TL;DR: The funnel that works at $5 CPCs bankrupts you at $300. Build infrastructure that matches your cost structure, not best practices.
Your marketing infrastructure has to reflect the economic reality you're operating in. Not best practices. Not what worked for someone else. Your actual market CPCs.
That may sound like a boringly common sense statement—yet it's not. In the drama and excitement of a new campaign launch, you have to check the market CPCs as a first port of call. Not doing this is tantamount to booking a vacation to Spain without checking the weather.
Sure, you've got tactics. But do those tactics make sense at $300 CPCs?
Market research is critical here. Spend a few hours mapping the traffic landscape, and think about how this is going to effect your primary KPIs against the assets you'll be running in market. Given where you're going to pay to send users (per click), does it actually make sense to ask the user to do what you want them to do?
I've worked in and with agencies. Not only do most people not do this, you're lucky if this is given any passing thought at all.
"Do we even need a landing page? We're sending this traffic to the homepage—and it's gonna work this time, goddamnit."
The Math on Infrastructure
Let's do the math on a B2B service business:
$300 CPCs. $10,000 monthly budget. That's roughly 33 clicks.
- At 2% CVR: You get 0.66 leads. You're dead.
- At 5% CVR: You get 1.65 leads. You're improving, but barely breathing.
- At 10% CVR: You get 3.3 leads. Now we have something to work with.
The infrastructure question becomes: how do you get to 10%?
You have two options, and neither is "wrong" - they just serve different business models.
Option 1: Lightweight Capture, Sales-Qualified
Simple email form. Maybe add name and company. Get people into your system fast, let your sales team qualify through conversation. This maximizes entries. You're trading lead quality for volume, betting that your sales process adds enough value to make unqualified leads worth filtering.
Option 2: Heavy Intake, Pre-Qualified
Five-page form. Budget, timeline, specific needs. You're building the qualification into the infrastructure upfront. CVR drops, but every lead that comes through is already vetted. Your sales team spends time closing, not discovering the prospect has no budget.
Where Does Qualification Happen?
For high-volume businesses where sales adds value through nurture - maximize CVR, filter later.
For high-ticket businesses like legal or insurance where intake requirements are non-negotiable - build the infrastructure upfront, accept lower CVR.
There are no "best practices." Only cost-appropriate practices.
At $5 CPCs, you can afford multi-step qualification. At $300 CPCs with 33 clicks per month, every form field is a business decision with a measurable cost.
The question isn't "what should we do?" The question is: where does qualification happen in your model?
Work backwards from there.
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