The challenge
Cloudflare needed to scale paid search across more international markets while improving efficiency at the same time.
The targets were ambitious: reduce cost per enquiry from around $150 to below $60, increase quarterly paid search enquiries from roughly 2,000 to more than 7,000, and expand campaign coverage from 9 to 18 markets.
That level of expansion introduces complexity quickly. Search behaviour, competition, cost and audience maturity vary from market to market, and a structure that works well in one region can become difficult to manage as coverage grows.
Cloudflare was also adapting to Google’s increasing use of automation, which made account structure and the quality of optimisation signals more important.
The campaigns had to serve several different audience states within the same system: enterprise buyers with little previous exposure to Cloudflare, warmer prospects who had already engaged, and people actively searching for specific web security and performance products.
The requirement was a paid search structure that could absorb more markets, more audiences and more demand without becoming harder to control or less efficient as it scaled.
Our solution
We restructured paid search around product areas and audience intent. That gave the account a clearer commercial structure, with campaigns organised around what people were looking for and where they were in the buying journey.
The new structure also created stronger inputs for Google’s automated optimisation, with product focus, audience behaviour and commercial priorities built more clearly into the way campaigns were organised.
Real sales lead data was then fed back into daily campaign optimisation. That gave the system visibility beyond the initial conversion and allowed performance decisions to account for the quality of the enquiries being generated, including which leads progressed further into the sales process.
Smart Display extended the same product-focused logic beyond search, while a bespoke reporting dashboard gave us daily visibility across campaigns and markets.
The combination of account structure, downstream sales data and faster reporting created a system that could expand internationally without relying on the same increase in manual management.
The outcome
Paid search conversions increased by 239%, from around 2,000 to more than 7,600 per quarter. Cost per enquiry fell by 63%, from $150 to $56. Paid traffic increased by 650% year on year, while campaign coverage doubled from 9 to 18 international markets.
Cloudflare reached twice as many markets with a paid search programme that had also become materially more efficient. The account generated far more enquiries at a substantially lower acquisition cost, giving the business greater headroom to scale investment without sacrificing performance.
Sales data also became part of the optimisation loop, bringing paid media closer to the quality of demand entering the pipeline and giving the team a stronger view of performance beyond clicks and form fills.
The result was a more scalable international acquisition model: broader market coverage, stronger conversion volume, lower cost per enquiry and a campaign structure built to support continued growth.
