Case #018: Three caps, one funnel

Case #018: Three caps, one funnel

A loans offer with a generous payout, $3,500 budget, $52 per approved application. The problem was a daily cap of 30 approvals. At that ceiling, even at a strong conversion rate, the offer could only return about $1,560/day — and my best ad set was hungry enough to blow through the cap by noon and then spend the afternoon buying clicks the advertiser would reject.

Days 1 to 3, I ignored the cap and let it rip. $1,400 spent, $1,650 back, but a third of my afternoon spend went to capped-out leads that paid zero. The funnel was leaking out the back door every single day after 1pm.

The move was to find the same approved leads two more homes. I sourced two competing loan advertisers carrying the identical offer with their own separate 30/day caps, and built a simple waterfall — leads that the primary buyer had capped got routed to buyer two, then buyer three, by descending payout.

Same traffic, same spend, three ceilings instead of one. My afternoon clicks stopped dying.

Full arc, 14 days: $3,500 spent, $5,950 back. 70% ROI — and roughly $1,800 of that revenue came from leads the original advertiser had already turned away.

The lesson: a daily cap isn't a wall on your traffic, it's a wall on one buyer — line up a waterfall and the leads you already paid for stop dying after lunch.