Facebook ads for a mortgage assistance service
Leads were costing over a hundred dollars each and sometimes more. After the account was rebuilt, some were coming in under five.
Farush, Mortgage assistance. Recorded March 2021.
Farush runs a service that helps homeowners who have fallen behind on a mortgage, or are about to. The work is an eligibility process — checking case by case which private or government programmes someone might qualify for. It is a business where the person on the other end is under real pressure, and the advertising has to reflect that.
He had set up Facebook ads himself. Getting them running at all took effort, and once they were live the economics did not work: cost per registration was frequently over a hundred dollars, occasionally worse. At that price the funnel cannot pay for itself no matter how good the service is.
The account was rebuilt rather than adjusted. New creative, a rewritten offer, and targeting aimed at the specific situation his service solves rather than homeowners in general. Cost per lead came down to a fraction of what it had been, with some leads arriving under five dollars.
The second thing that changed was range. He had wanted to open up additional lead sources for a long time but there was a barrier to entry in figuring out how. Running several verticals at once meant the business had something coming in during the slower stretches, which for a service business is often the difference between a good year and a flat one.
Cost per lead is the number that decides whether a lead generation business works. Everything downstream — the sales team, the close rate, the lifetime value — only matters if the top of the funnel is affordable. Most accounts in this position are not broken in a subtle way. The offer is wrong, the creative is generic, or the targeting is aimed at everyone.
If you sell a service and your enquiries cost more than they are worth, the fix is usually upstream of the ad account. Getting clear on exactly who you help, and saying it plainly, does more than any bidding change.
In Farush’s words
“The cost per lead coming through was really high — sometimes over even a hundred bucks. So that obviously wasn’t working.”
“He revamped everything for me and made it down to even sometimes some leads are coming for under five bucks. It’s a huge difference.”
“We learned how to get different verticals of leads coming in — stuff we wanted to do in the past but never had a chance of doing.”
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