We managed Google Ads for this nationwide Dutch car-lease operator — offices across the country, serving both consumers and corporate accounts — across a two-year window that included a long stretch without a Chief Marketing Officer. Decision-making slowed; some of the supporting layer that paid media usually relies on simply wasn’t there. We held the cadence regardless. Once the new CMO landed, the deferred restructure work caught up quickly: campaigns were rebuilt for ad-relevance, broad-match catch-alls were starved in favour of intent-mapped clusters, and the cost-per-conversion that had peaked at around €90 settled at roughly €60. Conversion volume doubled, from just over 250 leads a quarter to 500.
Hold the line through the gap. Execute the restructure after.
Disciplined maintenance through a year-plus without a CMO.
For an extended portion of the engagement the operator was running without a Chief Marketing Officer. Strategic decisions that need a marketing executive’s signature simply didn’t get made — landing-page changes, campaign-strategy pivots, budget reshuffles above a certain threshold. What we could do, we kept doing: weekly search-term review, monthly performance check-ins, seasonal reweighting around Dutch car-buying cycles. The hero work was deferred; the maintenance never paused.
A flat trajectory through a leadership gap isn't a failure of paid media. It is what paid media looks like when it is doing its job as the constant while the rest of the organisation transitions.
Once the new CMO landed, the deferred restructure followed quickly.
When the new CMO arrived, the deferred decisions queued up for execution. Campaign structure was rebuilt around lease-decision intent — B2C consumer queries separated from B2B fleet-lease queries, model-specific demand kept distinct from monthly-budget research, brand-defence campaigns set up to protect the operator’s own name. Ad-relevance went up, Quality Scores followed, and the cost-per-conversion line finally moved.
Budget pushed into the clusters that the new structure proved productive.
Visible in the Biggest changes panel: +€14,818 and +€12,318 added to the two campaign clusters where intent-mapped queries were actually converting at scale. The reallocations were not budget increases — they were redirections, made defensible by the conversion data underneath the new structure. By the end of the engagement, conversion volume had doubled (from just over 250 leads a quarter to ~500) and cost-per-lead had dropped from a €90 peak to around €60.
The chart shows the trajectory: yellow cost-per-conv line drifting down across the engagement while red conversion volume climbs through 2021 and 2022. The Biggest changes panel shows two productive campaigns scaled by +€14,818 and +€12,318 once the new structure was in place — the restructure that the CMO gap had deferred, finally executed.
Cost per conversion: from a peak during the CMO gap, with structural work deferred, down to a stabilised level on intent-mapped B2C/B2B clusters with reallocated budget.
24 months, 2,910 conversions, €90 peak down to ~€60 stabilised.
The blended figures across the engagement: 2,910 conversions, €207K total spend, €71.21 average cost per conversion, €1.64 average cost-per-click. The trajectory shows the journey: a flat period during the CMO gap, then a sharp restructure-driven improvement once new leadership landed — quarterly conversion volume doubling and cost-per-lead descending from €90 to around €60.
Was able to work with Feisal for several years in the automotive industry. The goal of our cooperation was to generate as much revenue as possible with online activities for customers in this branch. Feisal has a good outlook and pragmatic approach.
Boring, predictable, attributable. That’s what good PPC looks like.
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