$1,118 put the “Optimize Yourself” event in front of Sacramento-area business owners 66,649 times and pulled 745 people to the landing page. Five of them reached the registration step. The advertising worked. The handoff to registration did not.
The short version. We spent $1,118 over three weeks on Google’s Demand Gen product — ads that run inside YouTube, Gmail and the Google Discover feed. The money bought a lot of qualified attention at a low price: 66,649 ad views and 745 clicks through to the event page, at $1.50 a click. That is a healthy result for cold prospecting.
Only five of those 745 visitors reached the registration step. That is the number the board should focus on, and it is the number with the most fixable causes behind it: a Google policy block on our best-performing ad, six days of the flight with no ads running at all, and a registration form that sits on a different website from the landing page, which means we cannot yet confirm how many people actually finished signing up.
Every figure below is pulled directly from the Google Ads account for the flight Aug 7–28, 2026. Spend, impressions and clicks are final. The lead count can still move: this conversion carries a 30-day window, so a click from late August could still be credited as late as the end of September.
One campaign, one audience group, five ads. Demand Gen is Google’s social-style product: instead of waiting for someone to search, it places video and image ads inside YouTube, Gmail and Discover for people who match an audience definition.
| Where | Sacramento, Placer, El Dorado and Yolo counties |
| Who | Ages 25–54, household income in the top 20% of the area, all genders |
| Interests | Custom-built audiences around “Business Advice”, “Entrepreneur News” and “Videos About Entrepreneurship”, plus two saved audiences: “EO Prospect” and “EO Cold Audience — Custom Intent + Income” |
| Budget | $50 per day |
| Bidding | Maximise Conversions — Google is told to buy as many form-starts as the budget allows |
| Destination | Gamma event page, then a monday.com registration form |
Daily spend and daily impressions across the flight. The gaps are the story.
Two honest framings, because they point in different directions.
| Format | Spend | Impressions | Cost per 1,000 | Clicks | Click rate | Leads |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Video (3 ads) | $725.06 | 22,101 | $32.81 | 244 | 1.10% | 4 |
| Image (2 ads) | $392.72 | 44,548 | $8.82 | 501 | 1.12% | 1 |
| Total | $1,117.78 | 66,649 | $16.77 | 745 | 1.12% | 5 |
| Ad | Spend | Impressions | Clicks | Click rate | Leads | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Video — Sheila Carroll | $307.30 | 9,490 | 97 | 1.02% | 2 | Disapproved |
| Video — Mark Haney | $263.13 | 7,192 | 81 | 1.13% | 2 | Best all-round |
| Image set A | $213.04 | 35,203 | 381 | 1.08% | 0 | Reach engine |
| Image set B | $179.68 | 9,345 | 120 | 1.28% | 1 | Best click rate |
| Video — Dave Reese | $154.63 | 5,419 | 66 | 1.22% | 0 | — |
| Headline | Impressions | Clicks | Click rate | Leads |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| For Sacramento Founders $1M+ | 45,343 | 455 | 1.00% | 1 |
| Free Founder Event, Sept 25 | 9,145 | 145 | 1.59% | 1 |
| Your Health Has No Dashboard | 5,154 | 65 | 1.26% | 3 |
| You Track Every KPI But One | 3,968 | 53 | 1.34% | 0 |
| A Founder Who Exited, On Health | 3,041 | 27 | 0.89% | 0 |
The targeting said ages 25–54 in the top income bracket. Here is who the money found.
| Segment | Spend | Clicks | Leads |
|---|---|---|---|
| Men | $706.59 | 496 | 5 |
| Women | $391.81 | 238 | 0 |
| Unknown | $19.38 | 11 | 0 |
| Mobile phone | $991.02 | 680 | 4 |
| Desktop | $98.46 | 37 | 0 |
| Tablet | $28.29 | 28 | 1 |
Five things that shaped this result, ordered by how much they cost us.
The Sheila Carroll video ad — which took the largest share of the budget and tied for the most leads — is currently disapproved by Google under its “unapproved substances” policy. The trigger was not the ad. It was the event landing page, which named three specific peptides (Epitalon, GHK-CU and BPC-157). Google treats named peptides as unapproved substances and restricts any ad pointing at a page that lists them.
The page as it stands today no longer names those compounds; it discusses peptides only as a topic. The ad is still blocked. Action: resubmit the ad for review now the page has changed, and keep specific compound names off any page an ad points to.
Six of the 22 days delivered zero impressions: 16–17 August, and four consecutive days from 21–24 August. The account change log records no pause and no budget change on those dates, which rules out a manual switch-off. That leaves a billing or account-level cause, and it needs to be confirmed with Google before the next campaign.
The money was not lost — the continuity was. Google made up the shortfall by spending harder on the days it did run, so the campaign still spent $1,117.78 against a $1,100 plan. What we lost is three weeks of steady presence: a prospect who saw the ad on a Friday saw nothing for the next four days. For a campaign whose entire job is repeated exposure ahead of a dated event, that pattern costs more than the dollars suggest.
The campaign ended on 28 August. The event is on 25 September. The last four days of the flight were also the strongest — 27 August alone delivered 20,630 impressions, nearly a third of the campaign total, as Google's bidding finally found its footing. Demand Gen campaigns need roughly two weeks to learn before they perform, and this one was switched off just as it started to work.
The conversion Google reports is a codeless tag on the event landing page, not on the monday.com form where people actually register. Google therefore counts the handoff, not the finish. Until a tracking tag sits on the monday.com confirmation step, the cost per registration is unknown — it could be better than $223.56 or much worse. This is the single highest-value fix on the list, because every future decision depends on it.
A 1.12% click rate and a $1.50 cost per click on cold prospecting audiences are solid numbers for this product. The audience build — four counties, top-20% income, entrepreneurship interests — found the right kind of person cheaply. The problem in this campaign was not buying attention. It was what happened after the click.
| Move | Why |
|---|---|
| Track the registration form itself | Put a conversion tag on the monday.com confirmation page so we count finished registrations, not clicks toward them. Everything else is guesswork until this is done. |
| Run to within a week of the event | This campaign stopped 28 days out, right as delivery peaked. Event registration concentrates in the final fortnight. |
| Keep compound names off the landing page | One naming choice on a Gamma page cost us our best ad. Discuss peptides as a topic; do not list them. |
| Split image and video into separate budgets | Images bought reach at $8.82 per thousand; video produced the leads at $32.81. Pooled together, they compete for the same money and neither is optimised. |
| Test the 55–64 age band | 45–54 was the best-clicking band by a clear margin. The band directly above it was excluded, so we have no read on it at all — and it is where established founders sit. Worth a test, not an assumption. |
| Retire the qualifier headline as a lead message | “For Sacramento Founders $1M+” took 68% of impressions and clicked below the campaign average. The health-problem framing outperformed it on a fraction of the airtime. |
EO Sacramento ran an earlier Demand Gen campaign from 10 June on a $10 daily budget. It spent $727 and delivered 66,873 impressions and 966 clicks — a 1.44% click rate against August’s 1.12%. It is not a like-for-like comparison: that campaign was set to chase YouTube channel subscriptions, and it recorded 458 of them. Subscriptions are an engagement signal, not event leads, so the two campaigns cannot be judged against each other on cost per lead. Together they show the same pattern: this audience is cheap to reach and responsive to EO content.