Ask an Expert: Paid Media That Converts with Natasha de Koning
Series: Ask an Expert Expert: Natasha de Koning — Paid Media Specialist LinkedIn: Natasha de Koning Commentary by: Anthony Lopes, Lopes Advisory
Introduction
For this instalment of Ask an Expert, I spoke with Natasha de Koning, a paid media specialist who focuses on one of the hardest problems in digital marketing: turning ad spend into actual revenue — not just leads.
Natasha's work sits in the space between what platforms report and what businesses actually experience. It's a gap that, in my work with solar and renewable energy companies, I see widen to a chasm. Installers celebrate a month of "great leads" while the sales team quietly reports that half of them were tyre-kickers, the other half couldn't get financing, and the CRM hasn't been updated since February.
This conversation gets specific about where that disconnect originates and — more importantly — how to fix it.
Q: Tell us about what you do and what drives you.
Natasha de Koning: I'm a paid media specialist, helping businesses turn ad spend into real, measurable growth — not just leads, but revenue.
What drives me is solving the gap between platform performance and business outcomes. I enjoy taking underperforming accounts, tightening strategy, fixing tracking, and building systems that scale sustainably instead of chasing short-term wins.
Anthony's Commentary
That phrase — "the gap between platform performance and business outcomes" — should be pinned to the wall of every solar marketing department. Google Ads will tell you that you generated 200 leads last month. Your sales team will tell you they booked 30 site surveys and closed 12 deals. The question is whether anyone can tell you which of those 200 leads became the 12 deals, and what they had in common. That's the gap Natasha is describing, and it's where most solar marketing budgets quietly bleed out.
Q: Why do many paid media campaigns generate leads but not sales?
Natasha de Koning: Because most campaigns are optimised for volume rather than intent. This often shows up as optimising for cheap, top-of-funnel leads instead of downstream conversion events; weak qualification within forms and landing pages; misalignment between ad messaging and the sales process; and little to no feedback loop between marketing and sales.
Many accounts also fail to feed meaningful first-party data back into the platforms or don't fully trust the algorithms, leading to over-controlled and inefficient campaign structures.
The platforms are doing exactly what they're told — they're just being told the wrong thing.
Anthony's Commentary
"The platforms are doing exactly what they're told" — this is the most important sentence in this entire series for solar businesses to understand. If you tell Google to optimise for form submissions, it will find you the cheapest form submissions. It has no way of knowing that the person who submitted the form rents their home, has a shaded roof, or was just price-shopping with no intention to proceed.
In solar, the gap between a "lead" and a "qualified opportunity" is enormous. A homeowner requesting a quote is not the same as a homeowner who owns their property, has suitable roof orientation, can access financing, and is motivated to proceed within a reasonable timeframe. If your campaign can't distinguish between those two people, your cost-per-acquisition will always be higher than it needs to be.
Q: In practical terms, how do you define and optimise for lead quality?
Natasha de Koning: Lead quality is the likelihood that a lead will convert into revenue. Optimising for quality means going beyond the initial form fill and tracking post-lead signals — Sales Qualified Leads, booked calls, deal stage, and revenue. Where possible, I feed offline conversions back into the ad platforms and optimise toward stronger conversion events rather than surface-level actions.
I also build intent signals directly into forms — budget, role, urgency, and problem awareness — to help qualify leads earlier in the journey.
If the platform can't "see" quality, it can't optimise for it.
Anthony's Commentary
This is the practical execution of what Grant discussed in our previous Field Note about feeding first-party data back into platforms. Natasha takes it a step further with the form design point, which I think is underrated.
For solar, the qualifying questions that belong in a lead form are specific: Do you own or rent? What's your monthly electricity spend? When are you looking to install? Have you received other quotes? Each of these filters intent. Yes, adding fields reduces form submissions. That's the point. You want fewer, better leads — and more importantly, you want the platform to learn what a good lead looks like so it can find more of them.
The offline conversion feedback loop is the gold standard here. When a solar installer closes a deal and feeds that event — "this lead became a signed contract" — back into Google or Meta, the algorithm starts optimising for closeable leads, not just clickable ones.
Q: What's the right role of Google Search versus Meta for considered purchases?
Natasha de Koning: Google Search captures existing intent — people actively looking for a solution, typically lower in the funnel, closer to a purchase decision. Meta creates and shapes demand by educating audiences, reframing problems, and warming people up earlier in the funnel.
