Google Ads Case Study: How to Buy Leads at 20%-50% Discount

1. Why You’re Over-Paying for Your Leads

Most businesses unknowingly overspend on Google Ads, and it’s not because of poor ads or landing pages or poor choice of keywords. Apart from the normal agency-level optimisation that should be done for your account, there are additional underlying issues that prevent ads from delivering their full potential. These are not commonly known, not even by Google Ads agencies, but once you become aware of them, there are things that can be done to manage their impact upon your Ads account so that. you get better results.

Here are these three behind-the-scenes reasons why you are paying more than you should for each lead:

Poor Conversion Data Due to Tightened Privacy Laws

Google Ads optimises performance using data it collects from your ads and who responds to them. However, recent changes in browser privacy settings and new laws focused on protecting consumer data have made it harder for advertisers to track conversions accurately.

Apple’s increased focus on privacy, for example, means that many of the ways Google Ads tracks and reports conversions are now very unreliable. The Chrome browser is another example, as it’s now blocking the use of third-party tracking cookies (like those used by Google Ads).

The result is that Google Ads is getting poor quality data that’s full of gaps.

Without good data, Ads targeting can’t see the full picture of who’s converting and why. This leads to a big chunk of your ad spend getting wasted as Google thrashes around trying to find leads with an incomplete picture of the best audience to target for your ads.

Failure to Exploit the Full Potential of Google Ads AI

Google Ads uses AI to match your best current customers with high-potential future customers, helping to generate cheaper leads.

The problem is that because of the first issue – poor tracking – the AI is working with bad data and so the AI doesn’t have sufficient data to track down more leads for you. Fix the tracking, and set up the best Google Ads Smart Campaigns for your situation, and you’ll enjoy cheaper leads at higher volumes.

These take full advantage of Google’s entire network, showing your ads across multiple platforms for a crazy low cost per click.

Unfortunately, most agencies are ignoring this problem, which means that you, like most advertisers, are almost certainly over-paying for your leads, while missing out on potential extra leads and sales, too.

Google Artificially Inflates Costs

Google drives up the cost-per-click (CPC) for ads in ways that are difficult for advertisers to control or directly manage.

This was uncovered by the US Department of Justice in court during Spring 2024. During the trial, Google was forced to share documents that revealed tactics it uses to inflate ad costs to customers like your business. Here are a few of them…

1. Out-of-Order Ad Promotion: Google sometimes promotes the second, third or fourth-placed ad to the top position, creating false competition and encouraging higher bids to try and ‘win back’ a good position.
2. Reserve Prices and Auction Thresholds: Google sets reserve prices, requiring advertisers to meet minimum bids. Google can arbitrarily raise these thresholds, forcing advertisers to increase their bids to keep showing.
3. Cascading Effect: When Google increases the minimum bid for an auction, it pushes the price up for all advertisers, starting at the bottom with the lowest bidders being forced to pay more simply to keep their ads showing. This bid increase at the bottom pushes the next higher-bidding advertisers to also raise their bids to stay ahead. This cascades upwards, increasing ad costs across the board for everyone involved.

If you want to fight back and save a lot of money, keep reading this article. You can read more about the Google Ads court-case here.

While we cannot directly manage these tactics, we can use the fact that Google does not want to lose advertisers and ad revenue to fight back.

However, Google does not want to lose long-term advertisers. We have found that reducing budgets where price inflation has clearly happened normally gives Google a reason to lower the price again. It’s bizarre, but we see it consistently on client accounts.

Now that you understand how your ads budget is under attack from 3 different sources, let’s look at how we use a different approach to bring your costs down while improving your results.

2. The 3 Strategies that Dramatically Reduce Your Google Ads Costs to Improve Performance

With an understanding of why 97% of Google Ads accounts are overpaying, let’s look at how we approach things differently to reduce and control your costs while simultaneously improving performance. Somewhat simplified, it looks a bit like this…

On top of all the best-practices for tuning a Google Ads account, we do 3 things that almost no other agencies are doing for clients…

Server-Side Tagging (SST)

Tracking is commonly done using cookies on your visitors’ devices, but GDPR introduced far stricter privacy rules to give users more control over how their data is used. As a result of this change in the law, browsers including Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome, plus most others, stopped allowing data collection by third parties. This means Google Ads doesn’t get anywhere near as much data as it used to about who is clicking on your ads, making it much harder to optimise them.

