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Metro Credit is a car financing company located in Bedford, Nova Scotia. They also have an affiliated company that sells vehicles that they refer financing leads to for car sales.
They primarily serve the Halifax region but service clients all across Atlantic and Eastern Canada.
Previously they generated all of their leads organically, from local referrals, as well as paying per lead from car lead generation companies.
They were looking for another lead channel, and wanted a reliable source of qualified leads at a profitable cost.
Their average client lifetime value (LTV) is worth about $3,000 from fees collected from financing car loans.
They would purchase pre-qualified leads from a company at a cost of $150 per lead. This company would generate leads through primarily cold phone calls.
We always want to get a deep understanding of the client’s business, what their goals are, and if they have a history of running ads, and what their level of SEM marketing understanding is. We always ask our clients
Armed with more knowledge, we put together a proposal and strategic goals for our marketing and ad campaigns.
The key to success for Metro Credit was getting a cost per lead from digital marketing of less than $150, which was their current cost from other sales channels.
Also, they wanted a reliable source of leads that would allow them to hire new financing sales staff.
We put together a long and short term strategy to meet the above goals for generating auto financing leads.
See below how we managed to bring the Cost Per Lead down to under $60 in August 2022
For lead generation campaigns, Google Ads is hands down the best platform for paid ads.
It’s “bottom of the funnel” marketing.
Think of your own buying habits. What do you do when you’re looking to make a purchasing decision for a product or service?
Over 90% of people go straight to google, and type in search terms like “best [keyword],” or “car loan company,” or “lowest car loan rate,” in the case of our client.
Our ads would appear on the first page in thise results and capture in-market buyers for car insurance.
Our client, Brendan specialized in low interest, no interest, bankruptcy financing and a unique selling proposition of being able to offer private sale financing–something few other financing companies offered.
We had a starting test budget of $2500 per month to generate car financing leads.
One of the most important things in a lead gen campaign is lead attribution. For companies like this that take phone calls and capture email forms on their website, we always set up a software called Callrail.
Callrail tracks all phone calls and form submissions and attributes where the lead came from.
This allows our clients to see the direct results of our efforts, with no misunderstanding of where leads come from.
Every single lead that’s generated from Google ads will show it came from ads, and not other channels.
Every time someone submits a form, or calls the business an email is sent to the client with the lead information. In the case of a phone call, a call recording is also attached that the client can listen to. This is an invaluable tool, allowing you to assess:
By using highly specific keywords that indicated the user was looking to get car financing, we were able to maintain a low cost per lead.
We used exact and phrase match keywords to tightly target what searches were trigger Metro Credit’s Google ads.
We closely monitored the search terms report (which is what people are actually searching, versus what keywords you put in to target) to identify irrelevant searches.
We found sometimes our ads were showing up for what Google thought was a related search, such as people finding car loan calculators or searches related to a major bank.
Since those searches didn’t generate conversions or leads, we added them to our negative keyword list so they wouldn’t show up in the future and increase the efficiency of the ads campaign.
You can see some of our top keywords below, and how many leads they generated, as well as what cost per lead they netted.
Another key component of any lead generation campaign, especially in the automotive industry is the landing page experience.
People will only buy from a trustworthy, professional looking site.
Metro Credit had a serviceable site, but directing paid traffic is different from capturing organic traffic.
With direct response marketing, you want to make sure your page is highly designed to convert.
We designed a separate, specific landing page only Google Ads traffic would be directed to.
Based on our Conversion Rate Optimization experience we were able to get an extremely high conversion rate.
An industry standard conversion rate is around 2-4%, depending on the specific business, their site, what type of traffic, the market and their goals.
However, we were able to get an average conversion rate during the Google Ads campaign of 12%. Our client was extremely pleased with the results.
Results
Based on the results, Metro Credit decided to quickly scale their ad spend from $2,500 to $10,000 per month, as they were seeing a signifcant return, getting tons of leads and at their new level of spend they were consistently getting over 100 leads per month.
From those 100 leads they closed 30-50 deals per month.
This provided a signifcant return on investment using Black Octopus and our expertise in lead gen, conversion optimization, and running highly profitable Google Ad campaigns.
As we increased ad spend, our Cost Per Lead went from $100 to around $60
The leads were highly qualified and 30-50% resulted in deals, with an average customer LTV of $3000 to the financing company.
At a spend of $10,000 per month they’re generating 100-150 qualified leads per month.
100+ Qualified Leads Generated Per Month
30% Closing Rate On Leads
$3000+ Deal Size, $5000+ Customer LTC
$60 Cost Per Lead
Metro Credit is a car financing company located in Bedford, Nova Scotia. They also have an affiliated company that sells vehicles that they refer financing leads to for car sales.
They primarily serve the Halifax region but service clients all across Atlantic and Eastern Canada.
Previously they generated all of their leads organically, from local referrals, as well as paying per lead from car lead generation companies.
They were looking for another lead channel, and wanted a reliable source of qualified leads at a profitable cost.
Their average client lifetime value (LTV) is worth about $3,000 from fees collected from financing car loans.
They would purchase pre-qualified leads from a company at a cost of $150 per lead. This company would generate leads through primarily cold phone calls.
