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How Wpromote cut cost per lead and drove award-winning growth for education provider. Think with Google Editorial Team Whether someone is picking an early childhood education provider, securing a mortgage for a new home, or choosing a specialized doctor, high-consideration buying journeys are long, complex, and laden with anxiety. Buyers don't click an ad and instantly sign on the dotted line. They consult friend groups, read local reviews, double-check credentials, and compare options across weeks or months. For lead-generation advertisers, this creates a major paradox. How do you engage prospective customers across an extended research journey while maintaining lead quality and avoiding overwhelming your call center and enrollment teams? Digital agency Wpromote solved this exact challenge when it partnered with Learning Care, a leader in early childhood education that operates 11 subbrands across more than 1,100 schools, proving how data strength and AI can turn complex research journeys into predictable growth. The award-winning Wpromote team, from left to right: Alison Buchheit, Lexi Hoffman, and Amy Adams. Why high-consideration leads fail to convert. Because of the complexity of these types of decisions, parents and prospective buyers bring complex, multilayered queries to Google, asking long questions, comparing local options, and weighing trade-offs. People frequently fill out initial contact forms simply to gather basic information. However, many traditional lead-gen advertising campaigns treat every form fill as a successful conversion, instead of optimizing for lead quality. Learning Care's media efficiency problem was causing organizational strain. Operating hundreds of local schools across brands like La Petite Academy, Childtime, and Tutor Time, Learning Care was generating strong lead volume online. Yet local enrollment teams and call-center staff absorbed friction, following up with inquiries that never translated into enrollments. Paid search has moved beyond lead generation and become a strategic driver of the broader business. Wpromote identified the core issue: Google Ads bidding algorithms were optimizing for shallow online form submissions, rather than qualified prospects. To address this, Wpromote reframed the measurement strategy from basic online form fills to CRM-validated "lead-activated" conversions as the primary offline conversion signal for bidding. "What excited me most was how this work brought our agency team and Learning Care's internal teams closer to the same ultimate goal: driving meaningful enrollment outcomes," said Lexi Hoffman, associate director, paid search at Wpromote. "It showed how paid search has moved beyond lead generation and become a more strategic driver of the broader business." Steering AI with first-party data. To align marketing spend with true business outcomes, Wpromote built a foundation of data strength. Using Data Manager, Wpromote securely linked Learning Care's customer relationship management (CRM) data directly into Google Ads. Wpromote upgraded the primary bidding signal in Google Ads by routing call-center-qualified leads directly into the system, bypassing shallow form submissions. In addition, full-funnel milestones including "tour scheduled," "tour given," and "registration" were imported for comprehensive full-funnel analysis and to support future value-based bidding strategies. Connecting offline CRM data to Google's AI bidding tools transforms digital ad campaigns into a predictable growth engine. With rich first-party signals guiding the campaigns, Wpromote deployed Google's full-stack AI suite across Search and YouTube. Here is where they focused. * Performance Max: Activated across Search, YouTube, Display, and Discover using CRM lead-activated data to identify and capture high-intent prospective families. * AI Max for Search: Deployed AI Max for Search alongside separate Broad Match testing initiatives with target CPA bidding, shifting away from static exact-match keyword lists to capture complex, long-tail search queries from researching parents. * Customer Match: Allowed Google's AI to reach high-intent audiences using privacy-safe, first-party customer signals. Proof that not all leads are created equal. By connecting offline CRM data to Google's AI bidding tools, Wpromote proved that not all leads are created equal, transforming Learning Care's digital ad campaign into a predictable growth engine. Stronger CRM-based lead-activated signals improved campaign optimization across the board, ultimately driving a 4X increase in downstream student registrations. "Strengthening the quality of our conversion data changed what was possible for the account," explained Hoffman. "It gave us the confidence to lean into AI-powered strategies, like AI Max and Performance Max, expand beyond the limitations of a more manual approach, and navigate the evolving search landscape without losing sight of the outcomes that matter most to Learning Care." The campaign delivered substantial efficiency and enrollment growth across every metric. These outstanding results earned Wpromote the 2026 Google Ads Impact Award for AI Excellence. The core takeaway for lead-gen advertisers. If your prospective customers face complex, research-heavy decisions, whether enrolling a child, securing a mortgage, or choosing a healthcare provider, a form fill is not the end of the journey. Optimizing for lead volume instead of lead quality wastes call center capacity and starves AI models of the signals they need. By building data strength and feeding downstream CRM outcomes back to Google Ads, you empower AI to capture intent earlier, personalize messaging, and deliver confirmed revenue to better support complex decision-making journeys. Think with Google Editorial Team.

