Paid search to a landing page

What is a paid search funnel?

It is advertising bought against search queries — on Google and Microsoft’s networks — pointed at a landing page that offers one thing and asks for one action. In coaching that action is almost always booking a discovery call rather than buying anything.

The defining property is intent. Unlike social advertising, which interrupts, search advertising answers. The person typed the query.

That is why a funnel with only minutes of contact in it converts calls at 14 to 18 per cent, rather than the 2 to 5 per cent of reached people that short-contact structures are conventionally assigned — a practitioner rule of thumb rather than a measured band, and one paid search visibly beats.

What it is not: it is not a website. Sending paid traffic to a homepage with navigation, an about page and a blog is the commonest and most expensive error here. A landing page has one offer and no exits.

It is also not a channel that works without search demand. If nobody types your category, there is nothing to bid on. Executive, business and career coaching have real query volume; the more feeling-shaped a niche is, the less its buyers search for it by name.

What happens between the search query and the booked call?

Six steps, three of which you can measure precisely and two of which coaches routinely forget to measure at all.

1. The query

   A search that indicates intent rather than curiosity. "Executive coach for new managers" is a different buyer from "what is coaching". Match type decides which of the two you pay for.

2. The ad

   Judged on click-through rate and on what it promises. An ad that overclaims buys clicks that the landing page cannot convert, and you pay for both.

3. The landing page

   One offer, one action, no navigation. This is where the documented 17 per cent is measured, on sessions that arrived. It is the highest-leverage surface in the funnel by a wide margin.

4. The booking

   A time selected against real availability. Friction here is invisible and expensive: a form that asks for six fields loses people who had already decided.

5. The show-up

   The unmeasured stage. Between a booking and a call sits a no-show rate that nobody publishes and every operator experiences. Reminders are the cheapest intervention in this funnel.

6. The call, then the offer

   Closes at 14 to 18 per cent measured on calls held. High intent, no relationship — which is precisely the profile that produces a mid-teens close rate rather than the 40 to 70 per cent that referrals produce.

What does a Google Ads funnel convert at?

Two stages here carry real documented figures, which makes this funnel unusual on this site. Note that the two figures are measured on different populations and cannot be multiplied casually without accounting for the unmeasured no-show gap between them.

The $65 to $150 is a cost per booked discovery call. At a 16 per cent close, the implied cost per client is roughly $400 to $940 before any allowance for no-shows.

The documented case, in full

What does paid search cost to build and run?

The advertising is the visible cost and the smaller question. Booked calls cost $65 to $150 each, so a month at forty calls costs $2,600 to $6,000 in media alone. Coaches spending in the $500 to $2,000 band are described in the report as established with consistent paid channels; below that band you are buying data rather than clients.

The learning period is a real and often unbudgeted cost. Expect four to eight weeks before cost per booked call stabilises, and expect the first weeks to be more expensive than the average. Stopping during that window is the most common way coaches conclude the channel does not work.

The supporting stack is modest by comparison. Scheduling at $12 a month, video at $14.99, payments at roughly three per cent of what you collect. Coachful, which publishes this site, bundles scheduling, video, payments and the client-facing side from $29 a month; Calendly at $12 is the strongest pure scheduling tool there is, and its booking experience is better than anything bundled has matched.

The genuinely expensive input is the landing page, and it is expensive in iteration rather than money. The difference between 17 per cent and 5 per cent is worth more than every other optimisation in this funnel combined: at $65 per call, the same spend that produces 43 calls at 17 per cent produces roughly 13 at 5 per cent.

Who can run paid search, and who should not?

How does a paid-search call compare with a call from anywhere else?

All four bands below are measured on the same population — discovery calls actually held — which makes this the one genuinely like-for-like comparison on this site. Paid search sits third of four.

Intent buys a mid-teens close. Exposure buys roughly twice that, and transferred trust more again. This is what a paid-search funnel is accepting when it buys a booked call at $65 to $150 and skips every other stage.

How fast does paid search produce a client?

