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Cut Your CPA: A Free-Tier Playbook for Eliminating Wasted Ad Spend

Are your Google Ads campaigns burning cash? Many B2B SaaS companies waste significant ad spend on irrelevant clicks from students, job seekers, and mismatched businesses. This inflates your Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) and tanks your ROI, leaving your sales team with a pipeline of low-quality, unqualified leads.

This playbook introduces 'The Lean Starter Stack,' a budget-friendly system designed to prove the value of lead qualification before you invest in expensive automation. You'll learn how to leverage free-tier tools to manually track and analyze disqualified leads from your ad campaigns. By identifying the exact reasons and search terms that bring in junk traffic, you'll build a powerful negative keyword list to systematically improve ad targeting and slash wasted spend.

Expected Outcomes

  • A data-backed negative keyword list to immediately improve your Google Ads targeting.
  • A significant reduction in Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) by eliminating clicks from irrelevant search queries.
  • Higher quality leads delivered to your sales team, improving morale and downstream conversion rates.
  • A validated proof-of-concept for lead qualification, justifying future investment in more advanced marketing automation tools.

Core Tools in This Stack

HubSpot CRM

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A comprehensive CRM platform that includes a suite of tools for marketing, sales, content management, and customer service, with a completely free CRM at its core to help businesses manage customer relationships and accelerate growth.

Key Features
  • Contact & Lead Management
  • Sales Pipeline Visualization
  • Deal Tracking and Management
  • Email Tracking and Templates
  • Meeting Scheduling Tool
  • Live Chat and Chatbots
  • Reporting and Analytics Dashboards
  • Task and Activity Automation
Ideal For

Company Size: Small, Medium

Industries: Technology & Software, Business & Professional Services, Retail & E-commerce, Creative & Media

Pricing

Model: Freemium, Subscription

Tier: Starter

Ease of Use

Very High

Google Sheets

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A cloud-based spreadsheet application that enables users to create, edit, and collaborate on spreadsheets in real-time. It's part of the Google Workspace suite and is designed for data analysis, project tracking, and making data-driven decisions.

Key Features
  • Real-time collaboration and co-editing
  • Integration with other Google Apps
  • Extensive template gallery
  • Data analysis with charts, pivot tables, and formulas
  • Cloud-based access from any device
  • Compatibility with Microsoft Excel files
  • Version history
  • Extensible with add-ons and Google Apps Script
Ideal For

Company Size: Micro, Small, Medium, Large

Industries: Technology & Software, Business & Professional Services, Retail & E-commerce, Creative & Media, Education & Non-Profit, Health & Wellness, Other

Pricing

Model: Free, Subscription

Tier: Freemium

Ease of Use

Easy

The Workflow

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Integration Logic

  • Zapier

    When a visitor submits a form on a Carrd website, it triggers a Zapier workflow. Zapier captures the submitted data, such as name and email address. It then passes this information to Mailchimp, which creates or updates a subscriber in a specified audience. This creates a seamless, automated bridge between your website's lead capture form and your email marketing list.

Get Your Free CPA-Cutting Playbook

Stop wasting money on irrelevant clicks and start filling your pipeline with qualified leads.