Solved: Identifying Underperforming Bathroom Design Campaigns

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Happy to give you some initial thoughts on the situation you described. It's a classic problem, especially in high-ticket home services where the sales cycle feels like a marathon. You're stuck in this constant battle between marketing spend and sales results, with a huge time lag in between that makes it impossible to know what's actually working.

But I'm going to be brutally honest with you. The issue you're facing, this constant battle with the sales team and the agonisingly slow feedback loop... it isn't really a sales problem. It's a marketing and lead qualification problem. You're trying to measure the performance of a 100-metre sprint with a calendar, and it's driving you mad. The solution isn't to get the sales team to run faster; it's to start using a stopwatch and, more importantly, to make sure you're running the right race in the first place.

Let's unpack that a bit. You're waiting for the ultimate conversion – a signed contract for a full bathroom renovation – to decide if a campaign from three, six, or even twelve months ago was any good. That's an impossible situation. We need to give you a way to judge a campaign's quality within days, not months. And that starts by fundamentally rethinking how you generate and categorise your leads.

We'll need to look at why your feedback loop is broken...

Right now, it sounds like a lead is a lead. Someone fills in a form, the sales team gets it, and the clock starts ticking. But not all leads are created equal. You have two fundamentally different types of potential customers, and you're almost certainly lumping them all together in the same bucket.

1. The "Problem Solver": Their toilet is leaking, their shower has given up, or they've just decided they cannot live with that avocado-coloured 1970s bathroom suite for one more day. They have an urgent, expensive problem. They are actively searching for a solution. They are hot. They go to Google and type in "emergency plumber near me" or "bathroom renovation quote [your town]".

2. The "Inspiration Seeker": They're scrolling through Instagram on a Tuesday night and see a beautiful photo of a freestanding bath. They think, "Ooh, that's nice. Maybe one day." They might click on your ad, browse your gallery, maybe even download a brochure. They are not problem-aware; they are dream-aware. They are cold, or at best, lukewarm. They are your 3-12 month pipeline.

Your current strategy, from what I can gather, treats both of these people exactly the same. They both become a "lead" that the sales team has to chase. But the "Problem Solver" is ready to talk quotes and timelines now. The "Inspiration Seeker" is nowhere near ready. Giving a list of "Inspiration Seekers" to a sales team and asking for quick feedback is like giving a chef a bag of seeds and asking for a salad in five minutes. It's not going to happen. The raw ingredients aren't right.

This is the absolute core of your issue. You're judging your campaigns on a lagging indicator (the final sale) instead of a leading indicator (the initial quality and intent of the lead). We need to fix that first.

I'd say you need a proper lead qualification framework...

So, how do we fix it? We create a system that gives you feedback in 24-48 hours. We stop asking the sales team "did they buy yet?" and start asking "how good is this lead, right now?".

You need to implement a simple lead scoring system that your sales team uses on the very first contact call. Forget complex CRM automations for now. This can be done in a simple shared spreadsheet. Every new lead gets categorised immediately.

Here's a framework I'd suggest:

• A-Lead (Hot): This is your ideal customer, right now. They have a specific project (e.g., "I want to convert my bathroom into a wet room"). They have a rough timeline in mind ("within the next 3 months"). They have a budget, or are at least realistic about costs. They are ready to book a consultation or site visit.
• B-Lead (Warm): They have a genuine interest and a project in mind, but the details are fuzzy. The timeline might be "sometime this year" and they have no idea about budget. They need education and nurturing, but they're a real prospect.
• C-Lead (Cold): This is your "Inspiration Seeker". They say things like "just looking for ideas" or "we're thinking about it for maybe next year". They are not a sales opportunity right now; they are a long-term marketing opportunity.
• D-Lead (Dud): Wrong number, spam, tyre-kicker just looking for a price list, or completely unqualified for other reasons (e.g., outside your service area). These should be discarded immediately.

Once this is in place, your entire world changes. You stop judging a campaign's success on sales in 12 months and start judging it on the Cost per A-Lead this week. You can look at a spreadsheet and say:

"Okay, Campaign X spent £500 and generated 20 leads. But the sales team marked 18 of them as C-Leads and 2 as D-Leads. The Cost per Lead was £25, but we didn't get a single A or B-Lead. This campaign is a failure. Kill it."

"Conversely, Campaign Y spent £500 and only generated 5 leads. The Cost per Lead was £100, which looks expensive. But the sales team marked 3 of them as A-Leads and 2 as B-Leads. Our Cost per A-Lead is £167. For a project worth £10k+, that's a fantastic return. Scale this campaign immediately."

See the difference? Your feedback loop shrinks from a year to a few days. You can now make intelligent, data-driven decisions about your ad spend. The conversation with the sales team is no longer an argument; it's a quick, collaborative qualification process. This simple shift in perspective is the single most valuable change you can make to your marketing operations. It's not about working harder; it's about having clarity.

You probably should rethink your channel strategy...

