Google Ads Optimization: How Fewer Clicks Produced More Leads Over 11 Years

By Duncan Lauder Marketing Practicality LLC Google Ads Optimization

Google Ads optimization isn’t about buying more traffic. In 2015, one of our clients spent $4,797 on Google Ads and got 113 leads from 4,457 clicks. In 2025, they spent $4,531 — less money, 64% fewer clicks — and got 305 leads. More leads. Less traffic. Lower cost. The clicks went down. Everything else went up.

Most businesses assume that more traffic means more leads. It’s an intuitive assumption. It’s also usually wrong — at least when “more traffic” means more undifferentiated clicks from a campaign that hasn’t been optimized.

The real metric isn’t how many people clicked your ad. It’s how many of those clicks turned into actual inquiries. And that ratio — conversions per click — is almost entirely determined by how well your campaign targets the right person with the right message at the right moment.

Here’s what that looks like in practice, using 11 years of real data from Kencor Elevator, an independent elevator installation and service company serving PA, NJ, DE, and MD.

64% Fewer clicks 4,457 → 1,613/yr

170% More leads 113 → 305/yr

65% Lower cost per lead $42 → $15

The same budget. A completely different result.

2015 — Early campaign

Annual spend$4,797

Annual clicks4,457

Annual leads113

Cost per lead$42.45

Conversion rate2.4%

Leads per click0.025

2025 — Optimized campaign

Annual spend$4,531

Annual clicks1,613

Annual leads305

Cost per lead$14.85

Conversion rate26.4%

Leads per click0.189

Same company. Same service area. Budget within $266 of each other. The only difference is 10 years of optimization.

The leads-per-click story

The conversion rate improvement — from 2.4% to 26.4% — is the headline number. But the leads-per-click ratio tells the same story more clearly: in 2015, every 40 clicks produced roughly one lead. In 2025, every 5 clicks produces one lead. The campaign is doing 8 times as much useful work per click.

That shift didn’t come from spending more. It came from spending better — specifically from cutting the clicks that weren’t converting and concentrating budget on the searches that were.

Kencor Elevator — clicks vs leads over 11 years

As clicks declined through optimization, leads grew. The gap between the two lines is the efficiency improvement.

Annual clicks (left axis) Annual leads (right axis)

What actually changed

Eleven years of consistent Google Ads management produces this kind of result through a specific set of compounding improvements — none of which are dramatic on their own, but which accumulate into a fundamentally different campaign:

Negative keyword hygiene. Every irrelevant search term that triggers an ad costs money and produces nothing. Adding negative keywords — “elevator music,” “elevator pitch,” residential searches when the client is B2B-only — eliminates wasted spend immediately. Over years, a well-maintained negative keyword list quietly removes thousands of dollars of waste.
Service-specific segmentation. One broad “elevator company” campaign competes for everything and converts on little. Separate campaigns for repair, maintenance contracts, installation, and modernization allow tighter ad-to-landing-page alignment, better Quality Scores, and lower cost-per-click on the searches that actually matter.
Geographic precision. Kencor serves PA, NJ, DE, and MD. Every click from outside that footprint is money that didn’t need to be spent. Refining the geographic targeting over time concentrated the budget where the jobs actually were.
Bid strategy refinement. Moving from broad manual bidding to target-CPA and maximize-conversions bidding — once the account had enough conversion data to work with — allowed Google’s algorithm to find the right auctions. That only works after years of feeding the account clean conversion data.

The accounts that perform best aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones that have been actively managed — negative keywords added, bids adjusted, wasted spend cut — month after month, year after year.

— Duncan Lauder, Marketing Practicality LLC

The efficiency trend, year by year

The table below shows the full trajectory. Watch the leads-per-click column — it starts at 0.025 and ends at 0.189. That’s the compounding efficiency story in a single number.

Year	Clicks	Leads	CPL	Conv. Rate	Leads per Click
2015	4,457	113	$42.45	2.4%	0.025
2016	6,939	201	$33.54	2.9%	0.029
2017	3,949	188	$35.57	5.0%	0.048
2018	2,572	160	$42.12	6.4%	0.062
2019	1,749	105	$33.19	5.7%	0.060
2020	1,301	81	$34.46	7.1%	0.062
2021	2,472	294	$23.63	11.7%	0.119
2022	2,270	300	$19.79	13.3%	0.132
2023	1,880	310	$18.93	16.5%	0.165
2024	1,872	254	$18.65	13.7%	0.136
2025	1,613	305	$14.85	26.4%	0.189

This pattern holds across every vertical we manage

The Kencor numbers are the clearest illustration because the efficiency gain is so stark — 64% fewer clicks producing 170% more leads. But the same trajectory appears in the criminal defense, bankruptcy, and family law campaigns we manage. In every case, the most important optimization isn’t finding more traffic. It’s making better use of the traffic you already have.

What this means for your campaign

If your Google Ads account is generating clicks but not leads, the instinct is usually to spend more. More budget, more impressions, more chances. That instinct is expensive and usually wrong.

The more productive question is: what percentage of your clicks are converting? If it’s under 10%, the problem isn’t reach — it’s relevance. You’re paying for people who aren’t interested, and the fix isn’t more of them.

The digital marketing checklist covers the specific audit points worth reviewing first — negative keywords, geographic targeting, match types, and ad-to-landing-page alignment. For legal practices, the criminal defense, bankruptcy, and family law versions go deeper on vertical-specific issues.