Modus Create sells product engineering, app modernization, and AI strategy into CTOs. iExcel built the multi-channel demand engine — and the CRM, attribution, and dashboard underneath it.
The case study isn't the ad accounts — it's the layers below them. Every paid result above lives on top of a stack iExcel either built, rebuilt, or hardened.
Modus Create's buyer is technical. A CTO, a VP of Engineering, a Director of Platform. They read GitHub before they read a brochure. They evaluate vendors the way they review pull requests — slowly, skeptically, and in groups.
That buyer doesn't move on a clever ad. They move on credible service-line positioning, real proof points, and a measurable demand engine that can be tuned over time.
iExcel built that engine across paid media, CRM, attribution, conversion optimization, and content intelligence — then ran it across Modus's portfolio of service lines: Atlassian, AI Strategy, App Modernization, Product Development, AWS, GitHub Copilot.
A B2B consulting firm doesn't live or die on one channel. The CTO buyer shows up everywhere — LinkedIn for thought leadership, Google for high-intent search, Facebook for retargeting and warm-audience expansion. iExcel ran all three in parallel and tuned them against the same lead definition.
The March 2023 30-day snapshot tells the story most cleanly. Paid social carried the overwhelming majority of the month's lead volume, and it did so at roughly a quarter of the program's blended cost per lead — the efficiency you get when retargeting and warm audiences are doing their job. Google contributed a smaller lead count, but the highest-intent inbound search in the mix — the buyer who was already looking for a partner.
That's the read a single-channel program never gets to make: social for efficient volume, search for intent, all reconciled against one lead definition inside HubSpot so the numbers could actually be compared.
"You don't win the CTO with louder ads. You win with a credible signal, a measurable funnel, and a follow-up motion the sales team can defend in a deal review."
Modus didn't need one campaign — they needed a campaign system, repeatable across very different service offerings. iExcel built and ran the same loop for each: audience research → channel selection → creative → landing page → tracking → optimization → handoff to sales.
Google Search + LinkedIn TOFU promotion. MOFU keyword cluster identified as the highest-intent layer.
AWS-aligned messaging, landing page recommendations, blog ideation. Highest historical CTR keyword: 28.57%.
Partner + competitor campaigns. Google Optimize homepage and Atlassian-page messaging tests.
Narrow long-tail search testing. Early signal: 8.64% CTR on a tight sample — well above published B2B search averages. Methodology over volume.
New service-line planning. Keyword research, audience definition, content strategy ahead of launch.
Webinar promotion across LinkedIn and email nurture. MOFU lead-gen: 30.77% form-open-to-lead conversion.
The AI Strategy Roadmap search campaign proved the demand was real: a 4.77% click-through rate, roughly twice the published B2B search-ads average. Strong topline. But the operator story isn't in the topline.
The MOFU keyword cluster — the high-intent middle of the funnel — produced roughly three of every four conversions the campaign generated, while the broader top-of-funnel terms it shared budget with mostly generated clicks that went nowhere. We recommended narrowing spend to the converting layer and pruning the TOFU terms.
And the search behavior was already telling us what to write next. Historical CTRs revealed where Modus had latent search authority — and where the next content investment should land.
We don't publish clients' raw budgets — we publish the beat. The AI Strategy Roadmap campaign clicked through at roughly twice the published B2B search-ads average, and the high-intent middle of that traffic carried the conversions. A number that only stays defensible because the conversion tracking, HubSpot attribution, and lead-source cleanup were rebuilt first.
Demand gen leaks pipeline at the page level. iExcel ran Google Optimize homepage and Atlassian messaging tests, deployed Nelio A/B testing on the AI Strategy Roadmap page, and shipped heatmaps on the highest-traffic landing pages.
The recommendations were specific: CTA above the fold. Form placement against scroll patterns. Headline / subheadline rewrites tied to the search intent feeding the page. AWS-specific messaging on the App Modernization page. Site-speed QA so the page actually rendered before the buyer left.
None of it was hero-shot redesign work. All of it was the unglamorous tuning that takes a CTA from "looks fine" to "submits."
Most of the wins in this case study only exist because of one. iExcel caught and corrected the kind of tracking problems that quietly invalidate every report leadership sees.
Facebook leads weren't syncing cleanly into HubSpot — we mapped the failure and re-wired the path. The LinkedIn Insight Tag was attributing false-positive conversions on pageview, not action — we caught it in GTM, isolated the tag, and corrected it. Google Ads conversion imports had drifted out of sync with HubSpot — we re-aligned them.
The consent banner was blocking conversion firing for a non-trivial segment of traffic — we diagnosed it, documented it, and proposed the fix. A leftover third-party tracking script from an earlier build was conflicting with the primary analytics — we cleaned it up.
None of it is glamorous. All of it is the work that makes the dashboard worth opening.
Most agencies run paid and SEO as separate silos. We ran them as the same loop. Paid search told us which queries Modus was already winning attention on — historical CTR by search term — and we turned that signal into the SEO content roadmap.
The historical search data wasn't decoration. It was the briefing doc. The top query in the app-modernization line clicked through at 28.57% — intent that strong doesn't need more paid spend, it needs cornerstone content built around it, so the next time the buyer searches, Modus owns the click without buying it.
Same loop for App Modernization, AWS/Azure modernization, AI strategy, and product development. Keyword research, backlink and unique-domain analysis, content ideation, directory positioning (Clutch, DesignRush, GoodFirms). The SEO program was an output of the paid program, not separate from it.
For B2B consulting and digital-services firms selling into technical buyers — engineering leaders, CTOs, platform teams — the Modus engagement is the template.
It's not a single hero campaign. It's a multi-service-line demand engine, a CRM and attribution layer that catches the things every other agency misses, a measurement spine that produces a dashboard worth reading, and a content-from-paid loop that compounds organic traffic on top of paid traction.
Six service lines. Three channels in lockstep. One engine.
iExcel runs the paid engine, the CRM and attribution layer, the conversion tracking QA, and the dashboards your executive team will actually trust.
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