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Decreasing Cost-Per-Lead over 80% in a high-price market.
Website
Coutohomes.com
Industry
Luxury Homebuilder
Goals
Services
Lead Generation
Meta Ads,Google Ads
Couto Homes is an award-winning luxury custom homebuilder based in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. They have been voted Best Builder in Texas and chosen as a “DFW Favorite” 3 years in a row.
THE STORY
Fixing An Outdated Lead Generation System
When Wyatt first partnered with Couto Homes, they were generating leads for their homebuilding business at a cost-per-lead (CPL) that felt unreasonably high, even for a premium market. After auditing both their Google and Meta ad accounts, Wyatt discovered that the agency in charge of their digital ads was relying on outdated campaign structures and strategies.
In the first six months of working together, Wyatt successfully reduced their overall cost-per-lead by roughly 70%, bringing CPL down to less than half of its original cost. Over the following six months, costs dropped even further and eventually stabilized at a CPL more than 80% lower than what they were paying before.
THE OBSTACLE
Fixing An Outdated Strategy
1
Outdated Targeting
The previous agency was targeting tons of different audiences based on interests, behaviors, and more. This created two problems: Firstly, their build area is limited to DFW, so combining significant geotargeting with interest targeting resulted in too small an audience. But more importantly, interest-based targeting has become increasingly less effective since Apple's iOS 14.5 update in 2021.
2
Ineffective Optimization
They were relying on an outdated campaign structure that spent too much budget on campaigns optimized for “link clicks." This was creating low-quality traffic (sometimes even robot traffic) that could not be retargeted or nurtured in any way. They had trained the algorithm to look for users who are likely to visit their website, not users who are likely to convert into paying customers.
3
Lacking A "Call To Action"
Couto’s incredible build quality speaks for itself, and their ads did a good job highlighting that. But they didn’t ask users to engage with their brand or take specific actions beyond visiting the website. Instead of building a sales funnel with focused messaging that guides users through a customer journey, nearly all of their campaigns used messaging that sounded like “brand awareness.”
THE SOLUTION
Rebuilding A New Strategy
1
Broad Audience, Targeted Messaging
By broadening our audiences, we can let the algorithm do the work it was designed to do: find you more customers.
However, with a broad audience we must use laser-focused messaging to ensure that the right users are clicking for the right reasons. This way, the algorithm is being trained on the right data and getting more effective over time.
2
New Campaign Types
Utilizing more modern campaign types, such as Google’s Performance Max and Meta’s Native Lead Forms with Conditional Logic helped us find our audience faster.
In 2025, most user data is no longer available to advertisers through the old targeting tactics. These new campaign types were built to solve this issue by using signals and logic to find your customers within a broad audience.
3
Focus On Conversions
For some brands, pushing web traffic can be an important part of the funnel. But for a high-ticket, luxury brand with a long customer journey, we want to focus our ad dollars on quality, high-intent web traffic. This is why the majority of our ad budget goes to campaigns optimized for conversions, not link clicks. Even Brand Awareness campaigns should be focused on finding users likely to convert, which will in turn make our Retargeting campaigns even stronger.
THE FUTURE
Ensuring Long-term Scalability
Now that we were generating leads at an incredibly effective cost, we must make sure that those leads are high quality and likely to become customers.
We utilize tools such as smart Conditional Logic strategies for native lead forms on Meta, website Captchas, chatbots including ManyChat, and smartly targeted ad placements to ensure that our leads are pre-qualified enough to speak to a member of our team without wasting their valuable time. We keep a constant record of our communications with our leads. If we notice an issue, we immediately alter our approach accordingly.
Overall, Couto Homes has been able to significantly increase the amount of new customers being generated from their online paid marketing, while also significantly lowering their Customer Acquisition cost.
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