Case Study

Scaling Paid Media from $200K to $300K/Month While Holding CPA

76-person financial advisory firmSunrise, FL2024 to present

$300K+

Monthly Ad Spend

636

Meetings / Month

15.5%

Customer Rate

$3,448

Cost / Customer

The Problem

The firm needed to scale booked meetings from ~300/month to 1,000/month across Meta, Google, and TikTok. Previous attempts to push Meta past $200K/month degraded CPM and inflated cost per meeting. Google Ads had 24 conversion actions polluting Smart Bidding. Attribution was fragmented across platforms.

What We Built

Meta Ads ($185K to $235K/month)

  • Restructured into three pillars: Prospecting, Retargeting, Testing
  • Interest/Broad at $470 CPR outperformed Lookalike at $705 CPR
  • TM_Leads audience: 15.5% meeting-to-customer rate (3x firm average) at $3,448/customer

Google Ads ($80K to $115K/month)

  • Consolidated from 24 conversion actions to the ones that matter for Smart Bidding
  • PMax + LSA combination achieved $267 CPA (best performing structure)

Attribution

  • Built HubSpot attribution using hs_analytics_first_url UTM parameters
  • Connected 782 historical customers back to source channels
  • 246 customers attributed to FB Paid Social alone
  • 541 closed-won deals tracked end-to-end at ~14% conversion rate

The Numbers

MetricBeforeAfter
Monthly paid spend~$200K$300K+
Booked meetings~300/month636 (437 Meta + 199 Google)
Meta CPMDegrading at scale$533 (held while scaling 50%)
Google CPA (best)Inconsistent$267 (PMax + LSA)
Meeting-to-customer (TM_Leads)~5% (firm avg)15.5% (3x)
Cost per customer (TM_Leads)Unknown$3,448
Conversion actions (Google)24 (polluted)Cleanup in progress

What Made It Work

Broad beats Lookalike

At $200K+/month, Interest/Broad at $470 CPR consistently outperformed Lookalike at $705. Most operators never test this aggressively enough.

Audience segmentation is the lever

TM_Leads was a data win, not a creative win. Identifying which leads convert to customers at 3x the average changed the entire allocation strategy.

Conversion action hygiene

24 conversion actions were feeding Google Smart Bidding contradictory signals. Cleaning this up is the single highest-leverage Google Ads move for most accounts.

Attribution is not optional

Connecting 782 customers back to source channels via UTM parameters made every scaling decision data-driven instead of gut-driven.

Scaling Bottleneck (honest)

Show rate is stuck at 60%. 1,000 meetings/month is reachable on spend alone, but the firm needs 700+ shows to hit customer targets. This is the active problem being worked on.

Want results like these?

The Profit Loop Audit finds the same kind of wins in your stack. $3,500 flat. 5 days.

Get Your Audit