Case Study
3.6× as many qualified leads remaining outside nurture
How a leadership-development platform expanded paid acquisition while building a clearer view of lead quality.
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380
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32% lower
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603
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|---|---|---|
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Non-nurture qualified leads, up from 105
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Cost per non-nurture qualified lead, $1,116 → $762
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Total qualified leads, up from 473
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Reported comparison: February–April vs. May–July 2021. Paid media spend increased 147%. Non-nurture is a CRM status at the reporting snapshot, not a closed sale. Figures rounded.
A B2B leadership-development platform needed to grow demand across search and social. But deciding where to invest was difficult: campaign tracking, lead scoring and sales-stage reporting did not yet provide a consistent view of what happened after a form fill.
Four15’s engagement covered campaign execution and the measurement work around it. The team connected paid activity to channel, campaign and content reporting, tested offers and audiences, and used downstream lead status to guide the next round of investment.
In late 2020, Four15 standardized campaign tracking tags, added content-level tracking and helped rebuild marketing-automation reporting.
The resulting dashboard brought leads, marketing-qualified leads and sales-accepted leads together by source and offer. It gave the team a more useful basis for comparing campaigns than platform conversion counts alone.
The acquisition program promoted practical leadership resources across Google, LinkedIn and Facebook. Four15 tested content, creative, customer-based audiences and remarketing, then added Microsoft Ads. In 2021, the team expanded search around terms that had converted and focused remarketing on more engaged leads.
The work moved from getting campaigns live to understanding which leads stayed qualified as investment grew.
The work began in early 2020 with campaign builds, paid-social launches, conversion tracking and lead-flow troubleshooting. Later that year, content-led acquisition and reporting improvements became central to the program. In 2021, Four15 added qualified-lead reporting, tested more audiences and offers, and scaled search and social investment.
During the May-July 2021 reporting period, the team rebuilt qualified-lead reporting from marketing-automation data, added lifecycle views, refreshed audience lists weekly and corrected a Google conversion-tracking issue. These changes supported more informed budget and targeting decisions across the account.
Qualified leads remaining outside nurture increased by 275, or 262%. Their cost fell by approximately 32%, even as spend more than doubled. This was the strongest favorable efficiency result in the period. Overall cost per qualified lead increased, so the result should not be read as a reduction in acquisition costs across the entire funnel.
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Metric
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Feb-Apr 2021
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May-Jul 2021
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|---|---|---|
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Paid media spend
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$117,232
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$289,567
|
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Total qualified leads
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473
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603
|
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Qualified leads outside nurture
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105
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380
|
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Cost per non-nurture qualified lead
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$1,116
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$762
|
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Cost per qualified lead, all statuses
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$248
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$480
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A lead can qualify and later return to nurture. Looking at the leads still outside nurture gave the team another way to assess the paid program. It also made the next priorities clearer: improve sales feedback, connect advertising to later CRM stages and judge performance with enough time for leads to mature.
The earlier cohort had more time to move through the funnel. Tracking gaps also limited the link between paid leads and opportunities. These reported results describe the measured periods; they do not establish a revenue, profit or return-on-ad-spend improvement.
Paid media strategy and execution; campaign and offer testing; audience development; conversion-tracking troubleshooting; and reporting that connected acquisition activity to lead status.