Cost per lead is the most comfortable metric in B2B and the least useful. It can halve while your pipeline stays flat, because the cheap leads were never going to buy. The fix is making the ad platform optimise toward Sales Qualified Leads instead.
What a click costs in B2B software right now. Median Google Ads cost per click in the United States, from the October 2026 edition of the Paid Media Cost Index, a Diwizi dataset pulled on October 15, 2026 with the date the source last refreshed each figure.
| Search | Cost per click | Source refresh |
|---|---|---|
| payroll software | $128.41 | Sep 13 |
| hr software | $91.59 | Sep 15 |
| marketing automation software | $80.43 | Sep 16 |
| crm software | $37.13 | Oct 15 |
B2B & SaaS median, $80.43 across 5 keywords. Free to reuse with credit to the Cost Index.
The gap between a form submit and a real opportunity is where B2B budgets get lost.
Point Smart Bidding at form fills and it will reliably find people who fill in forms. Students, competitors, job seekers and consultants all convert beautifully and buy nothing.
Your sales team knows exactly which leads were worthless. If that judgement does not flow back into the ad account as data, the account cannot learn from it.
A six month sales cycle assessed on a 30 day attribution window will always make top-of-funnel look like a waste of money.
Enterprise and SMB have different values, cycles and buying committees. Averaged into a single CPL, both get optimised badly.
The differentiator is closing the loop between the click and the closed deal.
Before anything gets scaled, the data has to be right. GA4 and Google Tag Manager audited and rebuilt where needed, conversion actions deduplicated, Meta CAPI or server-side tagging where it applies, and offline conversion import so the platform optimises toward revenue instead of form fills.
Opportunity and closed-won data imported back as offline conversions with values attached, so bidding pursues revenue instead of enquiries. Works with HubSpot, Salesforce and most modern CRMs.
Search captures demand that exists. LinkedIn reaches titles that never search. Which mix you need comes out of your data, not a template.
Paid traffic dies on a bad page. I build and iterate the landing pages the campaigns point to, so the conversion path is one system instead of two vendors blaming each other. Fixed scope, tied to the campaigns, not open-ended web design.
A Looker Studio dashboard tied to your real conversion data, plus a written read on what changed and why. No 40-tab spreadsheet, no vanity metrics, no 'impressions are up' as a headline.
If your CRM cannot yet tell the ad platform which leads became opportunities, that is the first thing we build. Every other improvement compounds off it.
Some engagements have numbers I can publish from the account. Others are confidential, by contract or because they were employed roles, so I can speak to scope and approach but not exact figures. I would rather show you the real mix than invent a case study.
Google Ads and Performance Max in one of the most competitive local markets in the US, with expensive clicks, ZIP code choices and seasonal demand. The performance data is confidential by contract, so the case covers the work and the lessons, not the numbers. Read the case.
Cumulative account history since 2020: 5,707 clicks and R$ 63.61 per conversion. Conversions are contact actions recorded by Google Ads, not sales. I also created the brand identity and built the site. Read the case.
I have also worked in paid media in healthcare. Nothing from that work is published anywhere on this site: no employer named, no budgets, no results, no internal detail. It is listed only because it is where a large part of my healthcare experience comes from.
I go through the account, the tracking and the conversion path and tell you what is actually broken. You get the findings whether or not we work together.
Tracking, conversion actions and structure get corrected first. Optimising on top of bad data just makes you confidently wrong.
Campaigns, ad copy, audiences and landing pages built around how your buyers actually search.
Weekly optimisation against the metric that matters to your business, with a monthly written read on what moved and what is next.
Long-form writing on this topic from the blog.
Companies selling to other companies, with an average deal that justifies a salesperson's time on each lead.
Not a fit: Businesses that cannot follow up a lead within 24 hours; the campaigns will only expose that gap.
No. This is paid media only: search, paid social and the conversion path behind them. Bought lists and cold outbound are a different discipline and I am not the right person for them.
You define it, I build the measurement around your definition. The point is that whatever your sales team calls qualified becomes the thing the ad platform optimises toward.
Yes, but the reporting has to match it. We track leading indicators inside the cycle while attributing revenue on your real timeline, rather than pretending 30 day windows mean something.
Yes. Some clients keep their agency for execution and use me for the measurement layer and to ask harder questions about what is being reported.
A short form beats a long discovery call. Give me the basics and I will come back with a straight read on whether I can help, usually within one business day.
Rather book a time directly? Schedule a call.