Angel Adoption
Angel Adoption is a nationwide domestic infant adoption agency in Crystal Lake, Illinois. Digital Authority Partners was its agency of record for search, paid media, web development and site maintenance from November 2024 to October 2025. The account arrived with conversion tracking that counted contact page views as conversions, so nobody knew what a real inquiry cost. DAP rebuilt the tracking first, then rebuilt the paid search account against verified applications, the completed forms that actually reach the agency. Paid form submissions rose 105% from February to March 2025 while the cost of each one fell 40%.
Angel Adoption is a domestic infant adoption agency founded in 1998 and based in Crystal Lake, Illinois. It works nationwide through licensed entities in Illinois, Florida, Texas, Louisiana and Washington. The agency serves two audiences at once: expectant mothers considering adoption, and prospective adoptive parents waiting to be matched. Both journeys start with a form on the website, and both are decisions people make over weeks, usually on a phone.
Services We Provide
Project Summary
Angel Adoption signed a 12-month contract with DAP in November 2024, and DAP took over both Google Ads accounts on December 1. The first finding was a tracking problem, not a marketing one. The previous vendor had been counting views of the contact page as conversions, so reported leads ran at roughly three times the real figure. DAP fixed the tracking before touching the campaigns. Optimizing against a false conversion pushes an account toward the wrong traffic.
Six adoptive parent landing pages followed, then a state by state content program, then a technical program on two Joomla sites a third party developer controlled. March 2025 was the clearest month: paid form submissions doubled, cost per submission fell 40%, and the paid conversion rate almost doubled. The engagement closed in October 2025.
The Challenge
Broken Measurement A Conversion Number That Was Not a Conversion
The previous PPC and SEO vendor had set up conversion tracking that fired on a view of the contact page rather than on a form submission. Every visitor who landed on that page counted as a lead. DAP found the fault during the November 2024 audit and corrected it before the first full month of management. The correction cut reported conversions sharply, and it meant the client's history was not a usable baseline. No cost per lead figure in the account could be trusted, so no campaign decision could be defended.
Channel Concentration A Funnel That Ran Almost Entirely on Paid Search
In December 2024 the site produced 420 form submissions. Paid search delivered 293 of them, 69.8% of the total. Organic search delivered 69, and organic traffic was down 22% year over year. One channel carried seven in ten inquiries. That concentration set a floor on cost, because every extra inquiry had to be bought.
Platform Control Two Fragile Sites DAP Did Not Control
Angel Adoption and its sister brand ran on Joomla, an older content management system, maintained by an outside development agency. Staging existed but had not been disclosed to DAP, and when access came it did not mirror the live site: different templates, missing main page headings. A set of title tag edits in November 2024 coincided with a contact form breaking. In mid-December the developer ran a database merge that took both sites offline, told the client 24 hours later, and left ads running to a dead site until DAP paused them. Every technical fix had to be staged around a platform and a vendor DAP did not control.
Mobile Experience Eight in Ten Visitors Were on a Phone
Mobile accounted for 36,256 of December's sessions, which was 83% of the total. Mobile performance scored 22 out of 100 when DAP first measured it. Long forms on slow pages are a poor fit for a birth mother making a private decision on a phone. The audience the business depended on was landing on the weakest version of the site.
How We Helped Angel Adoption
Conversion Tracking Rebuilt Before Any Optimization
DAP fixed measurement before optimizing anything. Nothing else in the program could be judged until the account counted real inquiries.
- A full analytics audit completed in the first month, with the page view conversion fault documented and corrected
- Event tracking migrated from GA4 into Google Tag Manager and extended across the website and both Google Ads accounts
- Campaign level tracking repaired into Zoho, the system that holds the client's inquiry and family records, which put a campaign name against each application
- Client side form entries compared line by line against those records to locate where submissions were being lost
- A shared tracking implementation sheet maintained so the client could see what was live and what was pending
Paid Search Rebuilt Around Applications
Once the account counted applications, DAP cut what was not producing them and put the budget behind what was.
- Unoptimized campaigns wasting budget identified in the audit and removed in the first month
- Submission timing analyzed, which showed a peak at the end of the week and on weekends, and budget redistributed to match
- Keyword lists tightened to exclude low intent search terms, and underperforming ad callouts removed from both accounts
- Budget consolidated into the top performing Adoption_Alpha campaign, Performance Max relaunched with tighter targeting, and the Household Income campaign paused on quality grounds
- A Texas campaign launched in March 2025, remarketing bids lowered to bring down cost per application, and a dynamic search campaign prepared and tested
Landing Pages Built, Then Tested Against Each Other
DAP treated the landing pages as a test set rather than a single deliverable. The winning page and the winning form were both found by measurement, not by preference.
