The client is a travel company that sells safari tours in over 20 African countries. While the tour operators are locally based in Africa, the clientele is almost exclusively from the rest of the world (North America, Europe, Asia and Middle East).
"Profitable" growth is difficult to find. Leads from international marketplaces are often expensive and non-exclusive (leads shared between different buyers). Organic and Paid search provide a steady flow of leads but necessitate constant investment as the field is now as competitive as before the Covid crisis. The client's budget for ads outside of Google Ads is very limited ($550/month).
We defined a very narrow "cold" audience using the filtering criteria proposed by Meta
United States location only
frequent international travellers
household income in top 25%
interest in Wildlife Safari or African Safari
interest in Adventure Travel
The resulting audience is well under 500 000 which is small for Meta. We then launched a single middle-of-funnel campaign optimising for conversion leads on the client's website. We did not use the Advantage+ features to augment the audience.
After 6 weeks of learning phase, the campaign started delivering steady results:
Month 1: 6 leads (CPL: $92)
Month 2: 32 leads (CPL: $17)
Month 3: 46 leads (CPL: $12)
Month 4: 55 leads (CPL: $10)
When asked, the client didn't report any lead quality issue compared to SEO or Paid Search, over 90% of the leads were genuine (not spam). Similar leads sold on safari.com (the industry lead aggregator and marketplace) cost approximately $50, without exclusivity (several buyers for the same lead).
Today, this advertising campaign is being modified to broaden the audience and take into account the recent changes in Meta filtering criteria for audiences. We're being careful to not trigger a new machine-learning phase for the campaign as we clearly hit a sweet-spot with quality leads coming at a decent volume for a bargain cost.