From lead volume to lead quality
AU Bullion SW sell physical gold and silver to private buyers across the UK. The advertising does not sell a coin on the spot. It produces an enquiry that a real person on the sales team picks up the phone and calls, so the only result that matters is whether that call is worth making.
And it all happens inside Meta's financial products category, which removes most of what an advertiser normally leans on. No interest targeting worth the name. No lookalike audiences. No narrowing by age. A risk disclaimer on every advert, and every script written as education rather than advice. With targeting gone as a lever, the creative has to do the targeting and the form has to do the filtering.
The account was never short of leads. A simple form asking for nothing but a name, a phone number and an email kept the cost per lead low and the volume high, and on the headline numbers it looked like it was flying.
Mixed in with the genuine buyers were people who were only ever curious, and people who did not remember filling the form in at all. A cheap lead that goes nowhere on the phone is not cheap, it just moves the cost from the ad account to the sales floor. Cost per lead was the headline number, and it was the wrong one.
Volume held, and the noise fell away. In the eight weeks after the questions went in, the account produced within one percent of the enquiries it had in the eight weeks before, while reaching 22% more people. The fear with friction is always that it kills volume. It did not.
Cost per enquiry rose when the questions went in, and we said it would. That is the honest price of a filter, and it is the wrong number to judge a filter on. What changed is what arrived: enquiries from the right country, with a stated reason for getting in touch, from people who had chosen to push through a form that asked something of them.
Consistency followed. Instead of hot-and-cold weeks of cheap volume, the account settled into a steady flow of enquiries the sales team could plan a day around.
Friction fixed the enquiry. The next constraint was structure. The account had grown to a spend level where everything was competing with everything: four campaigns bidding into the same auction, winners starving new ideas, and no clean read on which combination actually produced buyers.
So in late July the account was rebuilt around a single job per campaign. Scale, with 60% of budget, spends the money on creative that has already proven it produces enquiries the sales team want, optimising on qualified enquiries fed back from the CRM. Test, with 25%, gives every new concept a guaranteed minimum spend so it gets a fair trial instead of entering a race it cannot win. Warm, with 15%, speaks to people who already engaged and have not yet enquired. Everything runs on the friction form, budgets live at campaign level, and the rules — promote, kill, rest — are applied on a fixed day each week.
The budget went where it was told — the split landed within two points of the 60 / 25 / 15 plan across the first thirteen days.
Test is doing exactly what it was built for. With a guaranteed spend floor it produced 40% of the account's enquiries from 26% of the budget, and its lead concept — which had sat starved in the old structure — became the cheapest enquiry in the account once it got a fair trial, roughly 30% cheaper than it had managed before.
And the quality number now exists. Roughly one in ten of Scale's enquiries is coming back from the sales team marked qualified, against one in fifty when quality was first measured, with the cost of a qualified enquiry down by around three quarters on the same basis. Early, and a small sample — but for the first time the account is being steered by what happens on the phone rather than by what a form fill costs.