The short answer
Between 30 August and 5 September 2026 our main Meta campaign spent $18,452.78 and produced 767 qualified submissions — $24.07 per lead. Every one cleared $30K a month in revenue, a $15K minimum request, six months in business, four months of statements available, and a six-digit code entered from its own mobile (the gates have since changed: one year in business, and 3 months of statements now included). That is the number a properly-run account produces at roughly $2,600 a day; it is not the number a new account produces in its first month.
Almost nobody in this market publishes their own ad numbers, which is why the cost of a Meta lead is a rumour ranging from $8 to $150 depending on who is selling what. These are ours, from the ads manager, for the seven days ending 5 September 2026.
| Seven days, one campaign | |
|---|---|
| Spend | $18,452.78 |
| Qualified leads | 767 |
| Cost per qualified lead | $24.07 |
| Daily spend | About $2,636 |
| Share of our total Meta spend | Roughly 90% |
| Basis | Measured — our own ads manager, 30 Aug to 5 Sep 2026 |
What the 767 looked like — $87,652 average monthly revenue, $92,408 average requested, trucking first by a distance — is published separately, along with the six Ads Manager numbers the campaign is managed on.
What “qualified” means here
A lead is not a form fill. Every one of the 767 cleared the gates our exclusive leads had to clear that week, enforced on the page rather than by a rep afterwards. (The time-in-business floor has since moved from six months to one year.)
- $30,000 or more in monthly revenue, selected from bands.
- Requesting at least $15,000.
- Six months or more in business.
- Four months of bank statements available.
- Industry and state selected.
- A six-digit code sent to the phone number given, entered before the application would submit.
Submissions that failed any gate went to a separate page and were never counted, never sent to Meta and never called. That matters for the number: a cost per lead that includes the disqualified is a different, smaller-looking figure, and it is the one most people quote.
What had to be in place
The rate is the output of a system, not of a budget. Three parts, and the video covers each: six angles of creative in static and video, uploaded in volume and left for Meta to sort; a funnel with only the friction that earns its place; and a pixel that fires for qualified submissions only, so the algorithm is optimising towards the merchant we want rather than towards whoever will fill in a form.
What it changes about buy versus build
Our exclusive leads sell at $60. The same lead costs $24.07 to generate at scale — before the media buyer, the creative output, the page, the verification service and the learning weeks that sit outside the ad account. The gap is real and it is smaller than it looks, and the full comparison is about owning a channel rather than saving on a lead. But the honest version of that comparison starts from a measured figure, and this is it.