How We Reduced Cost per Lead by 3X
The Client
Sure Step Finance is a US-based independent credit and insurance advisor. This is a startup with a team of 3 people and no marketing experience. The goal was to generate leads for free consultations and later convert them into paying customers.
Numbers for May 2025
The Problem
Before working with us, they had partnered with a large American agency charging $2,500 per month, but the results were unsatisfactory and the cost per booked call was too high.
The Solution
Preparations
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When we took over their account, it had already been inactive for several months. We reviewed the old campaigns to identify what went wrong.
First of all, the ads were good in terms of visuals and CTA. However, during 3 months of working with the previous agency, only 10 creative variants were tested. Out of those, only 5 generated any significant traffic - but the cost per lead was still above the target CPL.
Another major issue was mixing insurance and credit ads in a single campaign. The audiences for these two services are completely different and must be separated.
They were using only the Pixel - no CAPI. As a result, about 15% of leads were being lost.
Again, their retargeting campaigns were combined into a single audience, which made even less sense than the cold campaigns, considering the distinct audiences. To make things worse, the same ads were used for retargeting as for cold traffic.
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Structure
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So first of all, we fixed all major issues and built a proper campaign structure with 6 campaigns:
Insurance:
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Test
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Scale
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Retargeting
Credit:
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Test
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Scale
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Retargeting
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Optimisation
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We prepared 3 ads for Insurance leads and 3 ads for Credit leads, and ran them in a test ABO campaign. None of them could be considered clear winners in either campaign. However, the "best of the worst" ads had some interesting angles. We took those angles and presented them from a different perspective. The results improved - but were still not strong enough for scaling.
We then kept only the best-performing ads in the ad sets to help populate the pixel and created new variants for both Insurance and Credit. This time, for Insurance, we found 2 potential winners. We copied them, along with the top performer from the second test, and duplicated them into scaling campaigns. In the end, only 1 became a true winner - but this is how we work: tests and iterations, tests and iterations.
We also create at least 1 new test ad set per week, even if the CPA or CPL is already good, to prevent ad fatigue and maintain stable performance.
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The Results
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For the Credit campaign, it took 2 more iterations before we developed ads strong enough to move into the scaling campaigns.
Now the client has a stable flow of qualified leads and is considering expansion. We are not scaling budgets aggressively, as the client is already reaching their maximum lead capacity. Instead, we are focusing on lowering CPL and continuing to populate the pixel with valuable data for future growth.
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