Client name withheld under NDA.
Accounting and corporate secretarial work is one of the most crowded categories on Google Ads in Singapore. A click on corporate secretarial services singapore costs around S$13, and bookkeeping terms are not far behind. Many searchers are price-shopping a one-off incorporation package rather than looking for an ongoing accountant, so firms that bid broadly pay premium prices for people who will never become retainer clients.
This firm had 12 staff and served SMEs with bookkeeping, tax filing and corporate secretarial work. It spent S$4,500 a month on one broad campaign that sent every click to the homepage. About a third of the budget went to searches for free templates, jobs and government guides, and the firm had no way to tell which of its 21 monthly leads became paying clients.
We set up tracking for forms, calls and WhatsApp clicks, marked which leads became clients in the firm's CRM and fed those back to Google Ads. We also reviewed six months of search terms to see where the money had gone.
In accounting, the valuable lead is a retainer client, not a one-off incorporation enquiry. The account had to learn the difference before it could buy more of the right one. It also gave the partners their first honest view of which services were worth advertising at all.
We split one campaign into separate campaigns for bookkeeping, tax, corporate secretarial and incorporation, each with its own budget, and built negative keyword lists covering jobs, templates, courses and government sites.
These services are worth very different amounts over a client's lifetime. Separating them let the budget follow the work the firm most wanted. It also made reporting simple: each service now had its own cost per lead, so the partners could decide where to grow.
Each service got its own landing page with a starting fee, what is included, the relevant ACRA and IRAS deadlines explained simply, and a short enquiry form.
SME owners compare three or four firms at once. The page that shows scope and price quickly is the one that gets the enquiry. A clear deadline section also answered the question most SME owners ask first: when do I need to file, and what happens if I am late?
We tested ads built around filing deadlines and fixed fees, then moved bidding to target the value of qualified leads once enough conversions had come in.
Demand rises around filing deadlines. Ads that named the deadline and a clear fee attracted better-fit clicks than generic accounting ads. Fixed fees in the ad also discouraged people looking for free help, which saved clicks before they were paid for.
Weekly search term reviews added new negatives and moved the long-tail searches that converted into their own exact-match keywords.
A small firm cannot afford to pay for the same wrong search twice. Steady pruning kept the budget on searches from businesses that needed an accountant. Over six months the negative keyword lists grew to several hundred terms, each one a search the firm no longer pays for.
By month six, the firm received 41 leads a month instead of 21, at S$127 per lead instead of S$214. Monthly spend rose modestly to S$5,200, but almost all of it now went to searches from businesses looking for an ongoing accountant. Quality Scores improved, and the partners could see which service each lead came from and which ones became clients. Just as important, the firm now knew its cost per new retainer client, not just its cost per form fill. That number gave the partners the confidence to keep the budget running through quieter months instead of switching ads off and starting again before each filing deadline.
Wasted spend cut and services separated. Cost per lead began to fall.
Service landing pages went live and the conversion rate passed 4.5%.
41 leads a month at S$127 each.
An incorporation enquiry and a bookkeeping retainer are worth very different amounts. Giving each service its own campaign let the budget move to the work that builds long-term revenue.
SME owners compare several firms at once. Landing pages with a starting fee and a clear list of what is included converted far better than a homepage asking people to call for a quote.
Telling Google Ads which leads became clients showed it which searches were worth paying for. Without that, the account would have kept chasing the cheapest form fills.
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