More suitable enquiries, with the same advertising budget
Client: Citywide Cleaning Company (Manchester office / commercial cleaning).
Service: Recurring office / commercial contracts.
Channel: Google Search.
At an unchanged £6,000 monthly Google Ads budget, qualified enquiries rose from 25 to 40 per month. Cost per qualified enquiry fell from £240 to £150. Signed annual contract value for the comparable cohort rose from £60,000 to £96,000 within the same 60-day sales follow-up window.
Client & brief
Citywide Cleaning Company delivers recurring cleaning for offices and commercial premises across Greater Manchester. The brief was to increase suitable opportunities without raising the £6,000 monthly media budget. Form volume was not the primary goal, and delivery capacity was treated as finite.
A useful enquiry included a serviceable postcode, a commercial address, a decision-maker or authorised contact, and a requirement the cleaning team could fulfil. A generic request for a cleaning quote was not enough.
Average contract value used for reporting was £1,000 per month (£12,000 annual contract value), as a simplifying average across office sizes and cleaning frequencies. Actual quotations still depended on site survey, cleaning hours, access, consumables and scope.
Situation before engagement
The account was spending £6,000 per month on Google Search and receiving 100 enquiries. The headline cost of £60 per enquiry looked reasonable, but only 25 enquiries met the sales team’s requirements.
Unsuitable enquiries included people looking for cleaning jobs, household cleaning and work outside the service area. Sales staff spent time sorting them before they could arrange site visits for businesses looking for an ongoing office cleaning contract.
Campaign reporting stopped at the form submission. A request for a weekly office clean and an enquiry about a domestic one-off clean appeared as the same conversion.
What we changed
We reviewed search terms alongside the reasons sales rejected enquiries. Campaigns were separated around office cleaning and commercial cleaning contracts. Employment and domestic-cleaning searches were excluded, and location targeting was tightened to the area the business could serve.
Ads made recurring office cleaning more explicit. Visitors landed on a page explaining the commercial service and requesting the office postcode, approximate size and cleaning frequency.
A weekly feedback sheet connected each lead to its qualification status, quotation and eventual outcome. That shifted campaign review toward suitable opportunities, rather than the largest possible number of forms.
Results
Baseline month versus month three. Each lead cohort used the same 60-day sales follow-up window.
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly Google Ads spend | £6,000 | £6,000 |
| Total enquiries | 100 | 90 |
| Qualified enquiries | 25 | 40 |
| Qualified share of enquiries | 25.0% | 44.4% |
| Cost per qualified enquiry | £240 | £150 |
| Quotes issued | 10 | 16 |
| Contracts signed | 5 | 8 |
| Quoted annual contract value | £120,000 | £192,000 |
| Signed annual contract value | £60,000 | £96,000 |
What the numbers mean
Qualified enquiries rose 60% and cost per qualified enquiry fell 37.5%. Total enquiries fell by 10%, which was acceptable because more of the remaining enquiries matched the commercial service.
Eight signed contracts at the £12,000 average represent £96,000 in annual contract value, compared with £60,000 before. That is not cash collected, profit or a guaranteed twelve months of retained revenue. Quoted value and signed value are different pipeline stages and must not be added together.
The qualified-lead-to-quote rate stayed at 40% and the quote-to-win rate at 50%. The improvement came from generating more suitable opportunities, not from assuming every sales stage improved at once.
Qualification breakdown
In the baseline month, 1,500 paid-search clicks at an average £4.00 cost per click produced 100 enquiries. Reviewing those enquiries explained why the campaign dashboard and the sales team told different stories.
| Baseline enquiry classification | Count |
|---|---|
| Suitable recurring commercial requirement | 25 |
| Employment or recruitment enquiry | 24 |
| Domestic or one-off household cleaning | 21 |
| Outside the agreed service area | 18 |
| Duplicate, unreachable or insufficient detail | 12 |
| Total | 100 |
Each record received one primary classification. The original enquiry and classification reason were retained so the campaign team could challenge inconsistent decisions.
Implementation timeline
Week one: establish the baseline. Export search terms and campaign results, check that a form submission is counted once, and reconcile the 100 recorded enquiries against the sales log. Agree the qualification rules with the person handling quotes. Identify which searches created work the business did not want.
Week two: restructure around the requirement. Separate office-cleaning searches from broader commercial-cleaning searches, with distinct ad groups and messaging. Review terms relating to cleaning jobs, wages, training and household services. Add negative keywords with appropriate match types after checking context, rather than excluding every term containing an ambiguous word such as “job”.
