Arnau Vendrell's logbook

Through May we ran a high-volume lead-gen project, between B2C and B2B, and something happened worth logging, because it is exactly the kind of data you only get from working the case first-hand. We cut Google Ads spend in half versus April. On paper, less budget should mean fewer results. It did not, and the why is the interesting part.

To make it concrete with a similar but unrelated case, picture a solar panel installation company: homeowners, residential building associations and the odd small business with a warehouse. Exactly the kind of segment where leads pour in, drawn by the savings, but many are just price-shopping and not ready to buy. This kind of lead is hard to tell apart in Google Ads, and you end up overpaying for the good one within the batch.

What we built was a capture system based on warming cold contacts, plus a qualification layer from the very first touch. The goal was not to lower cost per lead, it was to make every lead earn its value.

With half the budget, Google Ads metrics shot up: cost per conversion dropped from €7.28 to €2.41 (a -66%), conversions rose +44% and impressions +295%. It sounds great, but there is a catch: those conversions are not really qualified leads. One automated campaign alone reported nearly 600 conversions at €0.63 each, and that number makes the channel look better than it is.

What mattered was further down. What was really going on is that we had a system we could feed volume into and run the entire qualification process automatically, something we could never have pulled off relying on the Google Ads platform alone. On top of that, the close rate climbed from 3.17% to 5.73%.

The takeaway is clear: Google Ads changes completely when a warming system sits behind it. It is not about bragging over cheap platform conversions, it is about generating volume that qualifies itself and taking load off the sales team, which gets pre-filtered leads instead of chasing cold contacts.