# Case Study: A Two-Year B2B Programme, and the Same Finding Twice | Crank Source: https://wearecrank.com/case-studies/data-infrastructure-b2b-two-year-programme Cost per enquiry varying forty-fold by format, seven-fold by region, and a warm audience of 78,661 people built for a penny each and left completely unused. --- Data Infrastructure Software — 2025–2026 # A Two-Year B2B Programme, and the Same Finding Twice Cost per enquiry varying forty-fold by format, seven-fold by region, and a warm audience of 78,661 people built for a penny each and left completely unused. Challenge Cost per enquiry varied up to forty-fold between advert formats shown to the same audience in the same week, the same activity cost seven times more in one region than another, and after a full year and $28,640 of spend the recommendation was still to validate whether the 207 enquiries produced were any good. Approach Isolate the variables one at a time rather than optimise on a blended figure: format against format, region against region, engagement against volume — and check what happens when budget is moved based on any one of them alone. Outcome The format finding repeated almost exactly a year later on the next campaign — direct messaging converting at 18.97 per cent against 0.94 for single-image ads — and a warm audience of 78,661 people, built at a penny each, sat completely unused because nothing was retargeting it. 01 ## Format alone moved cost by up to forty-fold — in both years In 2025, three formats ran to the same audiences over the same period. Direct messaging produced enquiries at $17\. Document adverts produced them at $262\. Single image adverts produced them at $691\. Form completion followed the same order: 31, 15 and 3 per cent. But the cheapest format only worked because a dearer one ran first to prime the audience — direct messaging produced enquiries at $17 only where document adverts had already run at $262 ahead of it. Moving all budget to the cheaper format would have removed the thing making it cheap. A year later, the same account ran the comparison again: direct messaging converted at 18.97 per cent, document adverts at 2.43, single image at 0.94 — a twenty-fold spread, with cost per enquiry at £345, £433 and £2,142 respectively. The same pattern, repeating, confirming format as the largest single lever in this channel rather than a one-off result. 02 ## The same activity, priced completely differently by region Across four regions on the same platform in 2025, one produced 203 enquiries at $114 each. Two others produced none, at implied costs of $1,776 and $2,540\. A fourth produced three at $401\. Of two defined audiences, one produced 200 enquiries at $116 each from $23,253 of spend; the other produced seven at $770 each from $5,387 — a strategically important market that simply did not engage at the price being paid. The following year, the same pattern repeated with a twist: one region produced 23 enquiries at £269 each against three at £1,932 in another — 7.7 times the enquiries at 7.2 times lower cost. But the expensive region's video completion rate was 35.7 per cent against 17.4 in the cheap one — twice the engagement quality at roughly ten times the cost per view, with the cheap region's volume explicitly queried on quality in the report itself. Two true and opposing facts, held at once, rather than one convenient headline. 03 ## Volume that still couldn't be judged on quality After a full campaign year and $28,640 of spend, the closing recommendation was still to validate that the volume being produced was of good quality — no qualification data had come back on the 207 enquiries produced. Of those 207, 52 came from one organisation and 47 from another: 48 per cent of the total from two companies, a headline volume figure concealing a very narrow base of actual interest. $28,640 was spent against a $40,000 budget — a delivery constraint, not restraint, because the audiences and formats that worked couldn't absorb the money available. 04 ## Warm audiences and engaged companies nobody was following up The organisations engaging most with the content were not the ones producing enquiries — one showed 30 per cent engagement and an 80 per cent form completion rate but low volume, while the highest-volume organisations engaged at only 7 to 9 per cent, a warm follow-up list sales would otherwise never see. The best-performing format, direct messaging, had no retargeting capability at all, so no audience was being built from the activity carrying most of the volume — the campaign restarting from zero each time rather than compounding. In 2026, video activity in the lower-cost region produced 78,661 completions at £0.01 each — a large warm audience built almost for free — which was not being re-engaged with anything. Beyond the 26 direct enquiries that year, 70 further companies had engaged enough to be worth approaching directly, a list that exists only where company-level engagement is tracked and handed over. ## Two years of the same account, and what stayed true across both 40x Cost per enquiry variance between formats, same audience, same week $114 vs $2,540 Cost per enquiry, cheapest vs. priciest region 78,661 @ £0.01 Video-warmed audience built, then left unused 48% Of enquiries from just two organisations Drawn from Crank's account work conducted in 2025–2026 for this data infrastructure software business. Client not named. ## Want to know what this looks like in your own account? These findings came from asking straightforward questions before any budget moved. We're happy to do the same for yours. 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