Data-Driven Marketing Case Study (UK SME): How a £3.2m Business Reversed a 179% Lead-Gen Loss.
&
Delivered 8× SEO Growth in 60 Days
Using Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Lighthouse and SERanking, the Fractional CMO uncovered the root causes behind collapsing performance: non-indexed pages, 6.5–20-second load speeds, wasted PPC spend, and a lack of reporting discipline.
For SMEs, this case study matters because it proves how data-driven decision-making outperforms agency “activity” — and how the right leadership can turn chaos into a measurable pipeline.
In the next sections, you’ll learn how to manage an agency, enforce accountability, and build a predictable lead engine using the same diagnostic steps applied in the live data
This Case Study shows the findings the Free Health Check revealed and the sanity that was returned to an MD of a £3.2m SME who had an agency that didn't use a data driven approach in his business for over a year.
The Table represents the summary points of a data driven marketing approach, where marketing analytics add clarity, transparency and measurable growth.
Data-Driven Marketing Case Study: How a Fractional CMO Turned Data Into 8× Growth
Data-driven marketing uses measurable insights—not opinions—to allocate budget and prove ROI. This case study shows how it transformed a £3m UK SMEs performance, albeit early days.
This case study will evidence how an agency that:-
-
Is measured on activity not results.
-
Waste thousands of pounds.
-
Costs a business measurable growth.
-
Just because they never looked at the data quality side of what they were doing - and used it to inform decisions.
-
The list detailed over are the areas uncovered, the fixes put in place and the results, forecasted , actual and anticipated.
-
A Fractional CMO brought leadership direction and data.
-
The result a quick, steady turn around.
-
This case study is the findings, with some illumination of the results, which we will point to as the data reveals itself, where those actions are still to pan out.
-
However a 90 day fix plan - will be published shortly to give you the objective data, to back it up.
-
This is probably the best example of a good team, without professional marketing direction, failing because of the lack of clear business goal focused leadership.
-
And worse, leadership which seemingly ignored the data from freely available industry benchmarking tools.
-
It sounds like a car crash with the lack of leads and wasted money, painful, however a lot of SME's go through this learning curve.
-
The key is to learn from it.
Data-Driven Diagnosis: Turning Gut Feel into Evidence
1
Website - New Domain - lost 515 visitors a month
An SERanking Survey of the SME domain found they have de-commissioned the old site and lost 77% of the traffic.
Why?
New Website executed poorly, no thought for historical content value, backlinking or other traffic preserving measures.
No one looked at the traffic numbers, both before and after the new domain went live.
2
Competitor Review - 4 Top Competitors
Research uncovered 1300+ keywords, 843 had significant search volume, totalling 26,500 visitors a month, the SME was Getting 2 out of the 26,5000.
Why?
No one had analysed the competitors domains, keywords, volume and trends and mad a plan around measurable data.
This is easy to do with the right tools and part of the free health-check
3
The PPC Campaign had been running for 8 months - with 4 leads - spend £31,251
The PPC Campaign was managed in isolation, not linked to the rest of the marketing team, not supported with any guidance.
Investigation found 77.6% of the PPC traffic bounced in 8 seconds, which data-driven marketing found, in about an hour.
Why?
The Website pages the ad campaign was pointed at had page load speeds of 6.5-20.5 secs on mobile and 3 secs to 8 secs, on desktop devices.
People literally got bored of waiting for the website to load.
Why was it not detected?
No one looked at the data in tools like Google Analytics, Google Lighthouse & Google Console and asked what was going on, and the PPC campaign managers findings were ignored or not understood.
4
Site Indexing - 56 page site - Google only recognised 2 pages
Why?
The second data-driven approach was to use Google Search Console.Only to find the site had not been indexed by Google Console in 10 months. Google ignored the website posting sitemaps, because its algorithm said "the site loads slowly - do not index!"
Consequence when the site Speed & Indexing were fixed the SEO traffic jumped 8X.(albeit it 2 visitors lifting to 16 is not going to make a commercial difference)
5
The Webmaster let everyone access the site and build heavy HTML code pages
Multiple well intentioned HTML webpage builders had been farmed out pages to build.
None of those pages was loaded via the content editors CMS, consequently they were:
- poorly created.
- not measured technically.
- no one looked at the quality of technical page delivery.
- no one looked at the page effectiveness in Google Search Console or Google Lighthouse, the latter took 20 seconds to identify the issue.
- of 843 target keywords they ranked for 47, on the 7 page of results in 67th position. (basically nowhere, the data-driven approach highlighting the issue.)
