The lead accounts
21,583 leads, and the account screens behind them
Anyone can claim a cost per lead. These are the account screens.
Lead-gen accounts get judged on volume, so the number that matters drifts quietly. Cost per lead climbs a dollar at a time while the report still looks busy, and because spend, leads and revenue usually live in 3 different places, nobody can say what a customer actually cost. An account can run at a loss for months and still read as healthy in the platform.
volume looks like health
Campaign structure built per objective, with budget held at the ad-set level so a winner can be scaled without resetting learning. Conversion tracking wired so the platform optimises on a lead the business would actually take, not on a form fill. Cost per result read weekly by ad set, with losers cut early instead of left to average out against the winners. Where the client could give revenue, it was pulled back against spend so the account was judged on return rather than on clicks. The screens here are the account views those decisions were made from: campaign names are redacted, and the totals are the platform's own.
budget at the ad set, not the campaign
Optimise on the lead the business would take
A form fill is not a lead. Conversion events were wired to the stage the client actually values, so the platform spends into people who answer the phone instead of people who are cheap to reach.
Hold budget at the ad set
Scaling at the campaign level resets learning at the exact moment something starts working. Budget sat at the ad set so a winner could be raised without restarting it.
Cut early, on cost per result
Weekly reads by ad set, not by campaign. A campaign average hides an ad set at 4 times the target cost, and that ad set keeps spending until someone looks a level down.
Pull revenue back where it exists
Where the client could give sales data, revenue was read against spend in the same table. The 1,405% campaign only looks like that because the revenue column is there: on clicks alone it was unremarkable.
Know what each market costs
$1.76 a lead in one education ad set and $22.46 in another account reflect 2 different markets. Setting the target for each market keeps the budget realistic.
21,583
leads across the 4 Meta accounts shown; the captures show $1.76 to $22.46 per lead
HandoverEvery figure here is a platform total from the account itself, not a rollup written afterwards. Campaign names are redacted and the account identifiers are cropped out, because the numbers are mine to show and the clients are not.
platform totals, names redacted
Evidence · fig. 01–07