We take back control by using first-party tagging instead, storing information about visitor sessions on a server unique to you, hosted in Europe. Along with a consent banner for people to agree to your cookies, tracking is restored to a far higher level, providing Google Ads with the information it needs to accurately target the right customers. This minimises the wasted spend on poor-quality leads, and your ads can focus on people who are more likely to convert.

Studies into the impact of SST have shown that this step alone can improve your tracking by 10-30%, which leads to better targeting and less wasted budget.

Deliberately Tuning Google’s Smart Campaigns

Google has 17 different campaign types that use AI to produce better results. These include goal-focused ones, like Maximise Conversions, as well as others that give you varying levels of control over what they’re doing. The one that gives the least control is Performance Max, which taps into Google’s entire network—YouTube, Display, Search, and more—to find cheaper leads at scale.

If they are setup and left to their own devices, they will probably just optimise for maximum profit to Google, rather than maximum leads for you!

You see, without Server Side Tagging, they get very poor conversion information and struggle to work at their full potential. As a result, smart campaigns often run far below their full potential, so you don’t get the leads you should be getting for the money you’re spending.

Our testing has found that the best way to tune smart campaigns is to add a filter that qualifies the leads your ads produces. We developed this approach in 2021 and internally we called it JetStream, because it made leads flow faster while spending less money. Since then we’ve renamed our whole approach to Google Ads management to JetStream, because our focus is entirely around higher lead flow for lower ad spend.

Fight Against Google’s Price Manipulation with Game Theory

We have studied the way that Google Ads accounts respond to changes in bids and budgets, along with the documents disclosed in their court case, and we have surmised that Google operates with two broad goals:

1. To maximise profits at every opportunity by charging the highest price customers will pay.
2. To go above and beyond to retain customers at risk of leaving.

Informed by this, we use an approach inspired by Game Theory, a field of mathematics that studies strategic decision-making. It works something like this…

• Google’s profit maximiser algorithm pushes up the price of your clicks.
• We respond by reducing the budget on that campaign to tell Google we’re not happy
• We move the budget to another campaign, or to another platform (e.g. Microsoft Ads) to maintain your lead flow.
• Google drops your prices and sends more traffic to the affected campaign in order to retain your business
• We increase the budget a little and watch carefully for unreasonable price hikes
• etc

It is a never-ending game where we monitor lead volume and costs and juggle with budget to keep your account running smoothly.

It sounds like a game – and that is exactly what it is. Our response comes from a famous Game Theory problem known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma (you can look that up in Wikipedia if you’re a bit of a geek like us). The strategy we use consistently gets the highest scores when pitted against other approaches, and is known as the tit-for-tat strategy.

By recognising that we are running your Ads account in a game with Google as the other player, you gain a true advantage against other ads managers who just tell you that prices are going up and there’s nothing that you can do about it, because it’s Google’s policies. They should be trying, at least, to keep your costs down with every tool at their disposal.

The combination of these 3 unique approaches means that you will reduce waste, improve targeting, and make sure your ad budget is working harder for your business. The results we achieve vary from 20% to 50% saving for the same or higher volume of leads. In the next section, we’ll look at some examples to show you what to expect.

3. Google Ads Case Studies (with Before and After Data)

We’re often asked what size of Google Ads account do these strategies work with. The answer is that they work with any size of account. In this section you’ll see the impact of using these strategies on an account spending tens of thousands every month, and another that spends just a few hundred each month. Let’s start with the bigger of the two…

£34k Monthly Ad Spend Cut Almost In Half While Maintaining Leads

An 8-figure national business, battling stiff competition from well-known established brands, as well as smaller challengers, was fighting rising costs, weaker margins and inconsistent lead flow. Despite spending between £32-45K per month, their lead flow was inconsistent and the cost per lead was on the rise.