6
No one was accountable for Data & Performance
All the output was activity - and that was what was measured, till the lack of leads became apparent.
As soon as a professional webmaster costing £2k a month was appointed and made accountable for performance:
- The site speed performed within Google Parameters
-
3 Secs Page Load for Mobile.
-
1 Sec page load on desktop.
- 8 Page templates were delivered that performed highly, all the content folk did was populate them.
- Instantly performance across site! See Here
You'll see the data-driven marketing impact in the following sections.
7
PPC Review - Current Home Product Pages
To evaluate the success of future PPC campaigns we analysed every facet of a successful "high conversion" landing page v the Core Pages the PPC campaign was directed at.
- They Scored at best 78% "B" meriting a 2-3% conversion rate.
(when site speed was fixed, prior to that 0.4-0.8% conversion)
- Common mistakes - "no customers that trust us" logo's above the fold.
- No Enquiry form that you can enter or auto populate on the page above the fold, the current one is below the fold and requires you to click to pop the form scoring C- from a user experience (UX) perspective.
- no compelling call to action (CTA) above the fold.
- content was good, just not designed with conversion at the front of its purpose, it read more like a brochure.
Again, a data-driven marketing approach focused the team on what needed fixing. See PPC Page Review
8
PPC - No real forecast - no model based on business objectives.
Starting from a goal of 30 leads a month we worked backwards at "exact match & broad match" keywords for seven areas:
-
Competition
-
6 Product/Solution keyword groups
It was very clear you could beat 30 leads a month with a £5k spend at 6% click thru rate(CTR) and 4% page conversion to a demo or brochure download.
We set about creating the ideal template to overcome the normal product page "B" score and brochure feel & design.
Always best to work back from the business goals, in any data-driven marketing campaign. See New PPC plan here
9
Target keywords - existing campaign 30 keywords targeted
It became evident that 75 keywords needed targeting of the 7 campaigns to hit the desire numbers.(not 30)
Clearly the campaign was not prior focused on the business need/objectives of 30 leads a month.
Modelling and data-driven marketing research informed the decision once again- not gut & activity.
10
Generic "so what" download a brochure/book a demo landing page objectives!
There were not 7 compelling reasons to encourage any visitor, they were on the right partner path.
- No value trades that passed the "so what test"
- No offers that felt like "i'm dealing with a market leader"
- A day of interviews with the sales folk & leadership and our "value trade" gems were secured.
Objective(s)
1. Lift 4% decent landing page conversion to 6% and buy some insurance on overachieving 30 leads a month.
2. Lift the bar to "market leader" "winner" standards not "also ran" "turned up" behaviour.
Again, the conversion data pointed us to the need to do better, with the goals we set for conversion, brochure download and request a demo.
Data-driven marketing highlighted we could shift landing page conversion from 4% to 6% (50% increase minimum) with a simple 3 hour workshop designed to highlight the pain remove and gains to be enjoyed.
11
No SEO Focus - Focused SEO campaign targeting 7 Keywords with 4,500 search volume
Focus the fire power - on target 7 words, that give us substantial volume if we rank top 3 in 6 months, (exact keyword match 4,500 search volume, broad match added, 9,000 search volume.)
Top 10 positions secured 6 leads a month.
Top 3 positions secured 27 deals a month.
Again SERanking and keyword research pointed us at the data-driven marketing answers.
Now working back from there what would the ROI be?
12
Resource allocation & focus not based on Business Objectives
It took 30 minutes to model the ROI on the SEO campaign targetting 7 keywords.
Cost of Fractional CMO 10% of his/her time to design campaigns & briefs (£10k over a year). another 10% to manage delivery quality and prioritise content lifts for performance gains.
(produce the plan, the content briefs and supervise quality delivery, review results and coach the intern)
Cost of full time Marketing intern focused on the area £23k per annum.
Total investment £43k
The return would be realised in one, 6 deal month, worth £240k
One months leads, would cover the investment in 30 days!
The issue, it would take 6 months to get there, hence PPC campaign for the short term.
The cost per lead via the PPC campaign £7,800+ per lead.
The cost per lead under the new campaign £317 per lead.
However, research found we could reduce that to £62 a lead with a ranking campaign (SEO). It would take 2 Years to dominate 30% of the search traffic and require a full time intern. See the SEO plan here
13
No Content Designed around Target Personas and Pain Points
If you don't fix pain then you won't have a business "Jeff Bezos"
We modelled 4 Sectors and 22 personas within them.
