Case study · Conversion & Lifecycle
Chasing cheaper leads capped profit. Higher-value customers grew it 52%.
An NCR-registered debt-review firm in South Africa, acquiring clients through paid search and inbound calls.
The situation
The client operates in one of South Africa's most competitive paid-search categories, where a handful of debt-review providers bid against each other for the same high-intent searches and the cost of a qualified lead climbs every year. Their entire acquisition model ran on volume: maximise form fills and inbound calls, keep cost-per-lead down, and let the call centre convert whatever came through.
By 2024 that model was straining. Lead costs were rising faster than closed-invoice revenue, monthly profit was volatile, and several months slipped close to break-even after fees. Growth had stalled not because leads were scarce, but because each new lead was worth less.
The assumption
The accepted playbook in debt review is volume at the lowest possible cost-per-lead: more leads, cheaper leads, and a call centre to sort them. Platform reporting reinforced it. The cheapest campaigns showed the most conversions, so budget followed the cheap leads. Everyone agreed that was efficiency.
What the evidence showed
Segmenting closed-invoice records by campaign and landing experience, not platform conversions, told a different story. The cheapest lead sources produced the lowest average invoice values and the weakest close rates; the volume playbook was quietly diluting the book. The profit sat with a smaller pool of higher-intent, higher-value customers that broad cheap-lead campaigns were actively crowding out. Cost-per-lead had been optimising for the wrong number.
What we did
- i.Stopped optimising for cost-per-lead and started optimising for invoice value.
- ii.Rebuilt the primary website around higher-value customers: sharper qualification, offer framing aimed at clients with more assets to protect, and a cleaner path to action, rather than maximising raw form fills.
- iii.Launched a separate reviews-and-comparison property to capture high-intent comparison shoppers and feed third-party credibility back into the funnel.
- iv.Restructured the Google Ads account into a clear tier system: scale the brand and comparison campaigns, restructure the mid-intent terms, and cut or pause the broad “debt help” and “debt general” buckets that looked cheap but billed least.
- v.What we did not do: chase cost-per-lead lower or re-expand the broad campaigns, even when platform metrics flattered them.
Results
Gross profit
FY2025 vs FY2024, closed-invoice records
Leads
FY2025 vs FY2024
Billed revenue
FY2025 vs FY2024, closed-invoice records
The evidence, month by month
Same seasons. Different year.
Billed revenue by month, indexed · FY2024 monthly average = 100 · closed-invoice records · January to October
Profit grew roughly three times faster than spend: gross profit rose 52% while media investment rose just 16%. The mechanism was value, not only volume. Average invoice value climbed 4.8% and the close rate improved to 11.7%, so a 17% lift in leads converted into a 26% lift in billed revenue. All figures are measured against the client's closed-invoice records, not platform-reported conversions. On the strength of the year, the engagement expanded into additional channels and continues.
The lesson
Low cost-per-lead optimises for the lowest value leads. Optimise for invoice value instead.