Acquire · Convert · Operate
PeopleFinders
The portfolio's highest monthly subscriber total since launch — up 33% month-over-month across three brands.
PeopleFinders is a data company whose real-estate brands — PropertyReach, Lead Sherpa, and Skip Sherpa — serve real-estate investors with property data and skip-tracing services, each acquiring trials and subscribers through paid media. When The Matchbox took over the portfolio, the brands shared a fragmented setup: no clean attribution, a generic one-size-fits-all signup funnel, and paid-search accounts whose budget was concentrated in inefficient competitor keywords. The Matchbox rebuilt the portfolio's paid media from the ground up — clean campaign architecture, verified conversion tracking, a cross-brand keyword and Quality Score audit, and a conversion-focused funnel overhaul. Three loosely-managed brands became a single, measurable acquisition system.
Visit peoplefinders.comMoM subscriber growth — portfolio high
Lead growth vs. prior quarter
Lower blended cost-per-lead
Lower Skip Sherpa cost-per-lead vs. Q4
Key achievements
Drove the portfolio's highest monthly subscriber total since the account began, up 33% month-over-month.
Reduced blended cost-per-lead 15% versus the prior quarter while growing leads 107%.
Lowered Skip Sherpa's cost-per-lead 36% versus Q4, the most efficient of all three brands.
Improved PropertyReach's paid-search cost-per-trial 22% month-over-month as trials grew 40%.
Rebuilding PropertyReach's paid search from the ground up
Spending without knowing what worked.
The challenge: Before the rebuild, PropertyReach's paid media ran without a clean attribution view — the team had no verified conversion data and no reliable read on what was driving trials and subscribers. Every traffic source funneled into the same generic lead-gen page, and acquisition costs were running far higher than they needed to. There was no clean campaign structure to optimize against.
The Matchbox solution: We rebuilt the account into a clean, segmented structure and wired verified conversion tracking across the ad platform and CRM so every dollar could finally be traced to an outcome.
- Rebuilt campaigns into a clean structure segmented by brand, competitor, feature, and audience.
- Added verified conversion tracking across Google Ads and HubSpot for the first clean attribution view.
- Reallocated budget out of underperforming paid social and into paid search, the proven subscriber driver.
- Implemented dayparting and Maximize Conversions bidding to concentrate spend on converting hours.
- Improved paid-search cost-per-lead 19% and cost-per-trial 22% month-over-month, with leads up 38% and trials up 40%.
Recovering wasted spend across two brands
Broad match quietly draining the budget.
The challenge: A single competitor campaign was consuming 43% of PropertyReach's entire paid-search budget, with one head term accounting for 84% of that campaign — at a Quality Score of just 3/10, outranked by the competitor 84–95% of the time, and a conversion rate that had decayed from 10% to roughly 5%. Across the portfolio, broad match was converting at 3.1% versus 8.0% on exact — roughly twice as expensive per conversion. On Lead Sherpa, 52% of the brand-campaign budget was leaking to non-brand queries, brand impression share had collapsed from roughly 50% to under 10%, and lead-to-subscriber conversion had fallen from 21.5% to 10.5%.
The Matchbox solution: We ran a two-month search-term audit across both brands and used it to systematically cut waste and re-point budget at converting intent.
- Audited two months of search-term data across PropertyReach and Lead Sherpa.
- Proved broad match was converting at 3.1% versus 8.0% on exact — roughly 2x worse cost-per-conversion.
- Traced 52% of Lead Sherpa's brand-campaign budget leaking to non-brand queries via broad match.
- Migrated match types to phrase/exact and built account-level negative keyword lists.
- Flagged a 150% brand CPC inflation in 10 weeks through Auction Insights and added competitor-name negatives.
Making Skip Sherpa the portfolio's most efficient channel
Strong unit economics hiding in the smallest brand.
The challenge: Skip Sherpa ran on a single Google Ads campaign that had been intermittently paused and restarted, leaving it without consistent delivery or a clean efficiency read. Subscriber acquisition costs in Q4 were high, and the small scale made the brand easy to overlook.
The Matchbox solution: We stabilized the campaign into its first full month of consistent delivery and tightened it around the brand's high-intent API and skip-tracing audience.
- Stabilized the single “Real Estate API” campaign into its first full month of consistent delivery.
- Lowered cost-per-lead 36% versus Q4 — the most efficient of all three brands.
- Cut cost-per-subscriber by more than half versus Q4.
- Lifted click-through rate to 7.3%, the highest across the portfolio and above Q4's 6.1%.
- Improved lead-to-subscriber conversion to 12.5%, up from Q4's 9.6%.
Fixing a generic funnel that leaked conversions
Strong traffic, weak conversion.
The challenge: Every campaign pushed traffic to the same generic signup page, regardless of intent. The landing pages drew strong volume but converted poorly — more than 27,000 sessions at a conversion rate below the 3–5% benchmark, with average scroll depth of just 15% and a JavaScript slider error disrupting roughly 900 sessions. PropertyReach's trial offer handed over 30,000 leads, attracting low-intent signups who pulled the data and churned.
The Matchbox solution: We deployed session analytics to diagnose the friction, then re-pointed both the pages and the offer toward higher-intent users.
- Deployed Microsoft Clarity across all landing pages to diagnose conversion friction.
- Surfaced the core problem: 27,000+ sessions converting below the 3–5% benchmark at just 15% average scroll depth.
- Right-sized the trial offer from 30,000 leads to 100 to attract higher-intent signups.
- Drove the property-and-owner-info campaign's acquisition cost down 53% and skip tracing down 55%.
- Identified and routed a JavaScript slider error affecting ~900 sessions for fix.
The outcome
The Matchbox transformed PeopleFinders' multi-brand paid media from an unmeasured, broad-match-heavy setup into a clean, efficient acquisition system. By rebuilding campaign architecture, auditing every keyword and Quality Score, and reallocating budget toward what actually converted, we drove the portfolio's highest monthly subscriber total since the account began — up 33% month-over-month — while lowering blended cost-per-lead 15% versus the prior quarter. Skip Sherpa became the most efficient channel in the portfolio, and PropertyReach's paid search posted double-digit gains at every funnel stage — proving that disciplined account structure and match-type rigor, not bigger budgets, are what compound efficiency across a brand portfolio.
Focus
Real Estate Data
FAQ
About this
engagement.
By rebuilding paid media across all three brands — PropertyReach, Lead Sherpa, and Skip Sherpa — from the ground up: clean campaign architecture segmented by brand, competitor, feature, and audience; verified conversion tracking across Google Ads and HubSpot; a two-month cross-brand search-term and Quality Score audit; and budget reallocation toward paid search, the proven subscriber driver. The result was the portfolio's highest monthly subscriber total since the account began.
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