In short
At first, the ads brought in lots of cheap leads, but nobody knew how much money they made. We rebuilt the website, moved lead collection to quizzes that filter out casual visitors, and set up a CRM with revenue tracking. Leads got more expensive, but now there was money you could actually count: over six months in 2026, paid ads brought in €17,400 in revenue on a budget of €6,413.
Starting point
The company helps applicants from Central Asia get into universities in Slovakia. We ran the first ad tests in summer 2023. From April 2025 we ran Meta Ads with lead forms: in April–December 2025, ads brought in 935 leads at €3.50 each, but the revenue from them wasn’t tracked, and there was no CRM or tracking by source.
The goal was to shift from the number of leads to their quality, and to see how much money each source brings in.
What we did
- Rebuilt the website and created landing pages.
- Moved lead collection from Meta lead forms to the website and quizzes, so leads would come from people who are genuinely ready to apply.
- Set up a CRM and revenue tracking split between paid ads and other channels.
- Ran Google Ads and Meta Ads targeting applicants from Central Asia.
- Worked on organic channels: SEO and GEO, meaning the company’s visibility in the answers of AI assistants like ChatGPT.
- Set up integrations between the website, ads and the CRM.
Results
Six months with a CRM: March–August 2026
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Ad budget | €6,413 |
| Leads from paid ads | 566 |
| Cost per lead | €11.33 |
| Revenue from paid ads | €17,400 |
| Revenue per €1 of ads | €2.71 |
Before and after: April–December 2025 and March–August 2026
| Metric | 2025: lead forms, no tracking | 2026: website, quizzes, CRM |
|---|---|---|
| Ad budget | €3,270 | €6,413 |
| Leads from ads | 935 | 566 |
| Cost per lead | €3.50 | €11.33 |
| Revenue from ads | not tracked | €17,400 |
Leads became three times more expensive: partly because of the deliberate shift to qualified leads, and partly because advertising itself got more expensive over the year. In return, the owner got an answer to the key question: how much money the ads bring in.
Highlights
- In May–July 2026: 129–143 leads a month from paid ads, and up to 190 a month from all channels in the CRM.
- In March–August 2026, the business’s total revenue from all channels was €53,300. Besides paid ads, this includes calls, SEO and visibility in AI assistants, which we worked on, plus Instagram, which the company ran itself.
- Revenue peaked in August, during the admissions campaign: €7,900 from paid ads in a month.
How we calculated
- Source: monthly plan vs. actual reports and the client’s CRM.
- Revenue is income the CRM linked to the lead source. The sales cycle is long, so a month’s revenue often comes from leads from previous months. That’s why we calculate the total for the whole period rather than monthly returns.
- Other channels (calls, SEO, AI assistants, Instagram) appear as a single line in the report, so the case’s headline figures cover paid ads only.
- 2025 data covers Meta Ads only and excludes May, for which there’s no report.
- Ads were off from 24 August 2026; revenue for 24–31 August came from leads from previous weeks.
