The client markets luxury properties in South Africa to foreign visitors. Most website leads are acquired via marketplaces listings, paid search and SEO.
Lower-end "luxury properties" generate a majority of the inbound leads from the website, whereas higher end properties generate most of the income and profit of the client's business (classic 80/20 situation).
We decided to optimise Google Ads for high potential leads only, effectively taking leads for low-end luxury properties or from people with less budget as "by-products" of the paid campaigns.
In 2019, we analysed all leads from the different website forms and determined a set of conditions that determined whether a lead was likely to transform for a high-value transaction or not. We then defined a "quality lead" event in Google Tag Manager and fed it back to Google Analytics 4 and Google Ads. We then optimised Google Ads for those "quality leads" only.
We repeated the analysis in 2024 and updated our "quality lead" definition in GTM, making it more restrictive.
The chart shows the number of "quality leads" acquired by Google Ads every year, per the definition of "quality lead" that was adopted by the client in 2024. The CPL is the Google Ads spend divided by the number of "quality leads".
2019 shows some early, marginal improvement vs prior years once the new "quality lead" conversion was being introduced.
The years 2020 and 2021 were marred by lockdowns that disrupted the market, with many competitors temporarily suspending their advertising campaigns. It was difficult to read anything in the results and make meaningful changes around that time.
The years 2022 and 2023 show a +270% increase in the volume of "quality leads" compared to the 2015-2018 period (1900/year vs 500/year), while the average CPL dropped from $108 to $39 (-64% drop). The client decided to ramp up the spend during this period.
The year 2024 was a bit degraded until we tightened the "quality lead" criteria a bit further, with 1700 leads at a $64 CPL for the year.
After 8 months of 2025, we can see the year ending with a record-breaking number of leads, for a CPL around $50.
The Google Ads spend in 2025 is about fourfold that of 2018.
The same "quality lead" approach is being rolled out to the other advertising platforms use by the client, starting out with Meta.