This article was originally published in our LinkedIn Newsletter, Growth Decoded, here.

A prefab backyard home builder came to us a while back with a problem that's pretty common for scaling home services brands. Their CPLs had been climbing for months while lead quality was slipping. Across their markets, they couldn't really tell which regions were feeding the pipeline versus which ones were just burning budget.

Fix 1: Campaign Structure

Time for damage control. We knew that adding even more budget into the campaign wasn’t the fix, and in these cases we typically start by simplifying the campaign structure. In this case, their paid social setup had the same issue we see a lot: too many ad sets, isolated audiences, and spend was spread so thin across the account that nothing had the chance to learn.

We rebuilt it around consolidated campaigns paired with a regional layer. The national piece captured efficiency, the regional piece let us turn the dial market by market. This gave the campaign fewer moving parts, cleaner signals, and allowed us to optimize faster. We know that the algorithm doesn't reward complexity. Instead, volume and clarity is how you win, so that was our step one.

Fix 2: Creative

Thenwe stopped running the glossy video. Their previous creative was high-production…the ad looked beautiful and performed like a brochure, but it looks like an ad. It’s not as relatable, and people scroll past it. We replaced it with UGC-style walkthroughs of actual units, edited together with customer testimonials that handled objections right there in the feed. It's a weirdly obvious lesson but it keeps being true: honest-looking ads beat polished ads, almost every time, in a feed environment especially. That creative shift alone moved a lot of the numbers.

Fix 3: Signal

The third change was probably the biggest. Their landing page was a form. The only action the user could take on the page was a form fill and this is a huge drop off point. We swapped it for a flexible multi-step onboarding flow that we could test per channel and per campaign, and on the backend we worked with their team to add new CRM fields that captured the onboarding responses.

Once those fields existed, we could optimize toward down-funnel events, likequalified leadandright-market lead. The platforms got a lot smarter about who to find because we were finally telling them what a good lead actually looked like.

Read more about choosing the right landing page strategyfor your industry, based onAli DeMocker& team's data.

The Outcome

We saw 136% more leads, 119% more qualified opportunities, 31% lift in conversion rate, 49% lower CPL, and 48% lower cost per opportunity on a 13% spend increase.

We were especially happy with how the qualified opportunities more than doubled, because the quality got better as the program scaled instead of becoming diluted, and that's the opposite of what usually happens when you push harder on paid social.

So many automatically default to "we need more budget" when performance stalls, but more spend on a broken structure, tired creative, and upper-funnel-only measurement can create wasted budget.

By fixing structure, creative, and signalfirst, we were able to improve the campaign’s results without really touching the budget. And once that fix was in place, adding more budget to the campaign makes more sense because every additional dollar can go farther.

Want to see where you can find efficiencies in your campaign strategy? Get in touch with us - we'd be glad to chat!