Closed-Loop PPC Attribution: How Two Campaigns Hit 56.7x and 39.3x ROAS
Most paid search programs don’t fail because the ads are bad. They fail because nobody can answer a simple question: what did that spend actually produce?
That’s the gap Heartlinks ABA and SimplyHome both came to Optidge with. Two different industries, two different campaigns, one identical failure at the foundation: leads were coming in, budget was going out, and neither client had a way to connect the two.
Both campaigns were recognized at the 2026 AMA Houston Crystal Awards this spring, part of a night where Optidge took home 5 Crystal wins across 8 nominations. Read the full recap here. This post focuses specifically on what these two paid search programs did differently, and why the fix wasn’t in the ad copy.
Campaign 1: Heartlinks ABA
Links ABA (a division of Heartlinks) launched its New Jersey division with no attribution system in place. Leads were coming in. Nobody could connect a single closed deal to the campaign that generated it. Budget decisions were running on impressions and clicks.
Optidge diagnosed the gap and built the fix in HubSpot: every lead tracked through insurance verification, intake, and deal closure, with Google Ads click IDs linked directly to HubSpot deal records and closed deals fed back as conversion signals to train smart bidding on actual outcomes, not proxies. Optidge takes a similar approach to HubSpot for other ABA providers, building the closed-loop system before optimizing anything downstream of it.
The creative had to match the moment.
Parents searching for ABA therapy are usually doing so shortly after a diagnosis, navigating an unfamiliar intake process, and comparing providers on trust and wait times as much as credentials. Empathy-first messaging like “Ask About Our No Wait-List Availability” consistently outperformed anything more transactional, because it spoke to the actual anxiety driving the search.
The account architecture mattered as much as the creative. Optidge separated branded and non-branded campaigns and added Microsoft Bing as a second platform alongside Google, a structural decision that unlocked cost efficiency the Google-only approach couldn’t reach. Bing CPAs ultimately came in significantly below Google’s, proof that platform diversification isn’t just a hedge, it’s often a genuine advantage.
The flow compounded from one closed client in September to fourteen in December, all tracked and attributed. The campaign delivered 56.7x ROAS against a 5x objective and won the AMA Crystal Award for Paid Search: Medium, as the sole finalist in its category that year.
Campaign 2: SimplyHome
Over in Texas, SimplyHome had been running Google Ads across five markets, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Bryan, and El Reno, through a previous agency that treated all five as a single undifferentiated account. They had leads coming in and no way to connect a single one to a signed lease. Budget decisions were made on vanity metrics with no ending to the story.
Optidge rebuilt the account market by market: each city got its own campaign, ad copy, sitelinks, and landing page. Performance Max was repositioned from a brand cannibalizer into a neighborhood discovery tool, letting it do the job it’s actually good at instead of competing against the brand’s own branded search.
The messaging had to speak to a very specific renter: someone who wants the lifestyle of homeownership without buying, searching hyper-locally for move-ready single-family homes rather than apartments. Headlines like “Private Yards. More Space. Real Homes.” addressed that emotional driver directly instead of leaning on generic rental copy that would have attracted the wrong audience entirely.
Alongside the account rebuild, Optidge built the attribution infrastructure SimplyHome had never had: HubSpot integrated with Google Ads, deal stages mapped from click to application to signed lease, and Entrata lease data connected back to specific campaigns and keywords.
The result was a 39.3x Lease ROAS against a 20x objective and a session conversion rate that grew from 0.69% to 2.85%. SimplyHome won the AMA Crystal Award for Paid Search: Large, a category with multiple competing entries, making the win a genuine head-to-head result rather than a default one.
For the first time, SimplyHome could answer what their paid search actually produced. The lead had always been the point, what changed was having a system that could actually trace website traffic and clicks through to a signed lease instead of stopping at impressions.
What Both Campaigns Share
The creative strategies were completely different, and the industries have nothing in common. But both campaigns needed the same foundation: closed-loop attribution built specifically for their lead generation process.
That’s what made the results possible. Both campaigns got better over time because the system was learning from actual closed business instead of surface-level metrics.
Optidge is a HubSpot Gold Solutions Partner, and building this closed-loop attribution infrastructure is core to how we approach paid search. Most agencies don’t build it because it takes real work. The campaigns that run on it are in a different category.
What This Means for Your Paid Search Program
If you can’t answer what your paid search actually produced in terms of customers, deals, or revenue, you have the same problem Heartlinks and SimplyHome had before Optidge rebuilt their programs.
The question isn’t whether your campaigns are running. It’s whether they’re connected to anything real on the other end.
Optidge’s paid search practice is built around closing that loop. Whether you’re running ABA therapy PPC, real estate paid search, or another lead-gen vertical, the attribution infrastructure is the starting point. Read the full story behind both programs: Heartlinks ABA and SimplyHome.
If you’re ready to talk about what closed-loop PPC attribution could look like for your business, start the conversation here.