Wpromote x Giant Spoon launches The Care Index(TM), connecting brand strength to revenue. Jun 17, 2026, 08:00 ET The new framework diagnoses where a brand's consumer relationships are breaking down, then translates those learnings into growth opportunities EL SEGUNDO, Calif., June 17, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - Just six months after joining forces, Wpromote x Giant Spoon has launched the Care Index(TM), a proprietary diagnostic framework for measuring long-term sustainable brand growth across three key drivers: know, like, and care. The Care Index identifies exactly where consumer connections fracture and diagnoses precisely where media and creative investments will yield the highest growth, giving the agency a foundation for translating insights into action. The Care Index evaluates where consumers stand in their relationship with a brand. Most brands can get people to know them. Fewer earn genuine affinity. But "care" is where real business value lives: that's the stage when consumers choose the brand over competitors, come back on their own, and recommend it to others. "When we came together as Wpromote x Giant Spoon six months ago, our primary mission was to eliminate silos between brand building and bottom-line performance," said Janna Navarro, VP, Managing Director at Wpromote, who led the development of the Care Index. "The Care Index is the realization of that vision. To drive growth, you need customers to know your brand, like you, and care about you. For the first time, we aren't just measuring that emotional care, we are translating it directly into media and creative actions that drive revenue." Using behavioral, engagement, and advocacy signals, the Care Index identifies exactly where consumers are dropping off and why. That diagnostic then shapes everything: which audiences to prioritize, what creative will spark the right interest, where to invest media dollars, and what success looks like. The same framework that diagnoses the brand problem also drives creative ideation and media planning. Audience targeting, messaging, and budget allocation all flow from the same source of truth, allowing creative and performance media teams to work in lockstep from day one. The Index continues to measure the brand's health so teams can refine strategy and optimize over time. Early validation of the Care Index across more than 100 mid-market B2C retail brands in 22 subcategories shows that each five-point increase in brand care correlates with approximately 10% increase in incremental annual revenue, establishing a clear financial value for brand-building efforts. In initial alpha testing, Care Score improvements correlated with next-month revenue results at 90%, suggesting the Index functions as a predictive signal, not just a diagnostic, and a source of agile brand insights that will help marketers move faster. "For years, CMOs have had to defend brand investment in a language CFOs don't speak," said Wpromote x Giant Spoon CEO Andrea Bendzick. "The Care Index changes that. When you can show that each point of care drives real revenue impact, and you have the data to back up where to invest next, you're not debating brand versus performance anymore. You're just talking about growth." Wpromote x Giant Spoon partnered with Northwestern University's Medill School Immersion Quarter Program to test and validate the Care Index. Through the initiative, the agency worked with a team of graduate marketing students to pressure-test early hypotheses and strengthen the framework, combining academic rigor with real-world marketing application. "We're working with students who'll be running marketing teams in a few years, so we focus on where the consumer journey is headed, not where it's been," said Ryan Reis, Northwestern Lecturer and Faculty Advisor. "Wpromote x Giant Spoon came to us because they wanted that perspective built into the framework from the start. Our students helped stress-test the early concepts and push back on what wasn't connecting." The Care Index(TM) is integrated into Wpromote x Giant Spoon's intelligence platform, Polaris IQ, giving clients real-time visibility into brand progress, with five clients across multiple industries currently participating in its alpha release. About Wpromote x Giant Spoon Wpromote x Giant Spoon is an independent, full-funnel marketing agency that unites brand and bottom line to drive measurable business growth. By integrating media, data, performance, and world-class creative, we help leading brands across industries like GE, Walmart, Vuori, and Intuit QuickBooks deliver immediate results while building long-term value. SOURCE Wpromote

