175 Leads. Zero Customers.
That was the account before me. It looked healthy and had never produced a sale. Here is the month that fixed it, week by week.
0
Leads before me
0
Customers from them
0.00%
Page → lead by week 4
0
Ads shipped in 4 weeks
What I inherited
| Spent before me | $4,437 |
| Leads produced | 175, all Meta instant forms |
| Cost per lead | $15.57 |
| Qualified leads | 0 |
| Purchases, ever | 0 |
On-platform forms harvesting the cheapest possible response. Fifteen dollars a lead looks like a win until you notice not one of them ever bought anything.
147 ads. 31 landing pages. Four weeks.
Week 1
Launch. Just not into their account.
81 ads went live in week one. What I refused was running them through the account they already had, because everything launched into it would have inherited what was already wrong with it.
- Four Meta pixels fired on a single pageview, so no number in the account could be trusted.
- 61.7% of every impression that account ever served went to one placement, at a 0.24% click rate, for zero website leads.
- Awareness campaigns bought 78% of all impressions at a $1.69 CPM, dragging the account CPM to $10.18 and making everything look cheap.
The second week-one call was the funnel itself. They were selling a complex medical product through self-serve checkout, with nobody ever speaking to a customer. I told them they needed a sales team. While the ads started gathering data, I worked with them to stand it up, connect the systems, and build the process it would run on.
Ads shipped
81
Pages shipped
16
Click-through
account warming
Page → lead
no traffic yet
Homepage
Tired all the time
Normal labs, still sick
Brain fog
Hormones off
Can't lose weight
Autoimmune answers
300+ biomarkers
Results in 72 hours
Skip the waiting room
WinnerPreventative, not reactive
Join Thryve
A checkup measures 14
What a wearable misses
Four steps, no clinic
Membership page
Week 2
First real traffic. Kill the dead placement.
The same placement reappeared on a brand-new account and a brand-new pixel inside 48 hours. Excluded on 3 August. Ten sales-page variants shipped the same week and no new ads.
Ads shipped
0
Pages shipped
10
Click-through
1.84%
Page → lead
2.43%
Membership
Package
Consultation
Compare
Long letter
Quiz
Dark
Objection
Proof
The arithmetic
Week 3
The sales team goes live. Swap the funnel.
The team we planned in week one started taking calls. Self-serve checkout came out and a phone-qualified call funnel went in, so every lead produced a conversation and a real disposition instead of a silent checkout.
Ads shipped
31
Pages shipped
3
Click-through
4.18%
Page → lead
6.02%
Call funnel signup
Callback + explainer
Integrative medicine
Week 4
Keep the winner. Double down on it.
Nothing new invented. The hooks that had already proven themselves, reproduced and varied one element at a time, against two pages instead of sixteen.
Ads shipped
35
Pages shipped
2
Click-through
5.60%
Page → lead
7.96%
The gap
WinnerThe direction
Same business. Different funnel.
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Spent | $4,437 | $2,067 |
| Leads | 175 | 41 |
| Phone-verified | 0 | 100% |
| Contacted by sales | 0 | 21 |
| Sales qualified | 0 | 9 |
This is what a hands-on CMO looks like.
I get hired to build or improve an acquisition channel. The engagements that actually move revenue are the ones where something was quietly blocking the conversion from ever happening, and nobody had found it.
This company was three months into paid media with nothing to show for it. Left alone, reaching a pipeline of sales-qualified leads worth calling could have taken six months, maybe a year. Or they decide Meta does not work for their business and stop.
It took one month and 23 logged iterations, most of which had nothing to do with ads: the account, the pixels, the pages, the forms, the CRM, the sales process, and a few things I cannot put on a public page.
An agency or a freelancer ends this engagement by telling you the ads are running and the page is not converting. That is where the six months goes.
I am not here to run ads. I am here to raise the revenue of the business, which means fixing whatever is actually in the way.
Is the account working, or does it just look like it is?
An hour on the account is usually enough to tell.
Book a call