Immediate to first clicks, days to first booked calls, and four to eight weeks to a cost per call you can plan against. It is the fastest structure in this set to switch on, and the report describes it as such without qualification.

The client cycle then follows the call: a discovery call held this week closes or does not close within days, which makes paid search the only funnel here with a genuinely weekly feedback loop. Compare the content and email structure at six to eighteen months.

That speed is the argument for it and the trap inside it. A weekly loop invites weekly changes, and changing the landing page, the ad and the bid strategy in the same week produces a result nobody can attribute. Change one surface at a time and give each change enough calls to mean anything.

Why do coaching Google Ads campaigns lose money?

Five leaks, roughly in order of how much money each one costs per month.

• The landing page underperforms. 17 per cent against 5 per cent is a 3.4 times difference in cost per call on identical spend. Nothing else in this funnel has that leverage.
• No-shows between booking and call. The unmeasured stage. Every booking that does not become a call is a $65 to $150 unit already paid for. Reminders and a confirmation step cost nothing.
• Broad match spends on the wrong intent. Paying for curiosity queries at the same price as buying queries. This shows up as high click volume and a landing page that suddenly looks broken.
• The call has no structure. The 14 to 18 per cent band already assumes high intent and no relationship. An unstructured call lands under it, and the media cost is unchanged.
• Optimising on leads rather than clients. The cheapest lead is frequently the worst. Meta Ads deliver leads at $30 to $80 and a $30 lead that never books is more expensive than a $150 booked call.

What does paid search pair with?

It pairs best with a stronger page offer than "book a call". A free assessment or audit converts to a conversation at 40 to 60 per cent measured on completed assessments, against 17 per cent for a booking form, because it asks for participation rather than commitment.

It pairs with retention arithmetic rather than with another funnel. An implied $400 to $940 cost per client is comfortable against a business coaching 90-day accelerator and uncomfortable against a single session. Executive coaching renews at 55 to 65 per cent, which changes the sum entirely.

It pairs badly with impatience and with any expectation of an asset. Paid search is a tap: the flow starts when you open it and stops when you close it. Content and email is the opposite trade, and running both is the standard mature configuration — one pays this quarter, the other pays in two years.

Why does a minutes-long funnel convert this well?

Across these eleven structures, conversion tracks contact time. Days of exposure convert attendees at 40 to 60 per cent. Minutes are conventionally put at 2 to 5 per cent of the people reached, which is a rule of thumb with no table behind it rather than a measured band.

Paid search is the shortest-contact funnel here — a query, a page, a form — and yet it closes calls at 14 to 18 per cent.

The reason is that intent substitutes for exposure. The prospect arrived already knowing they had the problem; the funnel did not have to persuade them of that, only that you were a credible answer. Every other structure in this set spends its time manufacturing the state that a search query arrives in for free.

The limit of the substitution is visible in the same number. Fourteen to eighteen per cent is a mid-teens close, well under the 30 to 50 per cent that content-warmed leads produce and far under the 40 to 70 per cent of referrals. Intent gets you into the room. It does not do what a fortnight of contact does.

What happens to 1,000 people in a paid search to a landing page funnel?

Each stage applies the recorded rate to the people still in the funnel. Where a stage has no published rate the arithmetic stops, because guessing past it would make every later figure fiction.

Stage rates as recorded on this funnel’s page. Practitioner estimates unless the page states otherwise.

How does this funnel compare with the others on effort and speed?

How do you run a first test of a paid search to a landing page funnel?

1. Measure every stage from day one

   Record how many people enter each stage, not just how many clients come out. A funnel with one weak stage looks exactly like a funnel that does not work.

2. Compare each stage with the recorded rate

   Where this page records a rate, hold your own stage against it. The stage furthest below its recorded rate is the one to fix first.

3. Fill in the stages nobody publishes

   Your own numbers for the unpublished stages are the most valuable figures you will have, because nobody else can give them to you.

4. Plan around the recorded speed

   The recorded speed is: immediate. Do not judge the test before it has had that long.