Mile Marker acquires LIFT to combine media and performance content. Mile Marker adds LIFT's performance creative to tighten media-to-conversion workflows in a competitive US agency market. Mile Marker has acquired LIFT, bringing a performance content and creative team into its omnichannel media agency model to tighten the link between media execution and conversion-focused creative. The combined company will operate under the Mile Marker name, headquartered in New York City, with West Coast operations based in San Francisco. Mile Marker positions the deal as a way to reduce operational friction between media, creative, and data workflows, especially for teams running full-funnel programs across offline and digital channels. Table of contents. Jump to each section: Why Mile Marker bought LIFT now. The practical bet here is that performance outcomes are increasingly constrained by handoffs. When media planning, creative production, and measurement live in separate teams and tools, speed drops and learnings do not compound cleanly across channels. LIFT adds capability where many media-led agencies still rely on partners or fragmented internal pods: performance creative systems that can be iterated quickly, plus execution that spans traditional and digital formats, including direct mail. Mile Marker has also signaled it is not anchoring the integration on a single generative AI tool, but on adaptability as channels and customer expectations shift. What changes in the combined operating model. Operationally, the combined company is aiming for a tighter feedback loop between creative inputs and media performance signals. Mile Marker says LIFT's content and creative capabilities plug into its data and media infrastructure (including Waypoint and Relay), with the stated goal of making creative testing and optimization more systematic. For marketers, the important detail is not the org chart, it is the promised workflow: faster movement from insight to new creative variants, and less lag between campaign performance and content updates. If executed, that can matter most in categories where creative fatigue and offer testing cadence drive material swings in conversion rate. How this deal fits the competitive agency landscape. The category is crowded. US-based agency-led martech services span omnichannel media, performance creative, and content execution, with competition across independents and holding-company networks. Mile Marker now competes more directly with performance-heavy independents such as Wpromote, Tinuiti, Power Digital, and Jellyfish, many of which market an integrated "media + creative + measurement" story. The differentiation, if it holds, will depend on whether Mile Marker can actually unify identity, creative metadata, and media signals into a single learning loop, rather than simply offering more services under one contract. Macro shift: integrated workflows and measurable creative. The acquisition maps to broader trends in marketing workflow automation and the continuing convergence of marketing and sales. As more revenue teams demand faster attribution, tighter follow-up, and proof of incrementality, agencies are under pressure to operationalize measurement across the customer journey, not just report on it. It also reflects a shift in how creative is evaluated. "Creative that performs" increasingly means creative that is instrumented: tagged, tested, and tied to downstream outcomes like conversion, retention, and lifetime value, rather than assessed mainly on qualitative review or channel-level proxy metrics. What marketers should evaluate next. Marketers considering an agency partner with "integrated" claims can pressure-test the model with a few concrete checks: * Creative-to-media feedback loop: How quickly do performance insights change creative, and what is the real turnaround time for new variants? * Testing methodology: Whether the team can run multivariate and hypothesis-driven testing across channels, not only A/B tests inside one platform. * Offline-to-online continuity: If direct mail is part of the mix, how identity and measurement are handled so results do not stay siloed. * Data portability: Mile Marker emphasizes an open tech approach; marketers should confirm how data is accessed, exported, and governed. Mile Marker cites a 90% client retention rate, and LIFT cites average client relationships of more than four years. Those are useful directional signals, but the business value for buyers will come down to whether the combined team can reduce cycle time and improve measurability without adding coordination overhead. This article is created by humans with AI assistance, powered by ContentGrow. Ready to automate your content marketing? Book a discovery call today.