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oneSolar engaged Ruby Digital with a specific brief: improve the quality of inbound leads generated through Google Ads. Operating in an increasingly competitive solar market, where the decline of load shedding had shifted consumer motivation from urgency to cost savings and grid independence, oneSolar was receiving a high volume of low-quality enquiries that were failing to convert into viable sales opportunities.
The engagement was focused on restructuring Google Ads activity to attract qualified residential and commercial prospects, reduce wasted spend on low-intent traffic, and build a sustainable lead generation framework capable of supporting oneSolar’s operations across Cape Town and Gqeberha.
The Google Ads strategy was designed around three core objectives:
When Ruby Digital took over the oneSolar Google Ads account, the challenges were not technical. They were market-wide. A saturated competitor landscape, a fundamental shift in consumer demand, and a lead pipeline contaminated by low-quality traffic meant that the account was spending money without delivering meaningful business outcomes. Fixing it required more than optimisation. It required a complete rethinking of what the campaigns were supposed to achieve.
A Market Shifted by the End of Load Shedding
When Ruby Digital began work on the oneSolar Google Ads account, the South African solar market was undergoing a fundamental shift. Load shedding had previously been the primary driver of demand, creating urgency that made conversion relatively straightforward. With the significant reduction in load shedding, that urgency disappeared and the market repositioned around cost savings and grid independence. This coincided with a sharp increase in competition, as more solar providers entered the paid search space, driving up costs and making it significantly harder to generate high-quality leads at an efficient cost per acquisition.
An Exceptionally Competitive Paid Search Landscape
The scale of competition in the solar paid search market is significant. Over the course of the engagement, Ruby Digital identified and negated more than 150 competitor brand terms within the account. This volume of competitor activity reflects how crowded the Google Ads auction had become, with budgets being eroded by irrelevant impressions and clicks from users searching for competing brands rather than oneSolar specifically.
A Lead Pipeline Dominated by Low-Quality Enquiries
The most immediate challenge was not lead volume, but lead quality. The account was generating enquiries, but a large proportion were coming from job seekers, price shoppers, and low-intent users with no realistic intention of purchasing a solar solution. These submissions were consuming the sales team’s time, inflating conversion metrics, and making it difficult to accurately measure true campaign performance or identify what was genuinely working.
To address oneSolar’s lead quality challenge, Ruby Digital implemented a structured, phased Google Ads strategy focused on progressively refining targeting, improving campaign efficiency, and shifting the account from broad reach toward high-intent lead generation.
Campaign Restructuring and Intent-Based Segmentation
The account was restructured around four distinct campaigns, each aligned to a specific audience and intent signal. A Homeowners Search campaign targeted residential prospects actively searching for solar solutions, while a Commercial Search campaign focused on business and commercial decision-makers. A Branded Search campaign captured high-intent users already familiar with oneSolar, and a Performance Max Multiplier campaign extended reach across Google’s full network, including YouTube, Display, Gmail, Discover, and Maps, to build awareness among architects, contractors, property developers, and commercial property managers. This segmentation ensured that messaging, bidding, and landing page alignment were customised to each audience type rather than competing within a single undifferentiated campaign.
Traffic Quality Refinement
A significant focus throughout the engagement was the systematic reduction of low-intent traffic. Ongoing negative keyword research and search term reviews were used to exclude irrelevant queries, including competitor terms, once-off panel purchases, and job-seeking enquiries that had been inflating conversion volumes without delivering sales-ready leads. Bad lead audience exclusions were uploaded directly into Google Ads to prevent the algorithm from targeting similar low-quality users, progressively improving the relevance of traffic entering the account.
Omnichannel Awareness and Conversion Integration
As the account matured, a pattern emerged that reshaped the strategic direction. Users were encountering the oneSolar brand across multiple Google touchpoints through the Performance Max campaign but not always converting immediately. Instead, they were returning later through branded or organic search to complete their enquiry. This indicated that Google Ads was functioning as both a direct response channel and an upper-funnel awareness driver, with organic search acting as the bottom-of-funnel conversion channel. In response, a Branded Performance Max campaign was introduced to strengthen brand recall and capture users re-entering the funnel through branded searches, while a remarketing campaign was implemented to re-engage previous website visitors who had not yet converted.
Conversion Quality Feedback Loop
To further improve lead quality over time, Ruby Digital implemented a GCLID-based feedback mechanism, using conversion data from leads manually scored as good quality to inform Google’s optimisation signals. Leads identified as low quality, including job seekers and unqualified enquiries, were removed from Google’s custom match lists to prevent the algorithm from targeting similar audiences. This closed the loop between sales-level lead quality and paid media optimisation, enabling the account to learn from real business outcomes rather than raw conversion volume alone.
Across a like-for-like comparison period (November 2025 to May 2026), the Google Ads programme for oneSolar delivered measurable improvements in lead quality, campaign efficiency, and overall return on ad spend.
Taken together, these results demonstrate that Google Ads, when structured around lead quality rather than lead volume, can deliver meaningfully better business outcomes even within a fixed monthly budget and an increasingly competitive market.
