3.4× the booked transfers, on 12% less media spend.

Royal Carriage was buying airport transfer traffic at a respectable cost per click and losing it in the gap between enquiry and answer. Roughly half of all calls arrived outside office hours, and the web form went to an inbox that nobody owned.

That gap did not show up as a marketing problem. On paper the account looked healthy: clicks were affordable and form fills were arriving. The failure happened after the click, in the hours when nobody was there to pick up, so it never appeared in the ad platform at all.

Nothing in the account tied spend to a completed ride, so the campaigns were optimising toward the cheapest form fill rather than the most valuable booking. A one-way local run and a repeat corporate airport account were the same event in the data, which meant the bidding could not tell the profitable traffic from the rest.

The after-hours enquiry stopped being a lost enquiry. Calls that used to reach voicemail were answered, quoted and booked while the caller was still deciding, which is where most of the recovered volume came from.

Because completed rides were being imported back into the account, budget could follow the routes that produced them. That is why booked transfers rose while media spend went down rather than up — the campaigns stopped paying for traffic that never became a ride.