One company may sell consultations, maintenance and major projects. These services have different timelines, costs and team availability. Assessing them through an overall cost per enquiry can send the budget towards leads that are easy to generate but difficult or unprofitable to serve.
Build an advertising structure that lets the business control spending by service and see each one's results. Start with economics and capacity, then choose the campaigns.
Describe each service as a separate offer
For each service, record:
- the customer's task and scope of work;
- revenue and variable costs;
- the criteria for a suitable enquiry;
- the journey from enquiry to payment;
- service region and language;
- available team capacity;
- the page used for advertising.
Compare services using consistent data. A high project price does not imply a high margin, and a high proportion of enquiries becoming sales does not guarantee capacity for ten more customers.
If one service occupies the team for a month and another for a few hours, also consider the contribution per unit of the constrained resource. This helps show how each service uses the business's available capacity.
Separate campaigns where independent control is needed
A separate campaign makes sense when a service needs its own budget, market, schedule, goals or the ability to pause advertising independently of other services.
Where offers have similar economics and service conditions, they can be combined while keeping ads and pages distinct. Avoid creating a campaign for every minor wording variation: with few enquiries, excessive fragmentation makes evaluation and management harder.
Separate campaigns do not automatically mean separate spending. If a shared budget is used, check its allocation. Google Ads, for example, supports a budget shared across several campaigns; setup is described in the official documentation. The account structure should reflect the rules for managing spending.
Connect enquiries to the service's value
The same “form submitted” event can conceal different outcomes: a small job request, a consultation or a discussion about a large project. Save the service and final qualification in the CRM.
Google Ads allows conversion values to be used for measuring and optimising outcomes; a value can represent revenue or another agreed economic measure. The principles are described in the conversion value documentation.
Define what the values mean before assigning them. Actual revenue for one service and hypothetical points for another cannot be compared as equivalent money. Do not add stages of the same deal as though an enquiry, qualification and payment were three independent sales.
First establish the connection between advertising and CRM sales, then decide which data to use for optimisation.
A hypothetical calculation of an acceptable enquiry cost
Suppose service A contributes €400 after variable costs and service B contributes €1,500. The business allocates up to €100 and €300 respectively to acquiring a customer, leaving the rest for fixed costs and profit.
Comparable historical enquiries show that 40% of qualified enquiries become customers for service A and 10% for service B. The indicative total cost per qualified enquiry is then:
- service A: 100 × 40% = €40;
- service B: 300 × 10% = €30.
In this example, the more expensive service requires a lower cost per suitable enquiry because enquiries lead to sales less often. These are hypothetical benchmarks. Use sales rates from completed enquiries of the same type; when data is limited, calculate scenarios rather than an exact forecast.
If the limit includes advertising management and enquiry handling, the acceptable media-only cost per enquiry will be lower than this calculated total.
Account for capacity when allocating the budget
Even a profitable service does not always need more advertising. Check how many orders the team can accept on time and how a higher volume would affect work quality.
For each service, define when to continue testing, increase spending, reduce it or pause acquisition. Reasons for a change may include a queue, an unavailable specialist, poorer qualification or an excessively expensive additional customer.
Assess spending alongside completed deals. A service with a long sales cycle cannot be labelled weak merely because new enquiries have not yet had time to close. See the separate process for increasing the advertising budget while controlling acquisition cost.
A service advertising management brief
- Name, audience and landing page.
- Contribution per order after variable costs.
- Qualification criteria and historical conversion to sale.
- Customer and enquiry cost limits, with the costs included specified.
- Available team capacity and promised timelines.
- Budget, goals and review rules.
- The person responsible for data and service-level decisions.
This brief supports a discussion of the budget in business terms. To agree on the structure, measurement and management of several services, use our advertising offer. Prepare the service list, sales conditions and team constraints for an estimate.