- Six adoptive parent paid search landing pages designed and developed in December 2024 and launched on January 20, 2025
- Expectant mother landing page designs produced, with a locations pop-up in the footers so one template could serve several states
- The Moms Adoption Dark variant carried 1,105 of March's 2,498 submissions, and a shortened form, Free Application (reduced), carried another 786
- An LGBTQ national service page and its paid search landing page written, designed and developed outside the scope of work at no extra charge
- A financing landing page built with an exit pop-up and four sticky banner versions, then a live split test of the main website against the landing page launched on June 18, 2025
A Content Program Built State by State
Adoption law and adoption cost differ by state. DAP built the content one state at a time instead of writing national pages and expecting them to rank locally.
- 24 blogs and 35 supporting outlines delivered in March 2025 alone, covering Texas requirements, costs, wait times, home studies and eligibility
- Adoptive parent state pages launched, with Texas and Dallas city page copy and design completed
- 17 Texas supporting blogs and 14 Illinois supporting blogs produced by June 2025, plus five state-specific birth mother pages
- 15 further supporting outlines delivered in August 2025 across Wisconsin, Washington, Florida, North Carolina and South Carolina, down to city level for Milwaukee, Seattle, Orlando, Miami, Jacksonville, Charlotte and Wilmington
- Financing copy components written for the application page, the blog and the cost of adoption page
Technical and Platform Work on a Site DAP Did Not Own
The two sites belonged to another developer. DAP audited them, fixed what it could reach, and wrote the rest up for the team that could.
- A technical search engine optimization audit run on both sites in November 2024, with the findings turned into a prioritized fix list
- Page titles and descriptions corrected sitewide, which moved click-through rate from 2.1% to 2.2% and added about 460 clicks a month
- Heading structure and internal linking improved, which moved average position from 19.5 to 18.7 and added 28 indexed pages and 11,000 monthly impressions
- Schema markup added so search engines could read each page, the sitemap file updated by hand, and redirects mapped for every page returning a not-found error
- 15 development fixes released in August 2025, and a migration plan written to move the website and database off the outside developer's Amazon Web Services account
Reporting the Client Could Defend
Roughly half the form submissions in Google Analytics were spam, and the client’s own records disagreed with the website. DAP built a reporting model that started from those records instead.
- A monthly digital marketing report produced for each brand, with the month's work listed against the month's numbers
- The 259 submission gap between DAP's tracking and the client's database escalated, with the steps needed to close it attached
- A proportional attribution model built on the Zoho records as the source of truth, distributing verified packets and sign-ons across channels by each channel's share of visitors
- A weekly paid search summary and a weekly client update email, so nothing waited for the monthly meeting
- A Q3 2025 quarterly review delivered with a written mathematical proof for every figure, plus an anticipated questions document with each answer written down in advance
What We Achieved
Paid search delivered 2,026 form submissions in March 2025, up 105% on February. Total submissions across all channels rose 84% in the same month, from 1,358 to 2,498, and paid search accounted for 81% of them. The lift followed the launch of the adoptive parent landing pages and the shortened application form.
Cost per paid form submission fell from $85.64 in February 2025 to $51.39 in March. The trend held. Cost per lead fell another 23.9% month over month in June 2025 on a 6.4% larger budget. In the first month of management, December 2024, cost per acquisition was already $348 against $395 the year before.
The paid search conversion rate rose from 4.03% in February 2025 to 7.74% in March, a 92% improvement. June 2025 showed the same effect. The conversion rate rose 47% month over month while clicks fell 4.5% and impressions fell 7.8%. Fewer visitors produced more applications.
A packet is the information pack the agency sends a family once that family is ready to move forward, so it is the first point in the funnel where an inquiry has real value. Across the two adoption brands DAP managed, qualified packets rose from 681 in Q3 2024 to 1,137 in Q3 2025, a 67% increase. Applications rose 37% over the same comparison, and sign-ons, the families that went on to retain the agency, rose from 61 to 89. At the client’s stated value of $23,000 per sign-on, those 28 additional sign-ons were worth $644,000.
In Q3 2024 the two managed brands needed 154 site visitors to produce one qualified packet. In Q3 2025 they needed 79. That is a 49% improvement in funnel efficiency. Total users fell 15% over the same comparison while packets rose 67%.
Angel Adoption’s search impressions grew from 374,000 in December 2024 to 640,000 in August 2025, a 71% increase, with impressions up 12.7% month over month in August alone. Referring domains, the count of separate websites linking to angeladoptioninc.com, rose from 218 in November 2024 to 293 in October 2025, 75 new linking domains across the engagement. Click-through rate on that larger footprint fell from 2.17% to 1.13% over the same window, so the extra visibility had not yet turned into more organic clicks by the time the engagement closed. The title and description work and the state-level content program were the response, and the blog pages were already earning 3% to 4% click-through against 1% to 2% on the service pages.
