800% Facebook Lead Growth

Challenge
The growth of digital leads and revenue in other channels led to higher lead demand from sales agents, and I was searching for another way to expand the leads portfolio.  I was looking to profitably add another 150 leads a month to the portfolio, using the existing leads budget instead of receiving incremental investment.

Opportunity
Facebook was a growing property in 2013, becoming the 2nd highest visited site in the world, new targeting features being developed and a more robust campaign platform was available.  It looked like a good opportunity to see if scale and efficiency could be accomplished on a shoestring budget.  In order to determine if Facebook could be a scalable channel, I needed to see how we could grow lead capture rate while producing a cost-effective cost per lead.  

Pain Points

1. Initial cost per lead was $900. Ouch.

Approach
Campaigns were set up to targeting audience segments based on the high value we saw in our Direct Mail campaigns.  We used a few of  Acxiom's Personicx consumer segments.  Ad Copy was tested, including images and headlines.  Landing pages were tested to match the versions of Ad copy. Bids were set within an ROI framework for expected profitability and data was constantly reviewed and analyzed. 

Results
Over an initial 7 months being in the market, data monitoring, analyzing, and a methodical testing approach, cost per lead shrunk by 800%, leads grew by 750% from 20 a month to 170 a month.   As we worked towards optimization, part of the analysis was to understand differences between how desktop vs. mobile traffic was performing.  Cost per lead difference was insignificant overall from the first wave of ad testing, but a deeper dive into device showed mobile click thru rate 720% higher than desktop, but conversion was 671% lower and therefore there was a 30% lower cost per lead on desktop.  This meant that while significant more volume was available on mobile, it wasn't as cost effective as desktop.  So, there were opportunities to scale mobile if we could lower cost per lead, and grow desktop if we could get higher a click thru rate.  This was proof of concept to invest in creating different marketing experiences and continue rigorous testing for desktop vs. mobile on Facebook.