CPL from $180 to $42
in a single season.
A Colorado whitewater rafting outfitter came to their agency mid-season leaking spend and losing bookings to competitors. We took the media seat behind the agency’s brand, rebuilt the account, and turned the summer around in 90 days.
The Situation
A profitable business, an unprofitable account.
The outfitter had been running Google Ads through their agency for three seasons. Bookings were growing on brand, but non-brand paid was underwater. The agency was managing the day-to-day but didn’t have a senior media buyer on the account, and the client was two weeks away from pulling budget.
- $180 blended CPL against a target of $55 — most non-brand clicks weren’t producing booked trips.
- No conversion API or offline import. Google was optimizing to form-fills, not the reservation system.
- Performance Max eating the account, cannibalizing brand and running against irrelevant geos (Kansas, Nebraska).
- One monolithic campaign covering half-day, full-day, multi-day, and family trips — no ability to bid by margin.
The Work
Six moves, executed in the first 30 days.
- 01
Rebuilt conversion tracking end-to-end.
Enhanced Conversions on the site, GA4 events tied to the reservation system, and weekly offline conversion imports for booked trips + revenue. Google stopped optimizing to leads and started optimizing to money.
- 02
Split the account by trip type and margin.
Half-day, full-day, and multi-day became separate campaigns with their own tCPA targets. High-margin multi-day got the aggressive bids; low-margin half-day got throttled.
- 03
Killed and rebuilt Performance Max.
Excluded brand, geo-fenced to a 6-hour drive radius from Buena Vista, swapped in high-intent asset groups by trip type, and fed the algorithm revenue signals instead of form-fills.
- 04
Launched Meta retargeting the site had never had.
Video creative from the guides on the water, retargeting site visitors and past-season bookers. Meta became the reminder channel; Google closed.
- 05
Rewrote the landing pages against booking friction.
Above-the-fold trust signals (safety record, guide count, years running), price ranges visible, and a shorter form. Booking conversion rate roughly doubled on the same traffic.
- 06
Weekly scorecard the agency owns.
A one-page scorecard delivered by the agency’s AM — CPL, booked trips, revenue, next week’s move. The client stopped asking for updates because the updates arrived first.
The Result
Same spend, 2.3× the trips on the calendar.
By day 90 the account was hitting a $42 blended CPL — under the original $55 target — with the same monthly spend. Booked trips more than doubled, blended ROAS more than doubled, and the agency held the client for a second full season. The scorecard the AM delivers each week now doubles as the renewal conversation.
“We kept the client, kept the relationship, and looked like the smartest media shop they’ve ever worked with. Nobody on their side knows we’re not the ones running the account.”
— Agency founder, travel & outdoor vertical
Engagement
Have an account that should be working and isn’t?
We take a 30-minute look at the account, tell you honestly whether it can be turned around, and — if it can — how we’d do it behind your brand.