serving high-intent commercial queries — short-term lease search terms, model-specific demand, brand-defence on the operator’s own name. Each lift was sized to the auction-insight data: bid up to where impression share would actually move, not blindly across the board.
Visible in the Biggest changes panel of the screenshot: +€14,176 into one renamed Search cluster, +€7,871 into a Brand campaign. Both were bid-driven shifts, not volume increases — same budget envelope, different placement on the bid curve.
Same budget envelope, different placement on the bid curve.
03 · Hold the structure — disciplined maintenance, sustained for two years.
Once the new bid baseline was working, the work shifted to maintenance: weekly auction-insight review, monthly impression-share tracking, seasonal reweighting around Dutch car-buying cycles. Nothing dramatic. By Q4 of the engagement the account was running at roughly 600 leads per quarter on a cost-per-conv around €15 — exactly the trade-off the client had asked for, sustained for two years without drift.
Two years of disciplined maintenance, not a one-month spike.
Was able to work with Feisal for several years in the automotive industry. The goal of our cooperation was to generate as much revenue as possible with online activities for customers in this branch. Feisal has a good outlook and pragmatic approach.
By the numbers
The blended figures across the engagement: 144K clicks, 2,930 conversions, €39.3K total spend, €13.41 average cost per conversion. The trajectory shows where the work went: a cost-per-conv that rose deliberately from ~€12 to ~€15 in exchange for the conversion-volume line stepping up through the engagement, ending at roughly 600 leads per quarter.
The deliberate trade-off the client asked for: a higher cost per lead in exchange for the auction share that had been silently leaking.
A cheap cost-per-lead can be the cheapest thing in the account, or it can be the ceiling on every quarter that follows.
Boring, predictable, attributable. That’s what good PPC looks like.
Every engagement starts with a 30-minute audit — free, no slides, just a screen-share through your account.
Book the audit →