About Sendcloud
Sendcloud is one of Europe’s leading shipping platforms, helping thousands of e-commerce businesses connect their webshop to multiple carriers from a single platform across eight European markets.
The Challenge
Sendcloud’s demand generation team was already running efficient paid media across Google Ads and Meta Ads, but had limited capacity to scale it further. The focus shifted from lead volume to lead quality, more SQLs, better CPA and CAC efficiency, and room to move into mid-market. Rather than a hands-off agency, they wanted an embedded growth partner to optimise across channels alongside the internal team.
How We Did It
We worked as an embedded partner inside Sendcloud’s team, splitting the funnel into demand capture (Paid Search) and demand generation (Paid Social) across the Netherlands, France, United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Spain and Italy.
Paid Search (Demand Capture)
Google Ads. The main challenge was to stabilise performance and get more from the existing budget, while building a stronger foundation for scalable growth. We set clear CPA targets by market and segmented campaigns into performance tiers based on spend and cost per SRL and SQL, allowing us to focus optimisation and budget on the biggest opportunities first.
We then shifted optimisation further down the funnel towards CRM outcomes such as SRLs and SQLs, continuously reallocating budget based on performance. At campaign level, we improved lead quality through search term analysis, higher-intent keywords and ad copy designed to pre-qualify prospects. Alongside this, we introduced structured, hypothesis-based testing by market to continuously improve performance.
Paid Social (Demand Generation and Capture)
LinkedIn Ads. Around 33% of impressions and costs were served to non-ICP companies and industries. LinkedIn Ads is known to mismatch industry tags. We moved away from broad industry targeting and adopted account-based targeting, building target account lists for Sendcloud’s priority segments (SMB and mid-market e-commerce stores across eight markets). For creative, we created concepts designed to stand out in the feed and transitioned to thought leadership ads.
As a result (YTD 2026 vs the whole of 2025), LinkedIn-influenced deals grew by 87% and influenced pipeline grew by 79%, bringing the cost per influenced opportunity down by 85%.
Meta Ads. We improved Meta Ads across three key areas to drive more qualified leads. We refreshed audiences with layered targeting and new lookalike audiences. We also added animation to existing product ads, introduced market-specific poster concepts, and tested multi-step Instant Forms to reduce lead-capture friction. Finally, we improved advanced matching through the Conversions API by adding more parameters, increasing event match quality and helping attribute more leads and opportunities to Meta.
The result: Meta spend came down 34% (Q1 2026 vs Q1 2025) while Sales Ready Leads grew 9%, cutting cost per SRL by 39% and cost per SQL by 32% further down the funnel.
The Results
Paid Search
- Year on year (Q1 2026 vs Q1 2025), an 82% increase in non-brand SQLs while reducing the cost per non-brand SQL by 44%, with the same ad spend across the European markets.
- Improved lead quality by 101%, measured by the conversion rate from non-brand leads to SQLs.
Paid Social
- Meta spend came down 34% (Q1 2026 vs Q1 2025) while Sales Ready Leads grew 9%, cutting cost per SRL by 39% and cost per SQL by 32%.
- LinkedIn-influenced deals grew 87% and influenced pipeline 79% (YTD 2026 vs full year 2025), while cost per influenced opportunity fell 85%.
What Made This Special
A capable in-house team and solid fundamentals meant we could focus on quality and efficiency rather than firefighting, proving paid media can grow qualified pipeline and cut cost at the same time.
