The Energy Experts were paying an agency for Meta ads that weren’t producing leads, while buying leads in from elsewhere just to fill the gap. We stripped the approach back, fixed the audience, and built a simple remarketing funnel — cutting cost per lead by 45% and lifting lead volume in the process.
Problem:
The Energy Experts already had an agency running their Meta ads, but it wasn’t delivering — so the business had started buying leads in from third parties just to keep the sales team busy, paying twice for the same outcome without reliably getting either. Underneath the disappointing results were two specific problems. The creative was copy-paste: the same ads and the same copy recycled across placements, with nothing built around who was actually seeing them. And too many tests were running at once, which looks like diligence but isn’t — with that many variables changing simultaneously, no single test could ever be isolated or concluded, so results came back as a mixed bag nobody could explain. The compound effect was the real damage: months of poorly targeted spend had trained Meta on the wrong signals, so the audience the platform was optimising towards had drifted further from the real customer with every pound spent.
Solution:
The instinct in this situation is to do more — more creative, more tests, more spend. We did less. First, we fixed the audience: no amount of good creative rescues an audience Meta has already been taught to target wrongly, so the account was cleaned up until the platform was optimising towards the right people again. Then we built one simple funnel instead of several complicated ones, focused on remarketing to people who had already landed on the landing page and shown genuine intent, rather than asking cold audiences to decide immediately. And we made sure every enquiry that came in got a response — unglamorous, but enquiries left sitting unanswered are leads paid for and thrown away. None of it was clever. It was clear, which is exactly what the previous approach had lacked.
Outcome:
Cost per lead fell by 45%, lead volume increased, and — most importantly for the long term — the Meta audience was cleaned up, bringing more of the genuine target audience back into the funnel. That last point is the one that compounds: a lower cost per lead is a single month’s win, but a corrected audience means the platform gets better at finding the right people every week it keeps running, rather than worse. The previous agency had been busy — lots of tests, lots of creative, lots of activity, but no conclusions, with the audience quietly degrading underneath it all. The fix wasn’t more work. It was deciding what the work was for.