How Viking Industrial cut cost per lead by 90% in three months
Viking Industrial's Google Ads was leaking budget at $302 per lead. Three months after a full rebuild, that was down to $30 — and monthly lead volume nearly tripled on a quarter of the spend.
Results Achieved
The Challenge
Viking Industrial sells and rents industrial equipment — diesel generators, solar generators, lighting towers, fuel storage — into mining, construction, and remote-site operations across Australia. Eight physical sites, from Brisbane and Perth down to Cooma and out to Karratha and Moranbah.
The product range is technical. The buyers are specific. And the Google Ads account was quietly burning through budget without much to show for it.
Between October 2024 and January 2025, Viking spent roughly $49,000 on Google Ads and generated 163 conversions. That's an average cost per lead of $302. For an industrial lead-gen account with defined product categories and clear geographic targeting, that number should have been a fraction of what it was.
A few things had drifted. Broad match keywords were pulling in queries that had little to do with what Viking actually sells. Location targeting was loose for a business with eight physical service centres — ads were showing to people nowhere near a Viking site. Ad copy was generic across the board, ignoring the fact that a customer searching for a 100kVA diesel generator has different intent to one searching for lighting tower rental.
Conversion tracking was firing, but the account wasn't optimising toward the right things. And with a monthly ads budget of around $5,000 AUD, there wasn't a lot of room for waste.
When Ben Samios and the marketing team reviewed the account, the diagnosis was clear enough: it wasn't working. What wasn't clear was whether to keep chipping away at it or start again.
The Solution
The account got a full rebuild rather than a series of incremental tweaks. When an account has drifted this far, patching around the edges rarely gets you where you need to go.
Restructure by product category
Generators, lighting, fuel storage, and rental services were split into their own campaigns. Each category has different buyers, different price points, and different search behaviour. Grouping them meant bids, budgets, and ad copy could match the intent behind each search.
Tighten match types
Broad match came off the table for most of the account. Exact and phrase match went in for the product lines with clear commercial intent — the terms where "generator hire Brisbane" is a much better signal than a broad-matched query about home generators or camping gear.
Fix location targeting
Eight service centres meant eight geographic radii, each set around where Viking actually delivers and services. No more ads to people 800km from the nearest Viking site.
Rebuild ad copy per category
Each campaign got its own responsive search ads written to the product and use case. Mining site power, construction lighting, remote-area fuel storage — copy that matched what buyers were actually searching for.
Get tracking clean
Phone calls and form submissions both counted as conversions, with the right attribution windows and duplicate handling.
Bidding
Started on Max Conversions once there was enough clean data flowing through, then added a target CPA constraint as the account stabilised.
The first month post-rebuild wasn't the goal — the point was to get the fundamentals right so the account could compound. By month three, the numbers had shifted meaningfully.
Between February and April 2025, Viking spent around $13,000 on Google Ads and generated 439 conversions. Cost per lead: $30. Same account, same products, same buyers — different structure.
"Chris took over our Google Ads when the account was a bit of a mess. He pulled it apart, rebuilt it from the ground up, and had our cost per lead down 90% within three months. Easy bloke to deal with, tells you straight, and always has a plan for what's next."
Ben Samios
Marketing Manager, Viking Industrial, Viking Industrial
Full Case Study
The lesson from Viking isn't that Google Ads is magic. It's that structural problems don't get fixed by tweaking bids.
When an account has drifted to $302 per lead, the temptation is to lower budgets, pause the worst campaigns, or add a few negative keywords and hope things improve. That approach can shave 10-15% off cost per lead. It rarely gets you to a 90% reduction.
What worked here was accepting that the structure was wrong and rebuilding from the campaign level down. Product categories that share bids and budgets can't be optimised properly. Broad match keywords in a lead-gen account with a modest budget will always leak spend to queries that don't convert. Ad copy that doesn't match the specific product a buyer is searching for gets ignored.
None of that is complicated. But it takes a rebuild, not a patch.
The other thing worth noting: Viking's account went from 163 conversions across four months to 439 conversions across three months — while spending less than a third of what it was before. That's the pattern to watch for when an account has been drifting. There's usually a lot of demand being missed, and a lot of budget being wasted on the wrong searches. Fixing the structure lets both problems resolve at the same time.
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