I cut the cost of a lead nearly in half. LinkedIn enterprise $300+ → ~$160, Google $90+ → ~$35, volume held
Spend was scaling faster than pipeline. So I rebuilt the paid engine until every dollar produced a CAC finance could audit.
Nobody could say what a lead cost
When I took over paid acquisition for PingPong's cross-border payments push, the channels were live and the budget was growing, but the two lines on the chart were pulling apart. Spend climbed every month. Qualified pipeline didn't climb with it.
LinkedIn was delivering leads at $300+ each. The export was full of impressive logos, at a cost per lead that made the payback math impossible to defend. Google was producing registrations at $90+ apiece, and when I traced a sample of them by hand, too many were the wrong suppliers on the wrong terms: broad keywords buying clicks instead of customers. In the monthly review, finance asked the question: “what does a lead actually cost us?” Nobody in the room could answer it with a number they'd sign.
Cutting spend would have shown efficiency on the slide and cost the business pipeline, so I kept the volume the business needed and rebuilt the machine underneath it: campaign structures, audiences, keywords and landing paths, until cost per acquisition was a number the CFO could trace line by line. I rebuilt it in four passes and held volume the whole way.
Half the cost only counts if the pipeline holds
Tear the structure down to the segment level
The old account was organized the way agencies default to: campaigns by geography, budgets smeared evenly across them, winners and losers invisible inside the averages. I rebuilt the structures around supplier segments: who the supplier was and what they needed to see. Each segment got its own campaigns, its own creative angle, its own budget line.
That single change made the account legible. When a segment's cost per lead moved, I could see it move, name the cause, and shift budget the same week instead of discovering it in a quarterly retro. That resolution let every later build cut cost.
LinkedIn enterprise CPL $300+ → ~$160 over the rebuild, volume heldI let the converters define the audience
LinkedIn's $300+ leads were the wrong people. The audiences had been built from job-title guesses and platform-suggested lookalikes. I threw that out and rebuilt them from the converting end backwards: pulled the accounts that had registered and transacted, profiled what they had in common, and rebuilt every audience, seed lists, lookalikes and exclusions, against that converting profile.
Exclusions did as much work as inclusions. I cut suppliers who could never pass onboarding, segments that registered but never transacted, and audiences that overlapped and bid against themselves. The budget stopped paying to reach people the funnel would only reject later, which is where CPL mostly dropped.
Audiences rebuilt from accounts that registered and transacted: CPL nearly halvedRe-score every keyword by what it registers
On Google, the account chased the wrong scoreboard: click volume and CTR. I re-scored the entire keyword set by registration quality, for each term, how many of its clicks became registrations, and how many of those registrations were suppliers the business could actually serve. Broad head terms that looked heroic on clicks turned out to be buying almost nothing downstream; I had been underfunding the specific, intent-heavy terms.
Then the slow part: I added negatives weekly from the search-term reports, ad copy and landing relevance tightened until quality scores rose, and budget migrated term by term toward registration quality. Cost per registration fell by more than half over roughly three months, while I tightened audiences and bids alongside it. And the registrations that remained were ones sales wanted to call.
Google registration cost $90+ → ~$35, volume held, keywords scored on registrationsThe last mile is where the dollar becomes auditable
Cheaper clicks still leak through a weak landing path. I rebuilt the conversion paths. I matched one landing page per segment to the ad that brought the visitor, cut the form to the fields sales used, stripped friction out of the registration flow, and tested variants on registration rate rather than taste.
Underneath it, I rebuilt the tracking so the numbers would survive an audit: every conversion tagged to its campaign, keyword and audience, every landing event reconciled against the CRM. That's what turned “CPL is down” from a marketing slide into a finance-auditable CAC. The numbers on this page are the ones that survived that reconciliation.
Every conversion tagged to campaign, keyword and audience, reconciled to the CRMWhat the rebuild produced
Two channels, four builds, one standard: cost per acquisition that finance could audit, at the volume the pipeline needed.
Efficiency
LinkedIn cost per lead in the enterprise segment fell from $300+ to ~$160, and Google cost per registration fell from $90+ to ~$35, a drop of more than 60%. Volume held throughout: the same pipeline, at roughly half the price.
Trust
Because every conversion was tagged to its campaign, keyword and audience and reconciled against the CRM, finance could audit CAC. The foundation the wider growth engine scaled on.
The limits
LinkedIn and Google were the main channels, and they are the two I can put public numbers against. Meta and programmatic ran over the same period, and their numbers stay off this page. The four builds also ran in parallel, so the drops here are what all four produced together. Exclusions are the one piece that traces cleanly to a single build.
Related work
“Working with Daniel has been a highlight in my career in fin-tech. He is an extremely diligent worker whose attention to detail is matched by his understanding of how the details affect the bigger picture. I hope to work with Daniel again in my career. Together we were a winning team and I count him as a life-long friend.”
“Daniel has a great track record in the fast-paced environment and has proven his self as an individual who focuses on multi-tasking while balancing the need s and goals of the company. He is intelligent, willing to learn, and is a hard-working performer amongst his peers at Tolocal. Finally, he does what he says he will do because his word is guaranteed. This is a unique and powerful combination of skills and experience.”
“Daniel is a professional, knowledgeable individual, that takes pride in the quality of his work. His reliability is second to none and he is always up to the challenge. I highly recommend him, he will be a great addition to any company that hires him.”
Three rules behind the CPL numbers
Efficiency at held volume, or it doesn't count.
Anyone can cut CPL by cutting spend. The discipline is keeping the pipeline the business needs while the cost per lead falls, both numbers, same chart.
Optimize for the funnel's end.
Clicks and CTR are the platform's scoreboard. Keywords and audiences got re-scored by registration quality, what sales could actually call.
A number finance won't sign isn't a result.
Every conversion traced from ad dollar to CRM record. $300+ → ~$160 and $90+ → ~$35 are reconciled figures.
His work is thorough and impactful. He has created amazing opportunities for sales with his marketing campaigns and is a huge asset to the whole company.
Ginger SumnerSenior Project Manager
Paying too much for the same pipeline?
I rebuild the paid engine until finance can trace every dollar to a CRM record.