Case study
Plug In Stations install EV chargers across the UK. When Andy decided to take on Octopus Energy, he had £2,000 a month against their £1,000,000, so we built the account around tracking real sales instead of leads. It has since tracked £2.2M in sales.
Andy called us one morning and said, “I want to take on Octopus Energy.” He had £2,000 a month to spend on Google Ads. Octopus and E.ON were spending around £1,000,000 a month between them.
On every obvious search, like “EV charger installer near me”, a click cost £6 to £12, and the giants could outbid us every time. We were never going to win their game, so we had to play a different one.
Both circles are drawn to scale.
We could never outspend Octopus, so we had to out-learn them. Andy’s sales team logged a quote and a sale value against every lead in StrikeTwice, our call and lead tracking.
Those sale values went back into Google Ads every 12 hours. Instead of chasing whoever filled in a form, the bidding learned what a paying customer looked like and which searches produced them.
| Date | Keyword | Quote value | Sale value |
|---|---|---|---|
| 27 Feb | ohme charger | £0.00 | £2,120.00 |
| 22 Feb | – | £930.00 | £1,830.00 |
| 22 Feb | – | £0.00 | £1,394.10 |
| 24 Feb | ohme home pro | £1,386.00 | £1,386.00 |
| 10 Feb | – | £0.00 | £1,299.60 |
| 12 Feb | – | £1,290.00 | £1,290.00 |
| 12 Feb | – | £0.00 | £1,272.00 |
| 14 Feb | – | £0.00 | £1,260.00 |
| 27 Feb | ohme charger | £1,536.00 | £1,236.00 |
Sale values logged against each paid lead by Andy’s team, rebuilt from the StrikeTwice lead log.
Once we could see which searches turned into paid installs, one product line stood out that the energy giants were not properly defending: homeowners looking to have an Ohme charger fitted. So we narrowed the account to it.
Clicks fell from around £6 to under £1 almost overnight, because nobody else was building a journey around Ohme buyers. In its first three months the new campaign brought in leads at £8.39 each.
We rebuilt the landing page around the two things people want to know before they trust a small installer over a household name: whether the business does what they need, and whether they can trust it to do it.
The form asks four questions in about ten seconds, which are the same four questions Andy’s sales team were already asking on the phone.
Plug In went from £2,000 a month on ads to more than £14,000, and in February 2025 it tracked over £100,000 of sales in a single month for the first time.
Leads grew faster than the spend did, from around 50 a month in early 2024 to more than 2,300 in July 2026.
The account was named a finalist at the UK Search Awards 2025, less than two years after Andy first set his sights on Octopus.
In April 2026 the Ohme campaign tracked £175,000 in sales on £9,729 of spend, and one in three people who clicked the ad became a lead.
Every one of those sales was logged by Andy’s team and fed back into the account, so the campaign was bidding for installs rather than enquiries. Each lead cost £5.52, which is less than a single click used to cost on the generic keywords we walked away from.
The Ohme campaign across April 2026.
We presented the account at Performance MCR, with the Ohme page up on the screen behind us.
The talk was about how a small business can beat a far bigger budget by tracking what actually makes money, rather than trying to outspend anyone.
In the Ohme auctions, Octopus’s share has fallen by 5% and E.ON’s by 8%, while Plug In brings in around 1,400 leads a month.
The limit now is not the budget or the cost per lead. It is how many calls Andy’s sales team can take in a day.
We will go through what is currently live, suggest changes, and tell you if we are a good fit to work together.
