CASE STUDY · BBC EMPORIUM

The account looked like it was working.

Twelve months of reported conversions said the Google Ads account was performing. Almost all of them traced back to a single hosted lead form that collected no qualification data — which meant the ROAS the account reported couldn't be stood behind. The measurement had to be rebuilt before anything else could be judged.

PAID MEDIA

WEBSITES

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Qualified Leads in First 30 Days

THE AUDIT

Three findings, twelve months of data.

A full twelve-month review of the ad account, the analytics, and the site they pointed to. The problems compounded on each other.

01 · CONVERSIONS

The numbers were hollow

Nearly every reported conversion came from a platform-hosted lead form that captured no qualification data. The account was optimizing toward a signal that said nothing about whether a lead was real.

02 · ANALYTICS

Measurement had gone dark

A legacy analytics tag was still installed but had stopped processing data in July 2024. It had gone unflagged. Two years of decisions were being made against a property that wasn't collecting.

03 · DESTINATION

Every CTA led nowhere

The site had been frozen since 2018. The contact form the ads were funneling toward didn't exist. Paid traffic was buying its way to a dead end.

THE REBUILD · 01 / ADS & ANALYTICS

Measurement first. Then structure.

No structural change is worth making while the scoreboard is wrong. Tracking was rebuilt to fire on a real form success state, the inflating asset was removed, and only then did the account get restructured around how people actually search.

Conversion tracking

Rebuilt through tag management and tied to the site's actual form success state, with a lead event firing only on confirmed submission. Verified live before anything downstream was trusted.

The inflating asset

The platform-hosted lead form was removed outright. Reported conversions dropped — which was the point. What remained could be counted on.

Campaign structure

Two overlapping baseball campaigns were consolidated into a single Sports Cards campaign — the manual location bid multipliers that justified the split were being ignored by automated bidding anyway. Comics stayed separate, because the buyer is different.

Ad groups by seller

Three ad groups per campaign, built around who's actually selling: the lifelong collector, the person who inherited a collection, and the one who found their childhood boxes in an attic. Single-keyword ad groups were ruled out — conversion volume is too low to feed automated bidding that thinly.

Negative keywords

Treated as strategy, not housekeeping. Estate-sale and collection-value searches skew heavily toward people looking to buy, not sell — and a buyer clicking a seller ad costs money every time.

THE REBUILD · 02 / WEBSITE

One site. Four ways in.

Someone selling a collection they spent forty years building does not need the same page as someone settling an estate. The rebuild uses a shared hub with persona variants — components built once, then the hero, stakes, objections, and FAQ swap to match who arrived.

The Lifetime Collector

Knows what they have. Wants to know it will be valued properly.

The Executor

Settling an estate on a deadline. Needs the process explained, not the hobby.

The Attic Finder

Found a box. Has no idea whether it's worth anything, and doesn't want to look foolish asking.

Comics

A different category with a different vocabulary. Same architecture, its own variant.

THE RESULT

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QUALIFIED FORM SUBMISSIONS · FIRST 30 DAYS

Worth being precise about what that number is. It isn't a bigger version of the old figure — the old figure counted a form that told nobody anything. This counts real submissions from real sellers, measured against a system that fires only when someone actually completes the form.

The lift is the point. That it can be trusted is the reason it exists.

“We hired Group B to review and rehab our Google Ads campaigns and website integration. He performed excellent work and we are already seeing a significant uptick in traffic and inquiries. I would highly recommend Grant and Group B for your business — professional service at a reasonable price.”

CURT SCHMIDGALL · FOUNDER, BBC EMPORIUM

CLEARED ALONG THE WAY

Seven years of quiet damage.

None of these were on the brief. All of them were costing something.

The contact form every call-to-action pointed to did not exist on the site.

Local business schema listed coordinates in Colorado of their original location, roughly 900 miles from the current location.

A viewport setting disabled pinch-zoom on mobile on a site whose visitors want to look closely at cards.

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