Halving the cost of a customer in under a month

The situation

Device Tracker Plus sells device tracking and security software. The paid search account was running and producing conversions, but at £28.08 each. At that price the maths does not work: every pound of growth costs more than it returns, so scaling makes the problem bigger rather than better.

What I did

The instinct in this situation is to buy more traffic. The actual problem was in two other places.

First, leakage. An audit of search terms showed budget going to irrelevant clicks and keywords that had never converted. That money was simply switched off and moved to the terms that were earning.

Second, what happened after the click. Headlines and form fields were doing more to deter people than the ads were doing to attract them, so those were rewritten and shortened to take friction out of signing up.

What happened

Cost per acquisition fell 58%, from £28.08 to less than half that, inside a month. Conversion volume rose 400% in the same period, which was close to four times what the entire previous quarter had produced.

Worth being clear about why: very little of this was clever. It was mostly stopping spend that was not working and making it easier to say yes. That is usually where the biggest wins in a paid account are hiding.