We then looked at a content map to deal with 66 pain points they had, we could with the solutions offered, address.
That gave us our SEO content map for 12 months SEO campaign.
We then cross mapped that with the existing site to see what needed lifting or was missing.
And costed, it was £43k & a year to rank Top 3.
A healthy by-product, we could build the customer journeys from the same modelling.Measurable ROI
14
No measurement of the suspect to prospect & enquiry to deal funnel
The PPC and SEO enquiry measurement funnels didn't exist.
a) The MD was using a simple measure - Google Ad spend divided by leads to measure effectiveness.
b) For SEO measurement was non existent - a crude schema blog, HTML code that tried to fool Google, that was the extent of SEO & any measurement worthless as the traffic was miniscule.
We recommended Google Campaign tracking UTM/Tags and Hubspot CRM be pulled into a databox consolidated reporting system so that:
- The board had a summary report of both SEO & PPC - and in the early days, could see the trend lines moving north.
- a diagnostic report so that the CMO and the PPC & SEO content guys, could see where campaigns were succeeding/failing and tweak accordingly, (the same report, just two levels of detail down)
- An operations report, so we could avoid any speed issues or performance factors influencing results by having a simple "Operations Health Check" report for both campaigns.
Marketing Analytics and transparency around enquiry funnel metrics help:
-
Alleviate board pressure.
-
Educated the team on successful tactics.
-
And acquire a thirst for further learns to improve the numbers.
15
No Search Engine Ranking Plan
Google Evaluates a domain on multiple factors to do with how rich and technically proficient a sight is for visitors.
There are 37 core criteria as well as Domain & Page authority.
The higher your scores in these 39 areas, the higher the Google algorithm lifts your content in search results.
Areas like Videos, Images, Business Profile, Knowledge panels, Search Snippets, AI responses - ie your content can be good, but Google needs to find it across a whole distribution array. Again a basic understanding of Google's ranking algorithm and a marketing analytics approach helped us to formulate the fixes.
Better still SERanking gives you where your competition are performing which as an insight is powerful.
Across 37 areas the SME, scored in 1 area, hence the average 67th position. The Domain and page trust were peer level, therefore did not hamper ranking performance.
We put in place a content distribution plan to tackle this area and wake up Google so that the content plans delivery impact was amplified.
16
Content Class Gaps - Customer Logo's - Short Videos etc
There were customer logo's on some pages to re-assured visitors, but short interview found a growing vein of referenceable clients and customer videos.
Logos and Videos from Mars & Apple, these were then factored into content for:
- Different stages of the prospect conversion funnel.
- Nurture campaigns for "late funnel" sign off stakeholders, or prospect champions to arm them with convincing ROI data.
- Landing pages to boost conversion from 2% to 4-6%.
17
Team Review - delivery capability
Broadly the team just needed a few "Major Tweaks"
-
A Plan.
-
A Measurement system that highlighted success & learns.
-
A Focus on commercial goals and achievement not activity.
-
The team were good, too busy, needed keeping in their own "swim lanes" and focus.
-
The biggest issue was that their efforts were independant and not knitted together.
18
Board - Needed confidence
As soon as early results started to surface:
-
Website Speeds Leaping.
-
SEO performance jump 8X in 2 weeks.
-
PPC spend halting.
-
Clear plan to fix "major issues".
-
Education & updating regularly.
-
Confidence started to return.
19
Summary
Fast issue diagnosis using free or cheap robust tools shone the light on:
- Issues to be fixed, the size of the prize with objective data, and a plan emerged.
- That plan was to use data, not gut to inform decision making.
- To ignore opinion, unless data backed it up.
- Then focus on implementing a plan that had a root in commercial goals, not activity.
- A data-driven marketing approach meant a solid set of reference points, to instill confidence and accountability and move forward.
From Metrics to Momentum: How Data Guides Every Fix
Lessons for SMEs Embracing Data-Driven Marketing
Section 1: Discovery what the data showed
Section 2: Fix Plan & Execution “90-Day Data-Driven Turnaround
Section 3: Results & ROI
Lessons for data-driven leaders
Fractional Marketing Director Methodology
We used a standard set of free (Google tools) and SERanking to conduct the fact find:
1. On the companies digital marketing
2. On there four competitors
Below we cover the tools used and very high level findings.
