Acquisition Efficiency: CPL $300 → $160

What I walked into

Nobody could say what a customer actually 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.

The numbers told the story plainly. 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 only question that mattered: “what does a customer actually cost us?” Nobody in the room could answer it with a number they'd sign.

The tempting move was to cut spend and declare victory on efficiency. The right move was harder: keep the volume the business needed, and rebuild 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. Four builds, one target: the same pipeline, at roughly half the price.

How I built it

Four builds, one target, a CAC finance would sign

Build 01 · Campaign architecture

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. Restructuring created the resolution that let every later build cut costs.

LinkedIn CPL $300+ → ~$160 over the rebuild, volume held throughout

Account restructure Before

Campaigns by geographyarchived

After · by supplier segment

Enterprise supplierslive

Mid-market supplierslive

Long-tail / self-servelive

Build 02 · Audience design

Target the accounts that actually convert

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 actually registered and transacted, profiled what they had in common, and rebuilt every audience. Seed lists, lookalikes, 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 most of the CPL drop came from.

Audiences rebuilt against converting accounts: CPL nearly halved, lead quality up

Audience rebuild Source of truth

Converted accounts · profiledseed

Lookalikes from converterson

Non-onboardable segmentsexcluded

◎ Seed lists⊘ Exclusions≈ Lookalike

Build 03 · Keyword & quality-score work

Re-score every keyword by what it registers

On Google, the account was optimized for 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; specific, intent-heavy terms were quietly underfunded.

Then the slow, unglamorous work: negatives added weekly from 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. And the registrations that remained were ones sales wanted to call.

Google registration cost $90+ → ~$35 with volume held and quality up

Cost per registration Keywords re-scored by registration quality

Google registration$90+ → ~$35

Negatives addedweekly

Build 04 · Landing & CRO

Fix the last mile, and make every dollar auditable

Cheaper clicks still leak through a weak landing path. I rebuilt the conversion paths page by page: one page per segment matched to the ad that brought the visitor there, forms cut to the fields sales actually used, friction removed from the registration flow, and variants tested against registration rate rather than taste.

Underneath it, I rebuilt the tracking so the efficiency claims 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.

LinkedIn ~47% cheaper · Google ~60%+ cheaper · every conversion traceable to source

Conversion path

Ad → segment landing pagematched

Form → registrationtested

Conversion → campaign · keywordtagged

Registration → CRM recordreconciled

Audit trail ad dollar → CAC

Operating principles

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.

Result

What 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 fell from $300+ to ~$160, nearly half, 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, CAC became a finance-auditable number. The foundation the wider revenue engine scaled on.

Related work

✓ Revenue engine ✓ Marketing ops ✓ Global web ✓ User acquisition

More work

Next case →Marketing ops: 200+ workflows, handoff in minutes Related →Revenue engine: $2M → $76M → $250M+ on one system

Paying too much for the same pipeline?

I rebuild campaign architecture, audiences, keywords and CRO until CAC is auditable.

All case studiesFour systems, instrumented About meThe operator behind them Contact medanielsfsu@gmail.com