Property
3 810 property enquiries at $7.50 each
What a real paid-social operation looks like when the budget is serious.
| Client | International property developer |
|---|---|
| Year | 2024 |
| Scope | Paid social strategy · Creative production · Landing pages · Lead qualification |
The brief
Challenge
Sell apartments in a residential development to buyers who were ready now — no nurture sequences, no email courses, no six-week warming. The client wanted enquiries with a stated budget and a real interest in finance, and wanted the cost per enquiry to be predictable enough to scale against.
What was done
Approach
Two platforms run in parallel so they could be compared honestly. Over 60 creatives tested across offer, location, visual and format. Several purpose-built landing pages, one per offer, plus a direct comparison of lead forms against quizzes against stripped-back pages with no navigation. Audiences were split by buyer type rather than by geography — expatriates, families, investors and relocators each got their own copy and imagery, because 'target the city' is not a strategy.
Results
The numbers, in full
| Channel | Budget | Leads | Avg CPL | Qualified | Cost per qualified |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Meta | $23 800 | 2 560 | $9.30 | 190+ | $260 |
| VK | $5 000 | 1 250 | $4.00 | 55+ | $340 |
| Total | $28 800 | 3 810 | $7.50 | 245+ | — |
Figures as reported by the client's ad accounts. Geography withheld at the client's preference.
Analysis
Why it worked
- Segmenting by buyer type rather than by city. Expatriates, families and investors want different things from the same building, and writing one advert for all three means writing one nobody responds to.
- One platform delivered cheap volume, the other delivered fewer but more accurate enquiries. Running both meant the mix could be tuned rather than guessed at.
- Qualification was pushed into the lead form itself. Every enquiry counted as qualified carried a budget and a finance intention, so the sales team was not paid to phone tyre-kickers.
Does this apply to a smaller budget?
The budget here is larger than a Cape Town salon will ever spend, and that is the point of showing it. The mechanism — segment by buyer type, test angles properly, qualify inside the form, compare channels honestly — is the same mechanism applied to a R5 000 monthly budget in South Africa. The arithmetic scales down more gracefully than most people expect.
More
Other work
Next step
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