Anonymised and sector-framed. Figures are the client’s own, reported the same way each month, and shown here with their permission.
A single-location coworking provider was running Google Ads as if it served the whole country, paying for clicks from cities it had no space in. The account also leaked budget to its own branded terms, buying traffic that would have arrived for free, and reported on conversion tracking so out of date that the numbers could not tell anyone which campaigns actually produced enquiries. In practice the business was spending against a picture of performance that was no longer real, with no reliable way to separate genuine new-customer demand from noise. The brief was to turn a leaking, mis-targeted account into a disciplined engine for new enquiries.
Fix the tracking, match the map to the business, and stop paying for customers you already have.
Rebuilt the tracking before touching the budget
Nothing gets optimised against numbers you cannot trust, so we started by rebuilding conversion tracking from the ground up. We defined what a real enquiry looked like for a coworking business, wired up accurate conversion actions for form submissions and calls, and removed the stale and duplicated signals that had been inflating and obscuring the picture. Only once the account could reliably tell a genuine new-customer enquiry from noise did we treat any performance data as a basis for decisions.
Matched targeting to what the business can actually serve
A single-city operator paying for UK-wide impressions is buying enquiries it cannot fulfil. We pulled targeting back to the geography the space genuinely serves, so budget went towards people who could realistically walk in and take a desk. That single correction stopped a large share of spend from chasing demand in cities with no location to sell.
Stopped paying for demand that was already ours
The account was spending on branded terms, buying clicks from people already searching for the business by name. We restructured campaigns around new-customer acquisition, cut the leak to branded traffic, and refocused budget on the non-branded, intent-led searches that bring in people who do not yet know the brand. The point of paid media here was to add customers, not to re-buy the ones already coming.
Tightened structure around genuine intent
With clean tracking and corrected targeting in place, we rebuilt the account structure so each campaign spoke to a clear stage of intent, supported by negative keywords that filtered out searches the space could never serve. This kept spend concentrated on the queries most likely to convert into an enquiry, and made the account legible enough to keep improving rather than simply maintaining.
Managed to enquiries, not vanity clicks
From there we ran the account against the one metric that matters to a workspace operator: qualified new enquiries at a sustainable cost. Ongoing management focused on reallocating budget towards what the rebuilt tracking proved was working, and away from what was not, so every reduction in waste compounded rather than being spent elsewhere.
The gains came from spending the same intent on far better-qualified demand. By cutting UK-wide targeting back to the city the business serves and ending the leak to branded terms, budget stopped funding enquiries the space could not fulfil and started funding ones it could. That is why conversions rose 109% while total spend fell 19%, and why cost per conversion dropped 62%: fewer wasted clicks, more of them from people who could actually become customers.
The 43% lift in conversion rate reflects the same discipline reaching the right audience with the right structure. Once tracking was rebuilt to measure genuine new-customer enquiries, the account could be steered towards what truly worked rather than what the stale data implied, and that accuracy is what let more enquiries and lower spend happen at the same time rather than trading off against each other.