Google Ads was an afterthought. We made it their #1 source of leads.
Trinity is a US online certification school — 30,000+ graduates, three decades of operation. When we took over paid media, Google Ads was managing 1–2 leads a day and had never led enrolment inquiries. Six months of rebuilds, a silent bug fix, and new channel architecture later, it became the single highest-volume lead source — past the website for the first time in the school’s history.
A side channel. And quietly broken.
Google Ads was generating 1.6 leads a day and barely moving enrolments. Underneath the low numbers sat a structural mess — one that had been capping its own bids without anyone noticing.
- A $0.01 Max CPC bug silently capping bids across every campaign.
- Every program — herbalism, holistic, naturopathic — crammed into one ad group, one ad, one landing page.
- Branded Search running on Maximize Clicks, optimising for traffic instead of leads.
- A Spanish campaign pulling broad nutrition searches far outside the target audience.
- No Performance Max, no audience architecture, no retargeting.
- Meta completely dark — zero paid social — and no UTM or CAPI tracking on key forms.
- Grow inquiry volume without growing budget in proportion.
- Improve lead quality — lower CPA, higher enrolment-to-inquiry ratio.
- Build a campaign architecture that scales program by program.
- Launch Meta as a second channel with retargeting built in.
- Make Google Ads the primary growth engine for the enrolment team.
Seven moves, program by program.
Within weeks we found a campaign-level Max CPC of $0.01 capping bids account-wide — Smart Bidding couldn't compete in any real auction. Removing it unlocked impression share and let the algorithm bid competitively for the first time.
Broke the single catch-all ad group into dedicated campaigns per program (CHHP, CNHP, CMH) — tailored keywords, intent-matched copy, and landing pages pointed at the right program. Quality Scores rose, wasted spend fell, budget became controllable per program.
Migrated from Maximize Clicks to Maximize Conversions, added a competitor negative list, and caught a phrase-match term matching hospital searchers at $259 CPA. Branded CPA stabilised at $62.98, with the core brand term converting at $56.52.
Built PMax from scratch — asset groups mapped to the top three programs, brand exclusions on, URL expansion off, enrolment-intent signals loaded. At a $275 Target CPA the campaign dropped from $261 to $110 in seven days; we lifted budget from $80 to $120/day to bank the efficiency.
A headline was pulling broad nutrition and lifestyle searches with the wrong intent. We removed it, added precise negatives (nutrición, licenciatura, gratis, diplomado), added UTM-tracked sitelinks, and re-segmented ad groups by program.
A two-layer launch: a video awareness layer that drove 200+ ThruPlays and built tiered viewer audiences (50 / 75 / 100%), feeding a retargeting layer of site visitors, social engagers, viewers, and an inquiry lookalike — testimonial creative into a dedicated thank-you page for clean attribution.
Coordinated the IT-side fixes that make everything else measurable: gclid hidden fields for form-level Google Ads attribution, Meta CAPI for signal quality, UTM standardisation across every campaign and sitelink, and PMax search-theme reviews to strip out irrelevant query categories diluting the conversion signal.
Numbers, not adjectives.
| Metric | Before · Nov 2025 | After · May 2026 | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Ads leads / day | 1.6 | 5.9 | ↑ 3.7× |
| Google Ads source rank | Not in top 3 | #1 — above website | first ever |
| PMax CPA | $261 | $110 | ↓ 58% |
| Branded Search CPA | Rising / untracked | $62.98 stable | contained |
| Weekly Google Ads inquiries | Single digits | 41 (May 3–9) | record |
| Meta paid social | Inactive | Live | new channel |
| Meta audiences built | 0 | 5 custom + lookalike | retargeting on |
Term over term, the same direction.
Lead growth compounded every month of the engagement — no spike-and-fade, just a steady climb to a new ceiling.
From the April 27 class-start term, Google Ads overtook the website as Trinity’s #1 lead source — a first in the school’s paid-media history.
First we build your pipeline.
Then we build the machine that scales it.
Same discipline, whether it's paid search for a law firm or a full revenue engine for a B2B startup — foundations first, proof in numbers.