# Case Study: Sixty-Four Enquiries, £3,000 of Spend, and £360,000 of Opportunity | Crank Source: https://wearecrank.com/case-studies/fintech-first-campaign-opportunity-value-2022 Cost per enquiry ranged six-fold across seven adverts feeding the same funnel — which is why it could never have told anyone whether this campaign worked. --- ![Financial technology case study: Sixty-Four Enquiries, £3,000 of Spend, and £360,000 of Opportunity](/images/case-studies/fintech.png?dpl=dpl_2uJjggmfov9ibhArygujfRBb3pax) Financial Technology — 2022 # Sixty-Four Enquiries, £3,000 of Spend, and £360,000 of Opportunity Cost per enquiry ranged six-fold across seven adverts feeding the same funnel — which is why it could never have told anyone whether this campaign worked. Challenge An early-stage financial technology business running its first sizeable lead campaign, with £3,000 to spend, no view of which message would stand out in its market, and no way of telling a good enquiry from a bad one once they started arriving. Approach Use search data to find where the business could stand out before writing a single advert, and website analytics to find where visitors were already dropping out. Build the campaign around a technical paper so the download itself does some of the qualifying, then iterate the creative against live performance rather than letting it run. Outcome Sixty-four enquiries at £46.88 each — roughly half the published cost for the sector. More to the point, those enquiries produced two direct sales opportunities worth over £360,000, against £3,000 of total spend. 01 ## The work that happened before any money was spent Search data was used first, to find where this business could say something its competitors were not already saying. Website analytics came next, to find where visitors were dropping out of the existing journey. Neither of those appears in a performance report, because neither produces performance. They determine what the campaign is allowed to be about, which is a larger decision than anything made afterwards. 02 ## Seven adverts, one audience, a six-fold spread Seven adverts ran to the same audience over the same period. The best produced enquiries at £19.68\. The worst produced them at £122.61. That spread is wider than any bidding or targeting change would have delivered, and it was sitting inside a single campaign. Two of the dearest adverts took 71 per cent of the budget between them, while two producing enquiries at under £23 received 17 per cent. The same £3,000 would have bought substantially more enquiries with no new money and no new creative. The creative was iterated twice against that live data rather than left alone, which is how the cheapest adverts were found at all. 03 ## An audience that still included people who would never buy Salespeople had already been excluded from the targeting. Marketing and research roles had not — people who download a technical paper, read it with genuine interest, and are never going to purchase anything. The audience reached 9,230 of the 14,000 available, seeing the adverts an average of 2.6 times. Raising the proportion that sales could actually use cost nothing; it was a targeting change, not a budget one. 04 ## What the campaign actually returned Against published benchmarks the campaign performed well: clickthrough at 0.73 per cent against 0.56, form completion at 20 per cent against 8 to 10, and cost per enquiry at £46.88 against a published range of £80 to £100 — roughly half the expected cost. But the figure that settles it arrived later. The 64 enquiries produced two direct sales opportunities worth over £360,000, from £3,000 of spend. Two opportunities from sixty-four enquiries is a three per cent rate. On volume alone it reads as thin. On value it is the whole point of the campaign, and the two facts sit together perfectly comfortably once you are measuring the right one. 05 ## What this means for you Cost per enquiry could not have told you this campaign worked. Seven adverts ranged from £19.68 to £122.61 and every one of them fed the same funnel — so the number that varied most was the number that mattered least. Beating a published benchmark tells you your advertising is competently run. It tells you nothing about whether the business made money. Only the stages after the enquiry can answer that, and in a market where a single deal runs to six figures, a campaign can look mediocre on every volume measure and still be the best money the business spent that year. ## What £3,000 of spend against £360,000 of opportunity actually proved £360,000+ Opportunity value, from £3,000 of spend £19.68vs£122.61 Cost per enquiry, best vs worst advert — same audience 71% Of budget spent on the two costliest adverts £46.88vs£80–100 Cost per enquiry, achieved vs published benchmark Drawn from Crank's campaign analysis and reporting conducted in 2022 for this financial technology 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. [ Talk to Wearecrank](https://wa.me/447457416922?text=Help%20my%20business)[Get in touch](/contact) [← Back to all case studies](/case-studies)