Managed IT and MSPs
Paid search sits alongside referral, and the free technical audit that qualifies it burns engineer time before anyone has committed to anything.
Paid search
Qualify the click, then bid on the next one
A paid search visitor has already named the problem and had the budget approved. They are the most expensive person on your site, and they land on the same box as everybody else. Ask them what they spend and what it is returning, and the click starts paying for more than a session.
You will need to know roughly what you spend on traffic each month. Nothing else.
One click, five moments
Where the money goes
- The auction runsCosts nothing
- The click is billedYou pay, in full, now
- The page loadsYou paid for this too
- The form is ignoredStill yours
- The session endsNothing recorded
Four of the five are billed. The last one is where the value was supposed to be.
Where the spend goes
Your bidding is learning from the wrong finish line
Smart Bidding gets very good at finding whatever you told it a win looks like.
In most accounts the imported conversion is a form submission. So the system goes and finds people who submit forms. Some of them are buyers. Plenty are researchers, students, competitors and the three agencies that email everyone. The auction is not what is costing you. The finish line is drawn in the wrong place, and every optimisation cycle pulls harder in that direction.
Broad match and Performance Max have both moved control away from the keyword and towards the signal. Which leaves you three levers: the page, the question it opens with, and what you count as a win. The third one is free and almost nobody touches it.
You are paying a premium for intent and then throwing the intent away at the door.
After the click
Four things happen instead of one
The page stops being a receipt for an email address and starts being the first half of the sales call.
The click lands on a question
The first thing it meets is about their situation and their spend, because that is what a paid searcher already has in their head. Nobody is asked for a name while they are still deciding whether you are relevant.
The answers do the qualifying
Fit, size, urgency and budget come back as a score rather than as an impression your sales team forms on a call. The expensive part of your week stops being spent on people who were never going to buy.
The ending changes by band
A high band ends on a calendar. A mid band ends on a costed report and a sequence written against the answers. A low band gets something genuinely useful and no call, which protects the diary.
The score goes back to Google
The conversion you import is the qualified one, with a value on it. Bidding starts hunting for people who look like the high band instead of people who look like form fillers.
Needs volume before it is stable. See the measurement section.
What we would build
On this channel the best ending is a number with a currency sign
Of the 13 formats in our own census, two are built for traffic that already has a budget.
Calculator
It writes the business case for them
Inputs in, a costed figure out: what the current arrangement is losing, what a change would return, how fast. The person who clicked your ad rarely signs alone, and a number is the only thing that survives being forwarded to a finance director who never saw your page.
Qualification quiz
It is the one format whose win is fewer leads
It routes by fit instead of by hand-raise, so expensive sales capacity stops being spent on people who were never going to qualify. It needs your definition of a good lead written down first, and that is the part most companies have never done.
Measurement
Feed the score back into the account
This is the part that turns a better page into a cheaper qualified lead, and it is the part most funnels never wire up.
Carry the click ID through
The Google click identifier is captured when they arrive and travels with their answers into your CRM. Without it there is no way to tell the account which spend produced which quality of lead.
Split the conversion actions
Completion is one action. A high band is another, with a value on it. Only the second one is fed to bidding as primary, so the algorithm optimises towards the leads your sales team actually wants.
Give it enough volume to learn
Value-based bidding is unstable until imported conversions are arriving steadily. Until then, read the band mix by campaign yourself and move budget by hand. That is not a failure, it is the first quarter.
The number worth putting in front of whoever signs off the budget is cost per qualified lead, by campaign. It is the only paid search figure that moves when the page after the click gets better.
What gets reported, and to whomWho buys this way
Five segments that already spend here and feel it
Taken from what each of the 25 segments in our own ranking says it actually does to generate leads, and what qualifying one costs it today.
Franchising
Portals and paid search deliver high applicant volume at low quality, and admitting the wrong franchisee costs more than admitting nobody.
Legal services
The most expensive enquiries in our whole dataset, and most of them never turn into instructions.
Commercial lending
High application volume, high decline rate, and an origination cost per funded deal that gets worse with every unqualified click.
Equipment leasing and asset finance
The buyer does not know whether to lease or buy, or what they would be approved for, so the click arrives with a question you can answer with a number.
Questions
What the person running the account asks first
It will change what the number means, so compare the right thing. Today your conversion rate counts form fills, and a form fill is not a buyer. What to watch instead is qualified conversions per 100 clicks and cost per qualified lead. If those move the wrong way, the questions are wrong and we rewrite them. If the raw form-fill count drops while the qualified count rises, that is the mechanism working, not failing.
Your turn
See what your paid traffic is doing after it lands
Our scorecard grades your funnel on the four things that decide whether the traffic you buy turns into anything. You get a band, a straight read on it and the one thing to fix first.
Not running yet. The report is yours whatever the score says.
Paid search is rarely the only line on the invoice
Six other sources, each arriving with a different amount of intent and a different thing worth asking first.
- SEO
Nobody sent them and nobody is waiting on an answer.
- LinkedIn
Two taps from a feed, back in a meeting in four minutes.
- Meta ads
Not looking for you. Willing to answer one thing anyway.
- Outbound
Deciding whether you are worth a reply before breakfast.
- Content and webinars
A name on a list, and nothing you can sort by.
- Influencer and UGC
Borrowed trust, arriving well ahead of any intent.