European CRO Case Study

Owning the Funnel: How a European CRO Doubled Pipeline on 25% Less Spend

SectorContract Research Organization (CRO)

Services Used

PPC Marketing Ops

80% lower

Cost per lead, from over €1,000 to around €200

~2x

Sales pipeline versus the prior year

25% less

Annual media spend

~6x

Return on ad spend, previously untracked

Project summary

A European CRO Paying Over €1,000 a Lead to Hear Almost Nothing Back

Our client is a European contract research organization that runs paid search to reach the lab managers, research scientists, and procurement teams who commission preclinical and clinical work. This case study is published anonymously under NDA.

The account was expensive and quiet. Cost per lead had sat above €1,000 for most of the year, and the media budget for the year ahead was being cut, so spending the problem away was never an option.

One Unsegmented Account, Doing the Same Thing Every Day

Nothing in the account had been separated. Branded and non-branded search shared campaigns, so cheap brand clicks flattered the blended cost per lead and hid what acquiring a genuine prospect actually cost. Every region carried the same daily budget, and Monday spent the same as Friday whether Friday converted or not. Newer campaign types sat switched off or untested.

The search term report was the other half of the problem: students looking for protocols, graduates looking for jobs, and academics hunting free methods papers were all being paid for alongside real buyers.

So the brief was not to spend more. It was to find the money already in the account, spread it across more places, and teach the bidding what a good lead actually looked like, in that order.

Why Marzipan

One Team That Could See the Account and the Pipeline at Once

Fixing an account like this needs someone who can read the media buying and the CRM at the same time. The waste was only visible once branded search, the search term report, and day-parting were checked against what actually became pipeline, which meant working across Google Ads, the other channels, and HubSpot as one picture rather than as separate reports.

Marzipan ran the whole thing as one program: the restructure, the channel expansion, the CRM feedback loop, and the continuous testing, with senior specialists accountable for pipeline and revenue rather than clicks.

The approach

Find the Waste, Spread the Bets, Teach the Bidding

Three things happened at once, and the order mattered: we recovered budget that was already being wasted, diversified where it was spent, then fed real deal data back into the bidding so it optimized toward pipeline rather than form fills.

01. Finding the waste

Branded search came out into its own campaigns first, so the real cost of acquiring a new prospect was visible for the first time. The search term report was cleaned next, with students, job seekers, and free-paper hunters all excluded.

Day-parting was then rebuilt from conversion data rather than habit, which meant Tuesday and Wednesday carried noticeably more budget than the back end of the week.

02. Spreading the bets

Performance Max went in as a controlled test and outperformed everything else in the account inside two months, so it took a permanent share of budget. Demand Gen followed.

Beyond Google we added Microsoft Ads, LinkedIn, and a pair of content syndication networks, partly for reach into audiences that never touch a search box, and partly so one bad month in one channel could not drag the quarter down with it.

03. Teaching the bidding what matters

HubSpot deal data was fed back into Google Ads, so the bidding models optimized toward deals rather than form completions. Every keyword was then checked against the CRM to separate the terms that produced conversations with procurement from the ones that produced nothing but admin: high-value terms got priority, and the rest were cut or capped.

Audience layering came last, because it only works once the data underneath it is clean. Lab managers and research scientists now see different copy from procurement teams, and anyone who reads technical content without converting gets a different ad again.

04. Testing the words

Ad copy ran on a continuous test cycle across headlines, descriptions, calls to action, and sitelink text. One headline rewrite came close to doubling click-through on a core campaign, which is a reasonable argument for spending more time on copy and less on settings.

The results

Spend Down, Pipeline Up

Figures are rounded and cover the twelve months after the restructure against the twelve before it. Cost per lead fell from over €1,000 to around €200. Annual media spend came down by about a quarter. Sales pipeline moved from flat to close to double, on roughly €1.8m of booked revenue and around 6x return on ad spend, neither of which had been tracked before.

“We were spending a fortune to hear almost nothing back. Marzipan worked out which half of the budget was doing the work, cut the rest, and then kept proving it month after month. Our sales team noticed before the reporting did.”

VP of Marketing

European contract research organization

Spend went down and pipeline went up, which is the combination that gets a program funded again rather than trimmed. The account is smaller than it was and worth considerably more.

80% lower

Cost per lead, from over €1,000 to around €200

~2x

Sales pipeline, from flat the year before

25% less

Annual media spend

~6x

Return on ad spend, previously untracked

Why Marzipan delivered

What Made This Work

Efficiency before budget. The first gains came from money already in the account: branded search separated out, junk search terms excluded, and day-parting rebuilt from conversion data. No extra spend required.
Deal data, not form fills. Feeding HubSpot deal outcomes back into the bidding meant the algorithms optimized toward pipeline and revenue, not toward whichever keywords produced the most low-value inquiries.
Diversified so no single channel could sink a quarter. Performance Max, Demand Gen, Microsoft Ads, LinkedIn, and content syndication spread both the reach and the risk beyond Google search alone.
Clean data before clever targeting. Audience layering only went live once the underlying conversion data was trustworthy, so the segments meant something rather than compounding noise.
Copy treated as a lever, not an afterthought. Continuous ad testing found a headline that nearly doubled click-through on a core campaign, the kind of gain that settings alone never produce.

FAQs

Paid Search, Answered

How did paid search cost per lead fall by 80% while spend went down?

By fixing efficiency before touching budget. Separating branded search revealed the true cost of new prospects, excluding junk search terms stopped paying for students and job seekers, and rebuilding day-parting from conversion data moved money to the days that convert. Feeding CRM deal data back into the bidding then optimized the account toward pipeline rather than form fills.

Why feed CRM data back into Google Ads?

Form completions are a poor proxy for revenue. By sending HubSpot deal outcomes back to Google Ads, the bidding models learned which clicks became real conversations with procurement and which produced only admin, so budget followed pipeline instead of vanity conversions.

Do you run paid media beyond Google Ads?

Yes. Alongside Google Performance Max and Demand Gen, this program used Microsoft Ads, LinkedIn, and content syndication networks, both to reach buyers who never touch a search box and to keep one bad month in one channel from dragging the whole quarter down. PPC and paid advertising or view all case studies.