Australian Lending Business: $9 CPL → $30 CPL (And Why That's Actually Good)

This client is in Australia. They're a lending business that lends money to other businesses.

They're probably the only, or at least one of the very few clients in my entire career, that when they approached me, they told me they don't really care about lead quality. The only thing they actually care about is lead volume and cost per lead.

Context here is that these guys have a HUGE sales team. I'm talking 60+ salespeople. So at that scale, it does make sense that lead quality fades as a KPI and lead volume takes precedent. That being said, lead quality obviously still does matter because without it you wouldn't have any sales. But they were not tracking lead quality and were adamant about not tracking it just because of the sheer volume and scale they're running.

Their previous provider was taking advantage of the fact that the client said they don't care about lead quality. This guy was running horrible campaigns to make sure his numbers looked good. I'm talking Facebook lead forms without any form of qualification. I'm talking Google Display ads. So your cost per lead is like nothing, but your lead quality is horrible.

And even though the client said they don't care about lead quality, when it comes to a lead with a fake phone number or a bot filling out a form and not an actual human being, that's not a lead quality problem. That's a no lead problem. It's a fake lead problem. It's not even a lead.

For context, those "great numbers" were $9 CPL on Facebook and $21 CPL on Google. Their goal CPL is $35 on Meta and $70 on Google. So this guy was absolutely crushing the numbers obviously. But on the backend, none of those leads were translating into any business at all. And because no one is tracking, no one can prove it.

The reason the company owner decided to switch providers was because he just felt like he couldn't trust the guy running his ads. He didn't really have any intel, any data, any metrics. The owner isn't very knowledgeable when it comes to this stuff, but his feeling was actually right.

First, I looked into what the other guy was running and told the business owner what was wrong. I explained the entire situation.

Then I made a controversial move. My CPL actually went UP to $30 on Meta and $55 on Google. I dramatically increased their cost per lead even though their goal is a very low CPL.

But here's why I did that—I have no ways of verifying lead quality. These guys don't have lifecycle stages setup. They don't have a CRM with pipeline stages. They don't report on good leads in any meaningful way. They only get leads.

So I have no offline conversions to pass back to Facebook or Google, even though this is something I talk about in every single case study. This is one of the rare cases where I don't even have this option.

What I had to go off of was basically what I know, based on my experience, generates good quality leads. And I had to double down on that.

For example, I decided that no Facebook lead forms would ever run. Even though we now have an option to implement one-time passcode to verify phone numbers, I still see not very high quality leads from Facebook lead forms.

On Google Ads, I obviously turned off the display campaign. Only running pure Google search campaigns now. No display network, no search partners, nothing like that. Only Google searches.

I built a landing page that does qualify those leads—a multi-step form with like 9 or 10 questions. Even though this might be hurting my CPL a little bit, because I don't have any visibility over lead quality, I have to pay this cost. And as long as I'm beating my KPIs, which I am (slightly at least), I'm happy to add more scrutiny to my forms to make sure these numbers are working.

No one is measuring lead quality, so it's up to me to make sure those leads are not only cheap but also high quality without getting any sort of feedback from the client about lead quality.

On the Facebook side, I'm constantly hiring actors, introducing new creative concepts every single week, putting out more static image ads, running AB tests on the landing page, and testing different ad copy.

On the Google side, I'm constantly adding negative keywords, changing bidding strategy over time, and testing broad against exact against phrase. Broad won, as you probably expected, because broad wins most of the time when it comes to mass markets or big markets.

We scaled the budget from $30k to $60k AUD per month over a period of 6 months. Basically doubled their ad budget. They're getting leads, they're happy, their sales guys are happy.

Removed all garbage traffic sources (lead forms, display ads). Built proper qualification landing page with 9-10 question multi-step form. Implemented creative diversification strategy (actors, statics, constant testing). Google Ads cleanup (search only, broad match optimization, negative keywords). Scaled volume 2x while maintaining quality standards (without any backend visibility).