This qualification framework naturally leads to the next step: using the right channels to attract the right kind of leads. If you want A-Leads, you need to go where A-Leads live. And they live on Google.

For Your A-Leads: Dominate Google Search

People don't go to Facebook when their boiler breaks. They go to Google. This is where active, commercial intent is highest. This should be the bedrock of your lead generation and where the majority of your budget should go, at least initially. You want to capture the demand that already exists.

For instance, we're currently running a campaign for an HVAC company in a competitive area, and they are seeing costs of around $60/lead. We’ve also had a campaign for a home cleaning company which got a cost of £5/lead. Bathroom design is a much higher-ticket item, so you should expect a higher Cost per Lead, but the principle is the same. The leads you get from search are fundamentally better qualified because they are actively looking for you.

You should structure campaigns around two main service types:

1. Plumbing (Urgent Needs): This is for your "Problem Solvers". Keywords here are things like:
   • emergency plumber [city]
   • leaky tap repair
   • blocked drain service
   • 24 hour plumber near me
   The ads for these keywords should be direct, mention fast service, and have a clear call-to-action, ideally a phone number they can click to call straight away (call extensions are vital here).
2. Bathroom Design (Considered Purchases): This is for people further along the research phase. The keywords are less urgent but still show high intent:
   • bathroom fitters [city]
   • bathroom renovation company
   • wet room installation cost UK
   • local bathroom designers
   The ads here can point to a gallery page or a dedicated landing page about your design process, with a strong call-to-action to "Book a Free Design Consultation".

By focusing on search, you will generate a far higher proportion of A-Leads. The feedback will be fast, and you'll be able to directly attribute revenue to your spend much more effectively.

For Your B & C-Leads: Use Meta for Inspiration

This doesn't mean you should abandon social media ads. Far from it. Facebook and Instagram are powerful tools, but you need to use them correctly. Their job isn't to generate A-Leads. Their job is to create future demand and capture the "Inspiration Seekers" – your B and C-Leads.

The goal of your Meta campaigns should be to build an audience you can nurture over time. The creative should be highly visual: stunning before-and-after videos, carousels of different design styles, testimonials from happy clients. You're not selling a service; you're selling a dream.

Crucially, the offer needs to match the audience's intent. Don't ask a cold prospect on Instagram to "Request a Quote". That's too much, too soon. Instead, offer them something of value in exchange for their contact details. This is called a lead magnet.

• "Download Our Free 2024 Bathroom Trends Guide"
• "Get a Free 3D Visualisation of Your Dream Bathroom"
• "Enter to Win a £500 Voucher Towards Your Renovation"

When someone takes up one of these offers, they become a B or C-Lead. They go onto your email list. The sales team can give them a quick follow-up call to qualify them using the A/B/C/D framework, but the expectation is different. These leads are for nurturing with monthly newsletters, design tips, and project showcases until they are ready to become an A-Lead.

The success of these campaigns is measured differently. You're not looking at Cost per A-Lead. You're looking at Cost per Guide Download or Cost per Email Subscriber. It's a completely different metric for a completely different strategic goal. This seperation is what will give you clarity.

Here's a calculator you can use to start thinking in this new way. Play around with the numbers based on a recent campaign. Instead of just looking at the total leads, see what your cost per *qualified* lead actually is. This simple tool can reframe how you view campaign performance entirely.

You'll need a better way to structure your campaigns and measurement...

So, the final piece of the puzzle is to structure your advertising accounts to reflect this new, bifurcated strategy. You need separate campaigns with separate goals, separate creative, and separate metrics for success. This isn't just for organisational neatness; it's to ensure the platform's algorithms are optimising for the right thing.

Proposed Ad Account Structure

Here’s a high-level look at how you could structure things. Think of it as building two distinct machines: one for harvesting existing demand and one for creating future demand.

By separating your efforts like this, you create clarity. The Google Ads budget is for immediate, measurable results. The Meta Ads budget is a long-term investment in building your brand and filling your pipeline for next year. You can justify both, and you can measure the performance of both accurately and quickly, without waiting for that final sale.

This is a fundimental shift from just "running ads" to building a predictable client acquisition system. It takes more strategic thought up-front, but it saves an immense amount of wasted budget, frustration, and friction with your sales team down the line. You'll finally be able to answer the question "is our marketing working?" with confidence, and in near real-time.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

I know this is a lot to take in, and implementing a system like this can seem daunting. It requires a shift in mindset from everyone in the team, from marketing to sales. But getting it right is the difference between an agency that's constantly guessing and one that has a reliable, scalable engine for growth.

This is exactly the kind of strategic challenge we specialise in solving. It goes beyond just setting up keywords and ads; it's about building the entire commercial framework around your advertising to make it predictable and profitable.

If you'd like to discuss this further, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can look at your specific situation and start mapping out what this system would look like for your agency. It might be the most valuable 30 minutes you spend on your marketing this year.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh