Popular offline, invisible online.
Akber approached us looking for an agency that could solve the mystery of the account's high cost per lead and low number of leads. He was confused, because they did not reflect the offline situation of his business at all.
Rush PCB was well known in Silicon Valley. Most of their existing customers knew exactly who they were, and plenty of them referred Rush to other companies. In the real world, the brand was strong.
So how could a company be this popular offline and yet go unnoticed and perform badly online? That question kept Akber wondering. He knew the service was excellent, but somehow, something just was not clicking with the marketing online.
There was a second wrinkle. Rush PCB sold into both the US and the UK, so right at the start we made a deliberate call: run both markets from one Google Ads account, with dedicated campaigns per country sharing a single structure. The US was the engine, and the UK a smaller second front we ran the same disciplined way.
Spending blind, with no benchmark.
We soon realized that Akber did not know how many leads were coming from his ad spend, because there was no conversion tracking in place. No benchmark, no measurement, no way to connect the money spent to a quote request won.
The account itself was thin. Rush PCB was already spending a real monthly budget on Google, but the campaigns had only a couple of ads, a handful of mostly short-tail keywords, and negatives that were not added daily, or even weekly.
And the funnel pointed the wrong way. Most interested buyers were calling customer support instead of filling in the form, and Akber wanted the website to be the primary place leads came in, not the phone.
The deeper problem was quality. It was never only about how many leads came in. It was about which leads were worth having, and with nothing tracked past the form there was no way to tell the good ones from the noise.
Track it, benchmark it, restructure it, prequalify it.
a Tracking and analytics, first
Before we touched the campaigns, we set up the conversion tracking. The setup itself was complex, but it let us pull a lot out of the submission forms: order specifications, types of customers, the kind of detail we leaned on for optimization for the rest of the engagement.
We ended up with 37 tracked events feeding every later decision, so the account finally ran on real data instead of guesses.
Real conversion tracking and 37 events, so everything after this ran on data.
b A benchmark before we changed anything
We deliberately let the client's existing campaigns run first, to benchmark them. We needed the real cost per lead and the real lead count before we started, so everything we did next could be measured against it.
When we showed Akber the numbers, he was okay with the performance, because he had never had specific figures to attach to his ad spend before. But that high cost per lead was the thing he wanted gone, fast.
A clean baseline to optimize against, the first one the account ever had.
c The radical restructure
In the second month we made the call to restructure the account.
You might be thinking, "Why? Does not that seem risky? Will it not destabilize the account?" You would be right to ask, and Akber asked exactly that. We encourage our clients to challenge us, because that is how you build the best-performing account together, with transparency and trust.
We were honest that restructuring can cause fluctuation and short-term changes in performance. We decided to do it anyway, all at once, because the structure itself was the thing holding the account back.
A cleaner structure means more control and better optimization, which in turn brings higher conversion rates and a lower cost per lead. Done right, this is exactly what disciplined Google Ads management looks like.
Let us see what exactly we did with the structure, shall we?
d The Alpha-Beta structure
We moved from one campaign with every keyword grouped together, two general ads and barely any negatives, to the structure known as the Alpha-Beta keyword structure, with the Single Keyword Ad Group approach. The logic is to run two sets of campaigns that feed each other:
This is also where we had a great back-and-forth with the client. Their side wanted every keyword set to Exact match from day one. We pushed back and explained the loop: broad and phrase match are how you discover the searches you did not know people were making, and Exact match is where you concentrate the money once you know they convert.
Run that daily and the account compounds: budget flows to what works, waste flows into an ever-growing negative list, and the exact phrases people search end up right there in the ad.
How did it land? The restructure lifted monthly leads about 45% over the first month and cut the cost per lead 32%. Akber was happy with the new leads, but he wanted the cost per lead lower still, and the conversion rate needed a push.
Monthly leads +45% and cost per lead -32% the month we restructured.
e Landing pages that prequalify
Then we got bold and started analysing the website too.
The phone-call button was everywhere, which made calling the path of least resistance, so we advised Akber to pull some of the call CTAs and add more form CTAs. And the site, though detailed, scattered the information a cold buyer needed across too many pages, which took real time and effort to piece together.
So we built dedicated landing pages, one per service, each structured to answer the cold audience's questions and the warm audience's questions in the right order, then hand them to the right form for that service.
Leads got everything they needed faster, calls went down, and form completions went up. In the first month alone the dedicated landing pages lifted lead volume 42%.
Dedicated landing pages lifted lead volume +42% in the first month.
f Two markets, one structure
Rush PCB sold into both the US and the UK, so we ran both markets from one Google Ads account, with dedicated campaigns per country sharing a single structure.
The UK ran on the same Alpha-Beta backbone, just pointed at a smaller market. It was always the lighter of the two fronts, and we managed it with the same weekly discipline as the US: the same negative-keyword hygiene, the same structure.
Keeping it in one account meant everything we built and learned for the US carried straight over, instead of standing up a second account from scratch.
One shared structure across both markets, so nothing had to be built twice.
g The optimization grind
This is the part of the work we love. We excluded returning customers and focused the analysis on first-time orders, using the form data collected in GA, so we were optimizing toward genuinely new business and not repeat buyers padding the count.
We went through keywords, ad groups, and demographics (age, gender, location, devices) every week, pausing what bled and protecting what converted, all without losing conversion volume.
Negative keywords and new converting search terms were pulled weekly, analysed, and sorted into the right campaigns. Over time that drove us to where 70% of spend sat on Exact-match converting keywords, up from about 20% at the start.
70% of spend driven to Exact-match converting keywords, up from about 20%.
Monthly leads up 835%, at a fraction of the cost.
We dropped the cost per lead 63%. Akber was happy with where it landed, so we held that level through the first year. In the final months it fell further still, to the lowest the account had ever run.
We grew monthly leads about 835%, close to nine times the benchmark. Through the first half of 2019 qualified volume climbed steadily off the baseline. From July 2019 it stepped up again. By early 2020 the structure and the dedicated landing pages together were producing the highest monthly volumes the account had ever seen.
The quality side moved too. Akber had always claimed a conversion rate north of 40% on quote requests that turn into orders, and once tracking was live we confirmed it: a 50%+ lead-to-order rate, climbing close to 70% by 2020.
And we scaled into it. Through the first six months we grew spend off the benchmark, and from July 2019 we stepped it up again, ending about 165% above where we started, while the cost per lead kept falling. That is the part that matters: more money went in and each lead got cheaper, not more expensive. As the pandemic arrived in early 2020, the account was at its best month yet.
When Diligent did tracking setup, I was able to see all conversions. This was my biggest problem for a while and I'm happy it's finally resolved. Throughout the process, the team was very proactive, organized, and I would definitely recommend them to everyone.
Let experts find what is breaking your account.
Paid advertising is a great way to bring in qualified leads, but it does not always feel so simple.
When you hit a wall, the smartest move is to let experts get into the account and tell you what is actually wrong. With the right team beside you, the problem is usually findable.
Rush PCB is the proof. We found what was breaking the account, set up the tracking so everything was finally measured, restructured the campaigns, and built the pages that turned interest into form fills. The result was more qualified leads at a far lower cost, from honest measurement and a lot of patient, hands-on work.
We know how much rides on getting lead generation right, and we have spent years doing exactly this for businesses like Rush PCB, across Google Ads and the analytics and conversion work that makes it pay.
- Conversion tracking and 37 events built from zero
- Alpha-Beta structure with single-keyword ad groups
- Weekly negative-keyword and converting-term discipline
- Landing pages that prequalify by service
- US and UK run from one shared structure
- First-time-customer focus using GA form data
- State and city-level optimization
