Case study · Google Ads lead generation
How we built a financial services lead-generation account from zero to over 5,000 leads a year
Three full trading years of a paid lead-generation retainer for a financial services brand, from launching the Google Ads account at zero through to over 5,000 qualified leads a year in Year 3. Annual lead volume grew 4.7x across the three years while cost per lead held roughly steady.
- Annual leads 5,467 (Year 3) from 1,169 (Year 1) 4.7x
- Annual paid media spend £35.4k (Year 3) from £5.7k (Year 1) 6.2x
- Cost per lead £6.45 (Year 3) from £4.85 (Year 1) Held largely steady
- Cumulative leads (3 years) 10,948 From account launch
The client
A financial services brand looking to build a paid lead-generation channel from a standing start. The brief was clean: launch a Google Ads account from zero, prove the unit economics against a known back-end lead value, and scale the volume while holding cost per lead in a range that kept the funnel profitable end to end. No dependence on brand recall, no historical audience, no organic search buffer, everything the account produced had to be earned by the paid programme.
The problem
New paid account, unproven audience economics, and a fully quantified downstream expectation on cost per qualified lead. The financial services lead-gen category is one of the most contested on Google Ads. Head-term auction CPCs are unforgiving, ad quality is fought over hard, and the difference between a profitable account and an unprofitable one is small enough that a couple of weeks of loose targeting will burn through a monthly budget without producing much. Building a new account into this from scratch means every early lever, keyword theme selection, match-type discipline, negative-keyword hygiene, landing page conversion rate, and audience layering, has to land in the first three months or the account never gets to scale.
The plan: land the unit economics, then scale the winners
Three years of disciplined single-account Google Ads management. No exotic tactics, all fundamentals executed at cadence.
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Account structure built for signal
Tight campaign structure from launch: separated brand, category, competitor, and long-tail intent into their own campaigns so bidding could learn each cluster independently. Match types kept mostly to exact and phrase for the first year so search-term data would remain clean while the account was calibrating.
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Landing page conversion discipline
Landing page rebuilt to strip friction and lift the form-fill rate. Above-the-fold form, minimal navigation, one clear commitment. Conversion rate improvements at the landing page compound directly into cost per lead across every campaign hitting the page, so this was the highest-leverage single lever in Year 1.
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Negative-keyword hygiene from Day 1
Weekly search-term reviews from Week 1 of the account. Every irrelevant match that fired became a negative before it hit £5 of spend. Negative keyword lists compounded into a substantial protective moat by Year 2, and now cover several hundred phrase and broad exclusions.
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Continuous ad copy and asset testing
Responsive Search Ad experiments rotating in and out of each campaign. Headline pinning strategy tied to the highest-CTR anchor phrases per cluster. Ad-strength scores kept in Excellent range across the account, which lifted auction share at no additional CPC cost.
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Bidding-strategy migration as the account matured
First 90 days on Manual CPC to keep the account honest while conversion data was thin. Migrated to Maximise Conversions with a CPC ceiling in Year 1 once we had 30+ conversions per campaign. Moved to tROAS-equivalent target CPA bidding in Year 2 once the account had the conversion volume to feed it.
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Weekly optimisation cadence, monthly strategic review
Weekly audit of search terms, negatives, ad performance, and Quality Score movement. Monthly performance review with the client tying the account back to the downstream lead value. Standing focus on the metrics that matter to the client, not the vanity ones, so budget conversations are always about qualified leads and downstream conversion, not clicks and impressions.
The trajectory (three full trading years)
Annual lead volume grew from 1,169 in Year 1 to 5,467 in Year 3, a 4.7x lift. Annual media spend rose 6.2x in the same period as we opened the tap on the winning campaigns. Cost per lead stayed largely steady around the £5 to £6.50 range across the three years, which is what a well-run lead-gen account should look like as it scales: volume up sharply, unit cost only gently up. Year 4 is tracking similar in the first half.
Source: Google Ads
Source: Google Ads
The scale point for a lead-gen account is the year the fundamentals hold under a step-change in spending. Year 1 to Year 2 was that year here: spend rose 4.2x, leads rose 3.7x, and cost per lead only crept up by 65p. That is the moment where the account structure, the landing page, the bidding strategy, and the negative-keyword base all had to hold under pressure, and they did. From Year 2 onwards the growth reads as controlled: 1.3x more leads, another 30p on the cost per lead. This is the shape a paid lead-generation account should have when the fundamentals are running well and there is genuine buyer demand behind the category. Year 4 is already tracking similar at the halfway mark.
Need a paid lead-generation channel built from scratch?
Peak Digital runs paid Google Ads lead-generation retainers for UK service and financial services brands where the downstream lead value is known and the account needs to scale efficiently. Book a free introductory call and we will tell you honestly whether the unit economics of your category will support this shape of programme.
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