Lead cost from €126 to €78 without new landing pages

What was broken

One campaign mixed brand and non-brand keywords, a structure that flatters every report. People searching the company's own name convert cheaply and would have arrived anyway; blended with them, the real cost of winning a stranger's quote request was invisible. Split out during the audit, non-brand CPL stood at €126 while brand sat near €19. The account had effectively been buying its own signage and calling it growth.

The second finding was absence, not breakage: no Microsoft Advertising account existed at all. For a desktop-heavy industrial buyer profile, that is money left on the table, since Microsoft's average search CPC runs around $1.54 against Google's $2.69, and procurement teams search from office desktops during business hours.

The fixes, in order

1. Weeks 1–2: brand and non-brand split into separate campaigns with separate budgets and targets. Brand capped at its historical volume; every report thereafter shows non-brand economics alone.
2. Weeks 2–4: non-brand rebuilt around 14 product families with exact-match cores and German-language negatives for DIY, second-hand, and jobs queries; 267 negatives in the first month.
3. Weeks 3–5: Microsoft Ads launched via import, then re-tuned: desktop-first modifiers, its own negative lists, and a UET tag counting the same quote-form actions as Google.
4. Weeks 5–8: budget rebalanced to 82% Google / 18% Microsoft based on observed CPL, with pacing alerts at ±20% of plan.

The channel split at close

The Microsoft slice benefits from a targeting layer Google cannot offer: LinkedIn profile bid adjustments, boosting manufacturing industries and engineering job functions on the same queries. Professional-audience clicks that cost $8 to $15+ on LinkedIn's own platform arrive here wrapped around Microsoft's $1.54 average search CPC, which is most of the explanation for the sidecar's persistent 24% advantage on this account.

What we left alone

The landing pages, the CRM, and the tempting German-language Display network. Quote pages converted at a healthy rate once qualified traffic reached them; the CRM integration worked and merely needed its data imported; and Display for industrial B2B is where budgets go to buy impressions among procurement teams' solitaire sessions. Each decision sits in the change log with its reasoning, which is also what makes the monthly report auditable by a managing director who has never opened Google Ads.

The lift, with context

Non-brand cost per quote request finished at €78, down 38% from €126, while lead volume held within 6% of the prior period. The 2026 LocaliQ tables place industrial and commercial cost per lead at a $75.19 median, so €78 sits right at the vertical's midpoint: believable, repeatable, and honest about what an 8-week engagement can do. The Microsoft slice closed the quarter 24% cheaper per lead than Google in the same account, a gap that has since held for a second quarter. Jorren Vandermeer notes this engagement as the standard case for the sidecar rule: 15–20% of budget to Microsoft, judged monthly, never assumed.

What this teardown generalizes to

Any account reporting blended brand and non-brand numbers is overstating its performance, full stop. Separating them takes an afternoon and changes every decision downstream. If your buyer profile is desktop and professional, the Microsoft Ads sidecar is the cheapest test available, and the waste audit prices both problems in euros before you commit to anything.