How to Earn 336% More Leads from a Dying PPC Campaign: Case Study

“Gumpo's strategic approach and their effective use of WhatConverts have completely transformed our paid advertising efforts.”

Case Study

• Agency: Gumpo
• Client: Medical Weight Loss Provider
• Software: WhatConverts

The Challenge:

When the leads are flowing in, PPC marketing feels like a breeze.

Clients don’t ask questions, small mistakes are easy to recover from—it’s like running with the wind at your back.

But what happens when the market shifts? What happens when deep-pocket competitors blow into the ad space? When industry changes lift up prices across the board? When campaign results, once reliable and impressive, have become utterly and completely deflated?

What do you do when the wind turns against you? 

This was the problem facing a leading provider of weight loss solutions in the UK.

Despite no major changes in their campaigns, the last half of 2023 brought dwindling paid ad success: lead volume dropped, lead quality had followed, and their cost per acquisition (CPA) was through the roof. In just a few months, campaign performance was worse than it’d been in years.

They came to Gumpo, a Macclesfield agency focused on data-driven strategy, with the task of bringing their PPC campaigns back to profitability. The goal was to restructure existing campaigns while attracting more valuable leads by sending higher quality lead data to the bidding algorithm using WhatConverts.

The Approach:

The first step was to run a comprehensive audit of existing campaigns. Here, Gumpo uncovered several glaring problems:

• Broad match keywords were attracting low-quality traffic and requiring time-consuming maintenance.
• Generic conversion actions (call clicks and email clicks) skewed campaign performance data, leading the algorithm to focus on low-quality actions.
• Unstructured campaign organization led to irrelevant traffic and wasted ad spend.

Other deficiencies (improper bidding strategies, overly frequent adjustments, misguided Google recommendations) all made unsatisfactory results even worse.

Pulling from their experience with similar campaigns in the past, Gumpo had a plan to bring the client's PPC investment back to profitability.

The Strategy:

“WhatConverts has been a game-changer, providing us with invaluable insights into lead behaviour and allowing us to optimise our campaigns for maximum impact.”

Leveraging the lead tracking power of WhatConverts, Gumpo took a multi-pronged approach to mending the client's paid ads campaigns back to health.

• Structured Campaign Rebuild: The account was restructured, prioritizing high-performing exact-match search terms for over 85% of traffic.
• Location-Specific Landing Pages: Campaigns were tailored to specific regions across the UK, with landing pages optimized for local relevance.
• Track Less Generic Conversion Actions: Gumpo leveraged WhatConverts to capture accurate lead data focused on qualified interactions (e.g., calls lasting over 1 minute vs. clicks).
• Advanced Bidding with WhatConverts Data: Using WhatConverts insights, Gumpo employed a target CPA bidding strategy to optimize campaigns for cost-efficiency.
• Focus on Qualified Leads: Spam and low-quality leads were minimized by using WhatConverts integrations to send only qualified leads to Google and Microsoft Ads for conversion tracking (see below).

The Result:

“We are thrilled with the significant increase in qualified leads and the substantial reduction in our cost-per-acquisition.”

The strategy was a complete success.

Thanks to Gumpo’s data-driven approach to paid advertising as well as their experience in healthy campaign structure and effective bidding strategies, the client saw massive increases in lead volume.

In just one quarter, Gumpo earned 293% more unique phone calls and 336% more unique form submissions—a year-over-year rise of  336% and 421%, respectively.

Lead quality also saw a dramatic improvement. Thanks to WhatConverts, Gumpo could effectively filter out spam and low-quality leads by training the bidding algorithm with cleaner data (fewer low-quality leads, more high-quality ones).

In the end, the average CPA plummeted from over £174 in Q4 2023 to £43 in February 2024 and further down to £38 in March 2024—a 78% CPA decrease in just one quarter.

For the client, it’s a successful investment and a marketing partner they know they can trust. And for Gumpo, it’s one more story of a broken campaign fixed and another over-the-moon client.

Results Highlights

• 336% increase in unique lead submissions
• Number of qualified calls rose by 293%
• 78% reduction in CPA in just one quarter (£174 in Q4 2023 down to £38 in Q1 2023)

Want to see what kind of ROI you can achieve? Start your free 14-day trial of WhatConverts today!