For considered purchases, the strongest results usually come from using both platforms together: Meta builds awareness and consideration, while Search captures demand when people are ready to act.
Anthony's Commentary
This is the framework I use when mapping channel strategy for solar clients, and Natasha articulates it cleanly. In the solar buyer's journey, Meta's role is to plant the seed: "Your energy costs are going up. Here's what your neighbours are doing about it." Google's role is to catch the harvest: "Solar panels [city] — get a quote."
The mistake I see most often is solar businesses running only Google Search — essentially waiting for demand that already exists rather than creating it. In mature markets like the Netherlands and Germany, there's enough existing search volume to sustain this approach for a while. But in markets where solar adoption is still growing, or for businesses entering new territories, Meta's demand-creation role isn't optional. It's the growth engine.
Q: What are your top three levers to pull when CPL increases or quality drops?
Natasha de Koning: First, conversion signal quality — are we optimising toward the right event? Has anything changed on the website that could impact tracking accuracy? Is offline conversion tracking still working?
Second, offer and messaging alignment — does the promise in the ad match the landing page and the sales process? Has the creative hit frequency saturation?
Third, audience and intent filters — tighten targeting, exclusions, or lead qualification before simply increasing budget.
Most of the time, reviewing these areas uncovers the root cause.
Anthony's Commentary
I'd encourage every solar marketer to print this list and tape it next to their screen. When CPL spikes — and it will, especially during competitive seasons when every installer in the market ramps spend simultaneously — the instinct is to either increase budget or slash it. Both are usually wrong.
In my diagnostic work, the root cause of rising CPL in solar accounts is almost always one of Natasha's three levers. Most commonly, it's the first: a tracking pixel that broke during a website update, a form change that created duplicate conversions, or an offline conversion feed that silently stopped syncing. Before you touch your budget, check your data.
Q: What tracking setup is non-negotiable today?
Natasha de Koning: GA4 must be properly configured. Google Tag and the Meta Pixel should be implemented alongside Conversions API. Conversion events need to be clean and deduplicated. And where sales cycles allow, offline conversions should be fed back into the ad platforms.
Where things typically go wrong: many businesses track only form submissions, allow duplicate or inflated conversions to skew results, or have no visibility beyond the lead stage. Others rely too heavily on platform dashboards without cross-checking data, or try to maintain full manual control over campaigns at the expense of algorithmic efficiency.
Without the right setup, the data used to make decisions becomes unreliable.
Anthony's Commentary
The Conversions API point deserves emphasis. With browser-based tracking becoming less reliable — cookie deprecation, iOS privacy changes, ad blockers — server-side tracking through Conversions API is no longer a nice-to-have. For solar businesses running Meta campaigns, CAPI implementation is the difference between the platform seeing 60% of your conversions and seeing 95% of them. That 35% gap changes everything about how the algorithm optimises.
For the solar businesses I work with, the non-negotiable tracking stack is: GA4, Google Tag with enhanced conversions, Meta CAPI, and a CRM (ideally HubSpot) feeding offline conversion events back to both platforms. Get that foundation in place before spending another cent on media.
Q: How do you structure landing pages and forms to improve conversion and quality?
Natasha de Koning: I focus on clarity and intent at every step. Each landing page should communicate one clear message, supported by a strong above-the-fold value proposition. Forms should be designed with less friction — not fewer fields, but better ones that qualify users properly. It should always be clear what happens after the form is submitted. And both the homepage and thank-you page should include social proof.
The goal isn't maximum submissions — it's the right submissions.
Anthony's Commentary
"Not fewer fields, but better ones" — this distinction matters enormously in solar. I've seen installers strip their forms down to name, email, and phone number in pursuit of higher conversion rates, then wonder why their sales team wastes hours calling people who aren't actually qualified.
A well-designed solar lead form should qualify for property ownership, approximate energy spend, installation timeline, and postcode — at minimum. Yes, this will reduce your raw lead volume. It will also transform your sales team's conversion rate and, over time, train the platform algorithms to find people who match your actual buyer profile.
The social proof point is equally important. Solar is a high-trust purchase — you're asking someone to put equipment on their roof that'll be there for 25 years. Testimonials, case studies with real savings figures, and any certifications or guarantees should be visible before and after the form submission.
Q: How do you test creative properly without burning budget?
