$25.61 CPL. Then they scaled us.
a US life-insurance lead-gen operator handed us $101K in ad spend, 73 ads and four niches. After the engagement ended they scaled our creatives to $1.9K of their $3.7K daily budget, because those were the only lines turning a profit.
The screenshots below cap at the first 200 of 639 ads, so those numbers are a floor, not a total.
$101K
Ad spend managed
9 weeks
3,900+
Leads generated
Across 4 niches
$25.61
Blended cost per lead
Against $30 sell price
1.9M
Impressions
From 73 ads
Our creatives now run the profitable lines.
The clearest test of ad creative is what a client does with it once nobody is paid to recommend it. They scaled ours to roughly 51% of the account’s daily budget, across 6 ad sets and 49 states. Figures below are from the client’s own dashboard, 30-day window.
$9K
net profit
The veteran niche runs 100% our creatives and is the account's only profitable line. It generated a net profit of $9K in a month at $24 cost per lead against a $30 sell price.
54
sales closed
Every veteran-niche creative that closed a sale in the last 30 days was ours. The leading creative closed 26 sales at $560 per sale, well below the $771 niche average.
30.8%
close rate
Our best close-rate creative converted at 30.8% against a 3.4% niche average. That is nine times the rate the niche manages on average.
Zero
from the other 190
Around 190 third-party creatives ran on the same account in the same window. Between them they closed no sales at all.
Cross-niche, the 30-day close leaders were ours too: a mortgage-protection remake with 10 sales, and an IUL 401(k) angle with 10 sales at $536 each against an $888 niche average.
Our top ads, May to August 2026.
The account’s own reporting, sorted by results, three months running. Every ad in these screenshots is ours, 28,768 leads across the rows shown. Client and campaign names are cropped out, the numbers are not.
6,330
leads
$17.37
895,342 reached
2,494
leads
$16.05
423,579 reached
1,851
leads
$20.29
367,716 reached
1,450
leads
$12.04
165,354 reached
Four of our ads carried 12,125 leads between them. The cheapest cost $12.04 a lead on 1,450 of them, the lowest figure in the account.
5,684
leads
$19.44
1,006,313 reached
1,997
leads
$20.23
504,547 reached
1,563
leads
$17.46
200,538 reached
406
leads
$12.43
62,221 reached
A single one of our ads reached 1,006,313 people and still held $19.44 a lead at a frequency of 2.47.
3,120
leads
$16.96
675,874 reached
1,803
leads
$16.54
193,424 reached
754
leads
$23.94
301,254 reached
A partial month, and cost per lead is still falling as fresh batches replace the fatigued ones.
Media buying, creative, compliance, calls.
The creative and the media buying were the same job. A losing ad set could be replaced with a new angle the same week, because the ads were produced in-house.
Profit-routing media buying
We bought media daily off a ledger that scored each ad set on true cost per lead: spend divided by leads actually sold, not the platform's form-fill number. That number runs 2.5 to 4.5 times lower than reality, so we ignored it entirely.
In-house creative production
We produced creatives end to end in 2 to 3 day batches: scripts, spokespeople, voice, footage, statics, end cards. No outsourcing and no handoffs, so a fatiguing lane got replaced rather than paused.
Compliance recovery
One ad was rejected on a financial-category rule. We diagnosed the trigger, second-person address, rebuilt the ad in third person and put it back live. Account forensics separated our changes from automated ones on a shared account.
Inbound-call account
We ran a separate account routed on rolling cost per call, with state targeting and weekday dayparting so budget was never spent when nobody was there to answer. Best recorded call cost was $10.38.
No pitch. Just the numbers.
Send your niche and your current cost per lead. If there is nothing to gain we will say so, rather than sell you a retainer.