Before Applying the 3 Strategies in this Guide…

The account felt like it was costing too much. Despite an extensive series of calls with a senior Google Ads client account manager to improve performance, nothing really changed. They were very keen to know how much profit was made from each sale – we didn’t tell them – and they consistently asked us to raise the budget and spend more.

You can see from the stats from the account that their ad spend was £34,000 in August 2023.

After Applying the 3 Strategies…

At the end of July 2024, we applied the 3 strategies from this guide to their account. The change in performance transformed their results, with the headline figure being a saving of £15,500 in ad spend. But behind this headline is another massive win – the cost per lead also fell dramatically, so they are getting more leads at lower cost.

The big business benefit is that as well as putting more money in the bank as profit, they can re-invest some of the savings into new campaigns to scale up the lead generation, outpace their competition and become a more dominant player in their market sector.

Small Business More Than Doubles Monthly Leads…

A small independent business, facing a steep decline in sales due to the tough economy and a limited ad budget, was considering closing the doors forever. Their Google Ads campaign has been running since 2015 but in recent years their performance has dipped, with leads almost doubling in cost. With a limited budget, they were getting just 25 leads per month, but they need at least 35 to operate with confidence.

Before Applying the 3 Changes:

As you can see from the image, in August 2023, they spent £469 and received just 23 conversions. This performance was unsustainable, there were simply insufficient leads and confidence in the ads channel collapsed, meaning they were unwilling to increase the budget in the hope of getting more leads.

After Applying the 3 Changes and Tuning Their Ad Copy:

After introducing Server Side Tracking, building a Performance Max campaign and strategically moving budget around September 2024, they spent £424 and received 56* qualified conversions, a dramatic improvement.

Note: the chart shows 77 leads, but the accurate figure is 56. There was an issue with the website that caused double-counting of some leads, which we have now cleared up.

Business Benefit:

Lead volume jumped from 25 to 56 per month, and ad spend dropped by 9.6%. The business owner has renewed hope that the business can turnaround, as the lead flow is now higher than ever and it is far more affordable than it has ever previously been. The client is now considering adding an online booking system to their website, which will increase bookings further, as new growth opportunities.

These examples clearly illustrate the fact that our unique approach works at different budget levels to deliver similar benefits. This means you will get meaningful results, regardless of your starting point.

Are you ready to save money on your Google Ads and enjoy unprecedented performance?

4. Next Steps – The Profitable Ads Blueprint Session

The first thing we need to do is evaluate whether or not your business and Google Ads account are a good fit for this approach. We do this in a short, structured call that assesses your current Google Ads performance and opportunity.

During this Profitable Ads Blueprint Session, we will:

• Take a quick look at your Ads account to identify opportunities to improve it
• Check there are no road-blocks to applying our strategy to your account (there are a few specific instances that make this approach much more difficult)
• Show you the scale of the likely savings you’ll make, using our approach
• A detailed plan outlining the improvements we can make to your campaigns
• A custom quote for our services

We understand that this may sound like a fairytale, which is why we back it up with risk-free guarantee so that you don’t pay a penny until we deliver better performance for you.

Our 100% Risk-Free Performance Guarantee

TL;DR – we’re so confident that this system will deliver results for you, that we’ll build it for you, and if you don’t save money, you won’t pay a penny.

We stand fully behind the results we deliver. That’s why we offer a 100% performance-based guarantee. Here’s how it works: if we don’t reduce your ad spend or improve your lead flow by at least 10%, you won’t pay a penny. We don’t believe in empty promises—only real, measurable outcomes.

You’ll receive our expert account blueprint and a roadmap for better results. But we’ll only charge you once we’ve achieved what we promised. No risk. No upfront fees. Just results.

With fees starting from £500/month, depending upon the size of your Ads spend, this is your chance to boost your business with zero risk.

We operate on a risk-free basis—you only pay after we deliver improved performance. Our fees start at £500/month.

Ready to see what’s possible? Schedule your Blueprint Session today!

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About the Author

Lee Duncan is the owner of The Lead Alchemists Agency and the author of Double Your Business, an Amazon best-seller from Financial Times Publishing. With over 150 businesses mentored since 2004, and multiple clients adding over £1m+ in annual sales, Lee is an expert in lead generation and sales transformation.