Seven brands. $1.7M a year in Google Ads. Attribution broken since 2022.
In the first 30 days, Ads by Jer rebuilt measurement across the portfolio, restructured the flagship account, and improved paid efficiency 20 to 25% month over month while spend went up.
- Client
- A seven-brand post-acute care software company
- Category
- Post-acute care software: home care, home health, hospice, senior living, long-term care
- Brands
- Seven brands across home care, home health, hospice, senior living and long-term care
- Channels
- Google Ads, LinkedIn, Meta, AdRoll
- Stack
- Salesforce, Pardot, HubSpot, GTM, Unbounce
- Engagement
- August 2026 to present
- Scope
- Paid media strategy and execution, measurement, account restructure
A $105K-a-month account that could not tell you where a lead came from.
The company sells software to home care agencies, hospices, senior living operators and long-term care providers under seven brands. Paid search was the largest demand channel, with the flagship account alone spending over $100K a month.
The measurement underneath it had quietly stopped working. The Google Ads tag was missing from the site after a Tag Manager migration. Paid search UTMs had last been tagged in 2022. LinkedIn tagging had lapsed a year before that. Only 11% of CRM contacts carried any campaign data at all. Click IDs, UTM term and content, and lead source were not syncing from Pardot to Salesforce, so every opportunity was attributed by hand, by whoever the BDR or AE thought made sense.
One person had run RevOps, marketing ops and customer ops across every brand for five years. When the company started a HubSpot-to-Salesforce migration on top of that, the paid program was spending at a $1.7M a year run rate against numbers nobody could defend.
“Every time we have an opportunity, we trust the BDR or the AE to manually attribute whatever they think makes sense.”
Fix what the platforms can see. Then change what they do.
Bids were the last thing we touched. In order:
Rebuilt measurement across the site and the CRM.
Sitewide GCLID capture written and shipped with the client's developer within days. Google Ads tagging restored in GTM and verified on the pricing and demo flows. The Pardot-to-Salesforce field mapping traced and fixed, so click IDs, UTM term and content, and lead source land on the lead and follow it to the opportunity.
Cleaned the lead data the platforms were learning from.
Bad leads had been left in progress instead of disqualified, so reported quality was wrong in both directions. We set the disqualification rules with the BDR team, so the conversion signal Google and LinkedIn optimize toward is a real one.
Restructured the flagship account around how the buyer actually shops.
The flagship's legacy campaigns were consolidated into seven product-line pillars: home health, home care, hospice, EVV and the rest. One theme per ad group, responsive search ads, a product-specific landing page for each, competitor-specific pages, and the top 25 proven keywords per campaign carried over from history. Changes ran as controlled parallel tests, not a cutover.
Moved budget to what was working and let the platform bid to it.
With tracking trustworthy, spend was reallocated to the highest-performing campaigns and Target CPA was turned on. That is where the August efficiency gain came from. The same month, the portfolio expanded into coordinated LinkedIn account-list campaigns against a named competitor, plus Meta and AdRoll for the home care brands.
More conversions, lower cost per conversion, and for the first time, numbers the CFO can trust.
Google Ads platform data, July 1 to 31 against August 1 to 31, 2026. Conversions as each account tracks them: demo, pricing and contact leads. Every row is a real account under management.
| Brand | Spend, Jul → Aug | Conversions, Jul → Aug | Cost per conversion | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flagship account | $89.8K → $106.5K | 220 → 272 | $408 → $392 | +24% conversions at +19% spend |
| Brand B | $7.9K → $7.4K | 27 → 35 | $294 → $210 | Cost per lead down 28% |
| Brand C | $19.9K → $11.3K | 159 → 124 | $125 → $91 | Cost per lead down 27%, spend cut 43% |
| Brand D | $3.2K → $28.7K | 3 → 38 | $993 → $756 | Scaled 9x while cost per lead fell 24% |
The efficiency number the client reported, 20 to 25% better than July, came from the reallocation and Target CPA, and it landed while August spend was going up, not down. The bigger result is quieter: for the first time since 2022, a lead in Salesforce carries the click that created it, which means the next 90 days can be judged on pipeline instead of form fills.
Google Ads platform figures, Ads by Jer manager account, pulled September 17, 2026. Three of the seven brands are excluded from the table because conversion volume was under 40 in both months. Cost per qualified opportunity from Salesforce will be added at the 90-day mark.
If your team cannot produce cost per opportunity, you have a tracking problem, not a media problem.
Every optimization decision in a paid account is made on the conversion signal the platform can see. When that signal is a form fill with no click ID behind it, the platform learns to buy cheap form fills. When it is a Salesforce opportunity with the click attached, it learns to buy pipeline. The account had been optimized for three years against a signal that was mostly missing.
The order matters. Fix the signal, clean the data, restructure around the buyer, then let the platform bid. Doing it the other way round, which is what most agencies do because bids are easy to change and tags are not, produces a better-looking dashboard and the same pipeline.
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Prefer to read first? Download the 2026 benchmarks report