Case #047: Two cold audiences, one offer

Case #047: Two cold audiences, one offer

Same insurance lead offer, same lander, $3,000 split evenly between Facebook and Google Search. I wanted to know which channel actually owned this vertical before committing a real budget.

Facebook: $1,500 spent, 214 leads, $7.01 cost per lead. Cheap clicks, but the lead quality was a swamp — the advertiser paid me on a 14-day scrub and rejected 38% as non-intent. Net payable leads: 133. Effective cost per good lead: $11.27.

Google Search on "cheap car insurance quote": $1,500 spent, only 96 leads at $15.62 each. Expensive on paper. But scrub rejected just 9%. Payable leads: 87. Effective cost per good lead: $17.24.

Facebook still won on raw cost, but the gap shrank from 2.2x to 1.5x once intent was priced in. The real split came at scale: when I pushed Facebook to $200/day the algorithm widened the audience and scrub rejection climbed to 51%. Google held steady because the keyword fences out tire-kickers.

Final numbers across the test: Facebook delivered cheaper volume but a ceiling. Google delivered a worse cost-per-lead that didn't degrade when I poured money on it.

The lesson: interruption traffic is cheap and shallow, intent traffic is dear and durable — pick by how hard you plan to scale, not by the cost-per-lead on day one.