From ~£800 a sale to close to £120 — by making the market bigger, not smaller.

An account strangled in the name of efficiency

When a cost per sale looks frightening, the easy move is to cut. The previous agency cut everything — and the cost stayed frightening.

The pattern is common and quietly expensive. Faced with a cost per acquisition around £800, the incumbent agency added negatives where none were needed, trimmed the keyword list to a handful of "safe" terms, and squeezed reach until the account was serving a fraction of its market. The result was the worst of both worlds: sales stayed expensive, and the account physically could not spend the budget it had been given.

There was a second problem underneath: the buying journey itself. Enquiries went into an offline booking and payment process — slow to close, hard to measure, and invisible to Google's bidding.

Expand the market, sculpt the intent, fix the journey

We took the account in the opposite direction: bigger where the buyers were, sharper where they were not.

1. Keyword mining to grow reach, not trim it. The market was never small — the account was. We rebuilt the keyword set from search-term and market data until the account could see the buyers it had been hidden from.
2. Negatives that sculpt, not strangle. The old negative list blocked real buyers. We replaced it with negatives chosen to shape search intent — cutting genuine waste while reopening reach the previous agency had thrown away.
3. New landing pages, built for the product. Purpose-built pages that actually understood what was being sold — lifting page conversion by roughly 4× (account data, anonymised).
4. From offline booking to streamlined ecommerce. The clunky enquiry-then-offline-payment journey became a clean online purchase flow, so buyers could complete there and then — and the account could learn from real transactions.
5. Budget followed the evidence. As cost per sale fell, spend was scaled into what worked instead of being rationed by fear.

Is your account being shrunk when it should grow?

If your agency's answer to an expensive lead is always another negative and a smaller keyword list, the 12-Point Wasted-Spend Audit will show you what the account is hiding from — read-only access, findings in writing within 48 hours.