Natasha de Koning: Effective creative testing focuses on testing angles and messages, not just visuals. Variables should be controlled — change one element at a time. Platform learning phases should be used intentionally rather than interrupted too early. Underperforming creative should be cut quickly, and winners scaled in a structured way. Testing budgets should be kept separate from scaling budgets.
Creative testing should be a process, not a gamble.
Anthony's Commentary
The "angles and messages, not just visuals" point is where most solar creative testing goes wrong. I see installers testing three versions of the same stock photo of solar panels with slightly different headline colours, when what they should be testing is fundamentally different value propositions: financial savings versus energy independence versus environmental impact versus property value increase.
In my experience, the messaging angle that wins in solar varies significantly by market maturity and audience segment. In the Netherlands, where solar is mainstream, financial return messaging tends to outperform. In markets where adoption is still growing, energy independence and rising tariff protection messaging often converts better. You won't know until you test — but test the message, not the font.
Q: What does a healthy account structure look like?
Natasha de Koning: A healthy account structure is simple, intentional, and designed to scale. Campaigns should be clearly separated by objective and funnel stage, without unnecessary over-segmentation. The focus should be on clean signals that drive results, not vanity metrics.
Complexity doesn't equal sophistication.
Anthony's Commentary
This principle applies directly to solar account structures, where I frequently see over-segmentation by product type or geography that fragments budget and starves individual campaigns of the data they need to optimise.
For a mid-sized solar installer, a clean Google Ads structure might be as simple as: one search campaign for branded terms, one for non-branded solar intent terms, one Performance Max campaign, and one remarketing campaign. On Meta: one awareness campaign, one lead generation campaign, one retargeting campaign. That's it. Each campaign has enough budget to exit the learning phase, and the signals are clean enough for the algorithms to work with.
Q: What are the biggest mistakes companies make in reporting performance?
Natasha de Koning: The most common mistakes are reporting platform metrics instead of business outcomes, providing no context around lead quality or revenue, focusing only on short-term performance, and ignoring attribution limitations.
Effective reporting should answer one clear question: "Is this growing the business?"
Anthony's Commentary
If your monthly marketing report leads with impressions, clicks, and CTR, it's not a performance report — it's an activity report. The solar business owner or commercial director doesn't need to know that CTR improved by 0.3%. They need to know how many qualified appointments were booked, at what cost, and how many converted to signed contracts.
The reporting framework I build for solar clients tracks three tiers: platform metrics (for the media buyer), pipeline metrics (for the marketing manager), and commercial metrics (for leadership). Each audience gets the view they need to make decisions, and the metrics cascade logically from media spend through to revenue.
Q: If you inherit a messy account, what's your seven-day triage checklist?
Natasha de Koning:
- Days 1–2: Audit tracking, conversions, and data integrity.
- Days 3–4: Review account structure, objectives, and optimisation signals.
- Day 5: Assess creative, messaging, and landing pages.
- Day 6: Identify quick wins versus structural fixes.
- Day 7: Build a clear action plan — fix, test, scale.
The focus is on stabilising the account first, then optimising, then scaling.
Anthony's Commentary
This triage sequence — stabilise, optimise, scale — mirrors the Diagnose → Integrate → Interpret framework I use at Lopes Advisory. You cannot optimise what you cannot measure, and you cannot scale what isn't yet stable.
When I run marketing diagnostics for solar businesses, the first 48 hours are always about data integrity — exactly as Natasha describes. Is the pixel firing correctly? Are form submissions being tracked and deduplicated? Is CRM data flowing back? I have never — not once — audited a solar business's paid media and found the tracking to be fully correct on day one. The fixes that emerge from those first two days almost always deliver more ROI than any campaign change that follows.
Closing Thoughts
Natasha's answers have a common thread: the gap between what platforms report and what the business actually experiences is where the real work happens. Closing that gap requires clean tracking, meaningful conversion signals, structured testing, and reporting that connects media spend to commercial outcomes.
For solar and renewable energy businesses, where the journey from click to signed contract involves site surveys, proposals, financing, and installation scheduling, this gap is wider than in most industries. The businesses that close it — through proper offline conversion tracking, CRM integration, and signal-based optimisation — will consistently outperform those still measuring success by the number of form submissions.
This Field Note is part of the Ask an Expert series on Lopes Advisory, where we speak to practitioners across digital marketing, RevOps, and growth strategy about the questions that matter most to scaling businesses — with a particular focus on the solar and renewable energy sector.