Week three: improve the destination and handover. Send office-related searches to a focused commercial page. Explain the service area, recurring nature of the work and site-assessment step. Add postcode, approximate office size and cleaning frequency to the form. Route enquiries into the existing sales workflow with campaign identifiers attached.
Weeks four to six: use sales feedback. Review qualification reasons each week. Adjust search coverage and location settings where the evidence supports it. Read the actual enquiries rather than relying only on counts, because a commercial cleaning request can still be unsuitable if its scope is too small or its access requirements cannot be met.
Weeks seven to twelve: consolidate. Keep a change log, avoid changing targeting and page copy simultaneously without a reason, and assess the rolling pattern rather than reacting to one poor day. Compare lead cohorts after allowing the same sales follow-up period.
Creative & landing page changes
Search theme shipped: “office cleaning Manchester”. Headlines used included “Office Cleaning Manchester” and “Request a Site Assessment”, with copy stating that the service is for commercial premises and recurring requirements.
The landing page opened with the same commercial proposition. It explained what information was needed to prepare a useful quote, then asked for the minimum details required to assess fit. It did not promise a fixed cleaning price before the scope was known.
The confirmation screen told the enquirer that the team would review the requirement and discuss a site assessment if appropriate. Sales aimed to make an initial attempt within one working day.
Month-by-month delivery
| Campaign delivery measure | Baseline | Month two | Month three |
|---|---|---|---|
| Media spend | £6,000 | £6,000 | £6,000 |
| Paid-search clicks | 1,500 | 1,420 | 1,350 |
| Average cost per click | £4.00 | £4.23 | £4.44 |
| Total enquiries | 100 | 94 | 90 |
| Qualified enquiries | 25 | 33 | 40 |
| Cost per qualified enquiry | £240.00 | £181.82 | £150.00 |
Average click cost rose as traffic became more focused. Better lead quality did not mean cheaper clicks. Month two was the intermediate checkpoint; month three is the comparison point. Averages are rounded.
Pipeline: enquiry → contract
For the baseline cohort, 25 suitable enquiries led to 15 completed site assessments, 10 written quotes and five signed contracts within 60 days. For the month-three cohort, 40 suitable enquiries led to 24 site assessments, 16 quotes and eight signed contracts within the same window.
In each cohort, 60% of qualified enquiries reached a completed assessment, two-thirds of assessments led to a quote, and half of quotes were signed. Stage rates were held constant on purpose. The story is improved acquisition quality, not a sudden change in sales closing ability.
Some suitable enquiries never progressed because the buyer deferred a decision, retained the current supplier or did not complete the assessment. An unquoted enquiry is not automatically bad traffic. At the 60-day cut-off, open opportunities remained separate from confirmed losses.
Annual contract value in the table uses the £12,000 average. Where individual contracts differ, reporting should use the value on each signed agreement.
Example opportunity record
CRM record C-031 (anonymised):
Day 1 — office-cleaning search; enquiry includes a Manchester business postcode, an office of approximately 400 square metres and three cleaning visits per week. Day 2 — sales confirms the enquiry as suitable. Day 8 — site assessment completed. Day 11 — quote issued. Day 26 — signature recorded.
The original acquisition source stayed attached as the opportunity progressed. Signature date was not treated as the acquisition date.
In weekly review, one ad group produced fewer forms but more site assessments. Before changing its budget, the team compared qualification reasons and allowed the sales window to mature. The decision log recorded the observation, the change, the reason and the date.
Obstacle we handled
Extra form questions can reduce response. An early draft asked every visitor for an exact floor plan and a detailed cleaning specification. That would have made assessment easier but put too much work on someone making an initial enquiry.
The shipped form asks for approximate size and cleaning frequency, with detail collected during the assessment. That balanced early qualification with a manageable first step. No separate numerical uplift is claimed for this form decision alone.
Next phase
Continue a comparable observation period at the same budget while confirming that the cleaning team can fulfil additional contracts. Budget increases are discussed only after assessing lead quality, sales capacity and contract economics. A higher volume of suitable enquiries does not justify overselling available service capacity.
Interpretation notes
Cohorts are small; this was not a controlled experiment. Demand, competitor activity, response time, quotation pricing and seasonal changes can influence outcomes. A fair report states that the improvement occurred alongside the changes, rather than attributing everything to a single keyword adjustment.
The £6,000 figure is media spend only. It excludes agency fees, sales time and cleaning delivery costs. Neither £96,000 of signed annual value nor its ratio to ad spend should be presented as profit or a cash-based return on advertising spend.