Turning a “failing” account into one of our best performers

CASE STUDY – LEAD GENERATION | HOUSEHOLD STAFFING | US MARKET

When we onboarded this household staffing agency in late 2024, the account was doing well – at least on the surface. CPA was below target, conversion volume was climbing month on month, and the numbers looked healthy.

The problem was that the numbers were lying.
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The Situation

The client places high-end household staff across the US – nannies, housekeepers, personal chefs. Their ideal conversion is a form fill from someone looking to hire.

We were tracking three actions:

  1. form fills from prospective clients
  2. calls from the website
  3. calls directly from ads

Calls from ads were converting cheaply and frequently. They were pulling the overall CPA down and inflating conversion volume. On paper, things looked great.

Discovery

In a routine client check-in, we asked which lead type was stronger – a call or a form fill. The client said form fills. They also mentioned they regularly received calls from job seekers and people trying to reach a competitor.

We pulled the search term report for calls from ads. Almost every query driving those calls was either a job-seeking term or a competitor brand name.

The pattern made sense. Someone searches, sees the ad, calls directly without visiting the site, realises they’ve reached the wrong business, and hangs up. Google records that as a conversion.

It wasn’t a conversion. It was noise – and the algorithm was optimising hard toward it.

 

 

What we changed

We made three structural changes:

  1. Moved calls from ads to a secondary conversion action so Google would stop treating them as a primary optimisation signal
  2. Tightened the negative keyword list to exclude all job-seeking terms
  3. Isolated competitor search terms into a separate campaign to control how much budget was being spent there, and to measure those terms clearly

The immediate result looked alarming. Overall conversion volume dropped significantly. CPA climbed. If we had been measuring the account on top-line conversion numbers alone, it would have appeared to be going backwards.

It wasn’t.

The Results

By end of 2025 comparing year on year:

More Spend. Fewer total conversions. Far more of the right conversions, at a lower cost.

Form Fill Conversions

Up 55%

– from 795 to 1,237

Form Fill CPA

Down 24%

from $225 to $170

Overall conversions

Down 26%

from 2,397 to 1,774

Overall CPA

Up 59%

from $75 to $119

Total ad spend

Up 18%

from $178,685 to $210,515

The Takeaway

This account is a good example of why conversion volume is one of the least useful performance metrics in isolation. Google will optimise toward whatever you define as a conversion – and if that definition includes junk, the algorithm will find more of it.

The fix here wasn’t a major rebuild. It was a conversion audit, a honest conversation with the client, and the willingness to let the headline numbers get worse in order to make the actual results better.

Accurate tracking isn’t a setup task. It’s an ongoing part of account management.

If your account is hitting its conversion targets but the leads aren’t converting into customers, it’s worth taking a closer look at what you’re actually measuring.