The Relaunch: Eight Days In
The lead campaign went live on July 22. This is an early look at how it is settling in: what it has cost, who is enquiring, where they live, and what we will adjust from here.
One campaign, kept deliberately simple so Meta's learning can build instead of resetting: your best-performing render, rewritten to lead with the $799K price and the 25 minutes to Whistler, running to Metro Vancouver and the Sea to Sky corridor together at $20 a day. Behind it sits the new higher-intent form, with the confirm-your-details step and the extra questions we added to filter out accidental taps.
The creative that's liveThe proven render, price first
The image that carried the old account, now with copy that opens on the price and the drive time instead of burying them.
See the live ad →Campaign setup
Built to collect leads, not clicks. Housing ad rules apply, so there is no age or interest targeting; the creative does the selecting.
- Goal
- Leads
- Budget
- $20 / day · $600 a month
- Audience
- Van + Sea to Sky · one pooled ad set
- Placements
- Automatic · FB + IG, as the old winner ran
- Form
- Higher intent · confirm step + 3 questions
- Status
- Active · approved & delivering
Early days, and the numbers are small, so treat everything here as a first read rather than a verdict. That said, the campaign has come out of the gate well. A 3.4% click rate on a cold audience is ahead of the account's historical 2.5%, and the cost per click is right in line with the best the account has done.
The old April campaign collected leads at $10.00 with a quick-tap form open to all of BC. The honest expectation was that the new form, with its confirm step and extra questions, would push the cost per lead up towards $30 or more in exchange for quality. Instead it is holding at $10.33 with the harder form. At the current pace that is roughly 50 to 55 leads a month on the $600 budget, before retargeting is even switched on. Costs are also moving the right way: impressions were about 24% cheaper by the end of the week than at launch, which is Meta's learning settling in.
This is the most useful thing the first week has produced. The old account could never tell us whether leads were coming from Vancouver or the corridor, because Meta only reports "British Columbia". So we put the question on the form itself, and every lead has answered it. The result is one-sided: 14 of the 15 leads live in the Sea to Sky corridor, and more than half are in Whistler itself, even though Metro Vancouver makes up about 97% of the people the ads can reach.
The buyer we built the message for, the person who works around Whistler and had given up on owning there, is exactly who is putting their hand up. "Priced out of Whistler? A new home 25 minutes away from $799K" is landing with the people it was written for. Vancouver is quiet so far, but one week is far too early to cut it: it is the proven volume layer from the old account, it costs nothing to keep in the pool, and the form now tells us for free exactly what each area contributes. If the pattern holds at the four-week mark, the corridor earns its own ad set and creative.
The form questions were added to grade quality, not just count names. Reading the answers: no realtors got through the filter, six of the fifteen gave a real buying timeline, and one says they are looking to buy within three months. The rest are researching, which is the honest answer you would expect for a purchase this size at this stage.
After a quiet first three days while Meta found its footing, the campaign moved to a steady two to three leads a day over the weekend and has held one to two a day since. Nothing here suggests fatigue yet, but with a small corridor audience being seen about 2.3 times each already, fresh creative will matter sooner rather than later.
Same story as the account's history, and it is holding on automatic placements: the Facebook feed is doing the heavy lifting with 60% of spend, the best click rate, and more than half the leads. Instagram is along for the ride at about a quarter of spend. Its click rate is well behind, which is partly the placement and partly that the square render is not built for stories and reels formats.
The campaign is doing what it was built to do, so no change of direction. Four adjustments to the setup, in order.
Fresh renderings, corridor-first
New creative from your renderings next, with the price and drive time up top and the lead line aimed at the corridor, since "priced out of Whistler" is the message the data just backed. Two or three versions in rotation so Meta picks the winner before the current render tires.
Vertical cuts for stories and reels
Each new render also gets a 9:16 version, so Instagram stops showing a letterboxed square. If IG still lags with proper creative, it gets trimmed.
Revisit the geo split at four weeks
The pooled audience stays while learning builds. If the corridor is still outdelivering Vancouver at four weeks, it gets its own ad set and budget, with Vancouver kept as a smaller volume slice.
Retargeting next month, then talk scale
Once a month of visitors and form-openers has pooled, a small retargeting layer comes on, usually the cheapest leads on any account. If the cost per lead holds around $10 to $15, that is the point to step toward the ~$1,000 a month the account has handled before.