The Results
Three clients, three channels, one method. Every number below comes from the client's own reporting, and the caveats are printed right alongside the wins.
Education · SAT and ACT Test Prep
~6% → ~10%
Sales page order rate
~$13,000 → ~$26,000
Monthly Grammar revenue
$0
Added ad spend
James Treadway sells SAT and ACT test-prep flashcards. His Grammar funnel worked: paid ads sent visitors to a sales page, the sales page sent buyers to an order form, and roughly 6 percent of the people who reached the page ordered. Profitable, and leaking.
The obvious lever would have been more traffic, which means more budget. We took the other lever. We rewrote and rebuilt that one sales page, the copy and the layout, and deliberately changed nothing else. The ad budget stayed flat. The order form was untouched. That isolation was the point: if revenue moved, the page would be the only thing that could explain it.
Then we let it run for about a month and reviewed the numbers live with James. The order rate rose from about 6 percent to about 10 percent, and monthly Grammar revenue moved from about $13,000 to about $26,000. Average cart value dipped from about $300 to about $255 because far more people were buying, which is the trade you want.
"We went from 13 to 26. Totally... It is inarguable, I would say."
James Treadway, on the May 26, 2026 review call
Your sales page is often the cheapest lever you have. Before paying to bring in more traffic, it is worth asking how well the traffic you already pay for is converting. Change one thing at a time, and when the number moves, you know exactly why.
National Childcare Business Coaching
19.52%
Click-through rate
$1.13
Cost per click
1,698
Clicks on $1,921.63 total
A national childcare-industry coaching company runs an annual summit for childcare business owners. Their paid acquisition leaned on social, which interrupts people who are not necessarily looking. Search does the opposite. It reaches the owner who has already decided something needs to change and is typing that need into Google. The question was whether that demand existed for a narrow B2B audience, and what it would cost to reach.
Rather than guess, we funded a small, controlled search campaign at roughly $5.50 per day and matched the ad copy tightly to the specific searches a childcare owner actually types, so the ad answered the query instead of competing for attention.
Over about 11.5 months, from May 1, 2025 to April 15, 2026, the campaign held a 19.52 percent click-through rate at $1.13 per click, across 8,700 impressions and 1,698 clicks. Commonly reported benchmarks for education and training search ads sit around 3 to 5 percent click-through and $2.40 per click, with broader B2B near $3.33. This campaign ran at roughly four times the benchmark click-through, at a third to a half of the expected cost per click.
A high click-through rate on search is not a creative trick. It is evidence that the words in the ad match the words in the search. The mechanism is the match, and the match holds at any budget. The channel is proven and underfunded, not unproven.
Home Service Business Coaching
$9.09
Per lead, best audience
$7.98
Per lead, best campaign
22
Campaigns over 3 years
A coaching group for blue-collar trade business owners coaches home service business owners in HVAC, plumbing, and electrical. Their best prospects are hard to reach online and easy to waste money on, but they gather physically at a handful of industry conferences each year. So we built a program called Hotel Hijack to reach those owners at those events, and ran it as a disciplined three-year test rather than a spend.
From February 2023 to February 2026 we ran 22 campaigns against more than ten events on $2,120.75 total, measuring the only two numbers that matter for this goal: leads and cost per lead, event by event. Blended, the program produced 45 leads at $47.13 each. The blended number deliberately includes the losing tests. The finding is underneath it.
One audience, Authority Brands events, returned 20 leads at $9.09 each across two campaigns. The best single campaign, October 2023, produced 19 leads at $7.98 each on $151.67 of spend. And every lead in three years came from a leads-objective campaign. The traffic and awareness campaigns, including one with the highest click-through rate in the entire program, returned zero leads.
Objective beat budget, and relevance beat spend. When a setup did not produce leads, we did not defend it. We recorded it and stopped. That discipline turned a crowded, easy-to-waste niche into a repeatable source of sub-$10 leads.
These are specific clients with specific markets, offers, and budgets. They are results, not guarantees. Yours will depend on your market, your offer, and the work.
The Verdict is compressed Hidden Layer research on your buyers, three ads built from it, and a live walkthrough with Lance. The research is yours to keep either way.
Book The Verdict $997 · Delivered live on a call with Lance Pincock