The fintech and payments space is one of the most competitive spaces in online advertising. It is very difficult to run paid ads profitably given that the cost for a single click can easily be a hundred dollars and leads can cost all the way up to a thousand dollars.
We were approached by a leader in the Fintech space who had previously attempted to leverage paid ads to acquire customers and had spent multiple 6 figures and over a year with another agency, but ultimately were unsuccessful with cost per lead being 50%-100% above industry average and a close rate that was non-existent.
With having a wealth of experience in the SaaS and Fintech space we knew that this was perfect opportunity for our team, especially given that one of our founders had previously been head of marketing for a fintech company that scaled to $100M in ARR and a $1B+ exit in just 4 years.
The previous agency did not have fintech or saas specific experience therefore optimized just for raw lead count, regardless of quality or whether or not those leads closed.
We saw a path to success and significant improvement by flipping this strategy on its head and going after quality instead of quantity of leads.
We first conducted a full rebuild of the Google ads account with all new campaigns based on templates and strategies that we had previously developed specifically for the fintech space.
Additionally, we focused on using only phrase and exact match keywords whereas the previous agency had run mostly broad. This move helped to improve quality of clicks and leads.
Given the high cost of clicks in the space we knew it was essential to have a high converting landing page format if we were going to make the economics work and get leads below the industry average CPL while still maintaining quality.
We installed our Fintech landing page template which we had spent millions of dollars of ad spend refining and testing to ensure that we would convert enough of these very expensive clicks into actual leads and deals. The landing page format that we used ended up converting 2X-3X higher than industry average.
Finally, there had been no leveraging of Meta retargeting, YouTube Retargeting, or Google Performance Max by the prior agency. Deploying these tactics created in lift across all existing campaigns.
All of these optimizations first resulted in an improvement in quality of lead with deals being closed from paid ads for the first time ever.
Once we had this proof of concept we were able to significantly scale the account by 400%+ while also reducing the CPL by 66% from the previous performance and beating the industry average by over 30%+.
Sales Qualified Opportunities and deals closed generated from paid ads increased by 657% in just 6 months after the initial baselines were set, post Ascenditt, taking over the account.
Paid ads is now the number 1 channel for customer acquisition for this 9 figure company when previously it contributed almost nothing in terms of revenue and deals generated.
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