Cowool: SEA cost per customer halved through Ads and Sales Ops

Cowool, which operates coliving residences in France, halved its SEA cost per customer in six months, from €1,700 to €830, and took the ROAS of that same channel from 1 to 8. Over the same period, conversion from connected lead to SQL gained 13 points and conversion from lead to customer 8 points. These results come from a setup deployed by Growth Room since summer 2025, combining Google Ads, Meta Ads, outbound prospecting, nurturing and sales process structuring in HubSpot.

About Cowool

Cowool runs coliving residences. The business is B2C: the decision belongs to the person who will live there, on a commitment that is compared against alternatives and constrained by what is available at the moment of the search.

That model has a direct consequence for acquisition. A lead only has value if it matches a residence with space left, at the time the person is looking. Cost per lead therefore says nothing on its own: only cost per customer, once the contract is signed, allows a channel to be judged.

The starting point

The company is rolling out residences across France and needed to accelerate SEA performance to support that expansion. The issue covered both the volume of enquiries and their final cost, once related to signed contracts.

The second subject was commercial. A sharp rise in lead volume produces nothing if handling processes do not keep up. The sales organisation and the CRM data had to be able to absorb that rise without losses along the way.

Ads: steering on cost per customer, not cost per lead

Google Ads

Paid search was rebuilt around a single objective: bringing down the cost of acquiring a customer, not the cost of a form. Trade-offs between campaigns were made on that basis, tracing performance through to the signed customer instead of stopping at the lead.

In six months, SEA cost per customer went from €1,700 to €830, and the ROAS of that channel from 1 to 8. Both figures describe the same movement: at comparable budget, a far larger share of spend ends in a contract.

Meta Ads

Meta Ads covers an earlier stage, when the search has not yet been typed into a search engine. The channel is tracked on the same criteria as SEA, through to the customer, so that the two levers stay comparable with each other.

Outbound and nurturing: working leads over time

Not every lead is ready at the moment it appears. Nurturing sequences maintain the relationship with people whose plans are not yet firm, or for whom no space is available in the residence they had in mind.

Outbound prospecting adds to that inbound flow. It is handled with the same statuses and the same criteria as campaign leads, which makes it possible to compare sources on what they actually contribute in signed contracts.

Sales Ops: structuring processes and data in HubSpot

Sales processes were rewritten in HubSpot: the steps for handling a lead, qualification criteria, and the definition of what makes a connected lead, an SQL and then a customer. The same rules apply across every residence and across the team.

This structuring produces the two conversion gains measured: 13 points between connected lead and SQL, 8 points between lead and customer. It also makes paid steering possible, since cost per customer can only be calculated if the CRM can link a contract back to the campaign that generated it.

Results

• SEA cost per customer halved in six months, from €1,700 to €830.
• SEA ROAS taken from 1 to 8 over those same six months.
• +13 points of conversion between connected lead and SQL since the start of the engagement.
• +8 points of conversion between lead and customer over the same period.

The engagement has been running since summer 2025. The approach stays the same: campaigns judged on signed customers, leads worked over time, and sales processes able to absorb the rise in volume.

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