B2B, electric buses, Australia, at Bang Media
Google Ads B2B lead generation for an electric bus distributor: +350% leads after a full account rebuild
Case study by Jan Wischniewsky
VDI Australia is the official sales and service partner for Yutong electric buses in Australia. I ran this project as project lead at the Australian agency Bang Media, where I worked before founding Skalor. Their customers are fleet operators, transport companies and public bodies, with sales cycles of months and ticket sizes where a single qualified enquiry matters. The Google Ads account had grown over years without structure, without reliable conversion tracking and without a connection to the CRM. We reset it from the ground up, made HubSpot the source of truth for lead quality, rebuilt landing pages with the client's team and restructured every campaign from search terms up to Performance Max. Result: +350% leads, 45% lower cost per lead and a setup the client can read and steer themselves.
- B2B
- Australia
- Google Search
- Performance Max
- Microsoft Ads
- HubSpot
- Offline conversion tracking
- Landing pages
+350%
Leads
-45%
Cost per lead
9 months
Project duration
1
CRM as source of truth
Challenge
The account carried years of legacy. Campaigns had been added on top of each other, so keywords, search terms and match types overlapped and three campaigns competed for the same query. Techniques dated from a different era of Google Ads: manual bidding without data to back it, broad match without negative lists, ad copy that had not been touched in months.
Underneath, the fundamentals were missing. Conversion tracking counted form submissions but not what happened afterwards, so Google Ads could not tell a fleet operator requesting a quote from a student asking for a brochure. There was no offline conversion import, so none of the CRM knowledge about which enquiries turned into opportunities ever reached the bidding. Landing pages were generic product pages, not built for paid traffic. The result: dirty data, Smart Bidding optimising toward the wrong outcomes, budget lost to cannibalisation between campaigns, and a cost per lead nobody trusted.
Approach
We treated it as a rebuild, not a cleanup. The old account held years of search-term data and learnings worth keeping, so the first step was to extract those: which queries produced enquiries, which territories converted, which products people actually searched for. Everything else was reset. Then, in this order: conversion tracking rebuilt in Google Tag Manager with clear lead definitions. HubSpot connected so lead status flows back into Google Ads as offline conversions, which turns "form submitted" into "qualified by sales". New landing pages built together with the client's team, one per use case. Only then the campaign structure: clean search campaigns by intent and territory, tight keyword sets and match types, shared negative lists, fresh ad copy. Performance Max and upper-funnel campaigns were added last, once the search data was clean enough to feed them.
What I did
- Audited the legacy account and extracted the search-term data, territory performance and learnings worth keeping before the reset
- Rebuilt conversion tracking in Google Tag Manager and connected HubSpot CRM, so Google Ads optimises on sales-qualified enquiries instead of form fills
- Built new landing pages with the client's team, one per use case, structured for paid traffic and quote requests
- Restructured search campaigns by intent and territory: keyword sets, match types, shared negative lists, new ad copy, no overlap between campaigns
- Added Performance Max and upper-funnel campaigns on top of clean search data, extended to Microsoft Ads, then scaled budget where cost per qualified lead held
- Set up a weekly loop with the client's sales team: CRM feedback in, campaign adjustments out
Project scope
- Role
- Project lead, client communication and hands-on execution for tracking, Google Ads and CRO input. Delivered at Bang Media, Australia
- Duration
- 9 months
- Services
- Account audit and reset, Conversion tracking, Offline conversion import, CRM integration, Landing pages, Campaign restructure, Performance Max, Microsoft Ads
- Website
- vdiaustralia.com.au
“Jan and the team at Bang Media rebuilt our Google Ads from the ground up: tracking, HubSpot integration, landing pages and a campaign structure that finally made sense. Leads went up more than threefold while cost per lead went down, and for the first time we could see which campaigns actually produced quote requests.”
Learnings
- A reset is not a restart. The old account held years of search-term data worth keeping, so we recycled those learnings into the new structure instead of starting from zero.
- For B2B with long sales cycles, offline conversion tracking is not optional. Without CRM data flowing back, Smart Bidding optimises toward whoever fills in a form fastest.
- The biggest lever was not inside Google Ads. It was the client's team feeding CRM data and product knowledge back into the setup, every week.
Tools
- Google Ads
- Microsoft Ads
- HubSpot
- Google Tag Manager
- GA4