Facebook ads for a debt settlement company

The first campaign ran at $75 a day. Across accounts, spend is now $40,000 to $50,000 a month — profitably.

George, Debt settlement. Recorded February 2024.

George works in debt settlement, helping people with unsecured debt. Leads come primarily through Facebook, which gives him a materially lower cost per acquisition than direct mail or Google would in the same category.

He started with no understanding of the platform and a small budget — $75 a day on the first campaign. The challenge was never getting something to work at that level. It was scaling it without the economics falling apart.

Within four months daily spend had reached $1,600, and across all accounts it now runs at $40,000 to $50,000 a month. The reason that mattered is that his cost per lead held while volume multiplied, which is what separates real scaling from simply spending more.

His summary of how is the most useful sentence in the recording: scaling is much more in depth than just spending more. Raising a budget on a campaign that works usually degrades it. Growth comes from producing more creative and more direct messaging aimed at more distinct audiences, so there is somewhere for the extra money to go.

Facebook also let him expand beyond his original niche. The same infrastructure now runs personal debt, business debt, student loans and medical debt as separate verticals, which is how a lead generation business grows without finding a new channel.

If you are at a few hundred a day and stuck, the ceiling is usually creative volume rather than budget. There is nothing new for the algorithm to spend on.

In George’s words