Tools used
-
SERanking:-
-
Competitor review Keywords (Search volume 26,500 monthly searches)
-
Positions & Rankings Review SME (ranking for 47 / 843 keywords)
-
Volume Review SME – traffic 80/26,500 a month (0.03% traffic share)
-
-
Google Analytics:-
-
SME organic search traffic QTR 4 2024 SEO traffic 666 visitors a month
-
SME organic search traffic 1st Sept 31st 2025 156 visitors a month
-
Lost SEO traffic 77%
-
-
Google analytics
-
Google Campaigns - PPC Adwords Campaigns Performance 6-10% CTR rates
-
77.6% abandoned session after 8 secs (issue page speed)
-
-
Google Lighthouse:-
-
Page Speed analysis (before and after)
-
Page speeds way above 3 secs maximum mobile. 1 second max Desktop.
-
Fix remove access to the website from agency team, except 1 input person required to populate high performance templates.
-
Templates design to perform by people who manufacture high performance web pages that load quickly.
-
-
SERanking:-
-
SEO performance post page speed fix 6X traffic
-
56 pages indexed and ranking.
-
-
Google Search Console:-
-
Indexed pages October – only 2 pages indexed.
-
Indexed pages November post page speed fixes, 56 pages indexed and ranked.
-
(no pages had been indexed since January!!)
-
Fixes into PPC / SEO / Partners researched and plans prepared.
The Free health check took a total of 2 days to prepare:
-
Step one - the interview & data access to do the research
-
Step two - the findings and plan options
The short term fixes were executed in 30 days, the loner term next year preparation plan in the next 30 days. If you'd Like a free health check here is the detail and here is the guide.
The plan is confidential but involves generating £1.2m of pipeline a month, from three channels: Google Adwords, Search Engines and Partners.
The plan will lower the cost per lead to £317 year one and £62 year two.
A Substantial reduction from the £7,500 per lead, which was the Google Ads 8 month result.
Here is what we did to fix the issue(s)
Area: Page Speed
Impact :
Indexing - Google downgrading 54 of 56 pages from SEO ranking because of slow page speed.
PPC Campaign halted till proper Landing Pages built that convert traffic.
Fixes:
Appointed webmaster for £1k a month to manage website page speed and performance.
Implemented standard templates that agency added content to, that met the Google Lightspeed parameters once published.
Before and after Page Speed Results
See Below immediate SEO Positions lifted
With Page speed Fixed we designed a new 4 stage PPC Campaign
The previous campaigns generated impressions however conversions were low, due to page speed.
The New Campaign sort to test:
-
A Version 1 new PPC Page Template
-
A Version 2 Improved template after v1 learns absorbed
-
A Version 3 with high conversion assets to download - replacing generic brochures.
-
A Version 4 with Pixel tracking linking to a multi-persona pain point nurture campaign.
See The new PPC Page Plan here
We analysed the old web pages to initial PPC campaign used to design version 1 see the analysis here
Marketing Case Study FAQs
What is a marketing case study?
A marketing case study is a detailed breakdown of a real business challenge, the strategy used to solve it, and the measurable results achieved — showing how data, leadership, and execution deliver ROI.
Why are marketing case studies valuable for SMEs?
They turn theory into proof. SMEs can see exactly how strategies like SEO optimisation, PPC, or Fractional CMO leadership deliver measurable commercial outcomes.
What does this marketing case study cover?
It examines how a £3m UK tech SME transformed marketing performance — fixing indexing, speed, and reporting — to achieve 8× SEO traffic in 90 days.
Who led the strategy in this case study?
The project was led by a Fractional CMO from Communications Edge, bringing senior-level marketing leadership and accountability without full-time cost.
What tools were used in this marketing case study?
SERanking, Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console, and Google Lighthouse were used to audit, measure, and optimise performance.
What were the main issues discovered?
Poor page speed, outdated site maps, missing KPI tracking, and fragmented agency reporting — all fixed through structured analysis and leadership.
What measurable results were achieved?
After 30 days, 56 pages were indexed, organic traffic rose 8×, and a consistent dashboard now tracks ROI, CAC, and lead flow across channels.
How does this case study show the value of a Fractional CMO?
It proves how leadership clarity and data discipline outperform agency activity — lowering costs while improving accountability and growth velocity.
What can other businesses learn from this case study?
That marketing success depends on measurement, not volume. Leadership, structure, and speed deliver compounding gains in ROI and pipeline quality.
Where can I find more case studies like this?
Visit the Communications Edge Case Studies page for more data-driven examples of measurable growth and marketing transformation.
Get in Touch
This is a Paragraph. Click on "Edit Text" or double click on the text box to start editing the content.