Meta ads for MCA brokerages, simplified

Whenever I talk with an MCA broker about Facebook or Meta leads, they say right away: “That’s never worked for us. MCA leads from Facebook are terrible.” The truth is, nine times out of ten they just haven’t run it correctly. They don’t understand which specific inputs they have to make into Meta so that on the output side they get something worth paying for: the leads. So in this video I want to run through a very simplified process for running Meta ads yourself, so you don’t have to rely on lead vendors, lead sheets, UCC data, all these different sources. Not to say you can’t use them. But it’s always good to have a working lead source that you control one hundred percent.

You know for a fact that if you spend X on ads, you’re going to fund X deals, and those deals are going to look a specific way. This is what the lead vendors have probably shown you, and it’s probably what you have in your mind about how Meta ads look for MCA: you spend a bunch of money, it goes into some magical black box which is Meta, and qualified leads come out the other side. Yes, in theory you give money to Meta and leads come out. But there’s a very precise structure inside that box. If you understand the inputs and how to make them, it’s not a black box. It’s a very simple form, basically.

There are three separate parts to it. Number one is ad creatives: what the merchant actually sees on the front end, and there are different types, which we’ll go over. Then there’s the funnel, the conversion mechanism that turns someone looking at an ad into someone whose contact info you have. And then there’s tracking and iteration: once someone has submitted an application, what do you do with that data to keep improving the system, lower your cost per lead, lower your cost per acquisition and raise lead quality.

This is all based on real numbers. In the past seven days we spent $18,452.78 on Facebook ads on one campaign in one of our business managers. That’s about ninety percent of what we spend, to be honest, though we diversify which business managers we work in and which campaigns leads come from, because we don’t want to risk one of our main campaigns getting shut down. That spend turned into 767 qualified leads. Each qualified lead meets the following criteria: at least $30,000 a month in revenue, requesting a bare minimum of $15,000, they fill out which industry they’re in, six months in business minimum, four months of bank statements available, they select their state, and, very importantly, a mobile-verified phone number, with a six-digit passcode sent to their mobile device.

A few other things I’ll cover beyond creatives, funnel and tracking: the budget you should be running at, ad fatigue, and our pay-per-lead program if you’re interested. So let’s get into it.

Number one is ad creatives. I’ve tried to condense this to the information you maybe don’t already take for granted. I don’t want to make this a boring, generic course; I want it to be actionable. There are different ad concepts you can have within the creatives, and the goal is for you to have a lot of creatives and for Meta’s algorithm to pick where the spend goes. Even now, if I went into my ads manager, we do not turn off ads. We do not turn off ad sets, for the most part. The only reason we turn something off is if we see Meta pushing spend towards something that is genuinely not producing results. And if you’re running ads right now you’ll see Meta pushing spend to maybe ten or fifteen percent of the ads you have. That’s for a very good reason: those ads are producing results, based on the tracking and iteration you’re actually using.

There are a few proven ad concepts. Industry-specific: restaurant, landscaping, med spa, trucking. That’s where you get granular about who fills out the submissions. Product-specific: MCA, debt consolidation, lines of credit, which work pretty well. State-specific, which is good whether you’re nationwide or only in a few states: you can personalise the messaging, whether it’s a video ad or a static ad, so these people feel like this is for their state only, and that works very well. Then revenue-tier: companies over $50K a month, over $30K a month; we’ve sometimes run over half a million a month. If you really want to jack up the type of customer you get, that’s where you do it.

A basic rule of thumb, and this is actually pretty interesting: the number you put in the ad is going to be roughly half of what the actual submissions average. If you say “business owners making $50,000 per month”, you can expect the average person who submits the form to be doing $25,000 a month. Don’t ask me why. I guess it’s basic human psychology, but across multiple industries and multiple offers, this is what we’ve seen. If you want merchants doing $30,000 a month, you should be advertising a bare minimum of $60,000 a month. This is just what we’ve seen after spending close to six figures on ads this past month.

Here are some examples of static images and video ads. This is a useless debate: should I do static or video? Do both. Upload both to your ads manager and let the data decide. At the end of the day your data is the best data. Don’t sit there thinking, should I make static ads, video ads, industry-specific, state-specific? Do all of them and let Meta decide. Here are some static ads aimed at restaurants. A very simple line-of-credit ad, which is a cross-pollination of a product-specific ad for a business line of credit and a home-services ad. This one is more of a lifestyle ad, a UGC-style ad you could call it, with very simple raw text. We can literally get these pictures from Pinterest; you can use pictures from your camera roll. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you capture the attention of the right person and get a good offer in front of them. That is all marketing is, and especially for MCA, for a product these people need right now. You need to position yourself as an authority in the market so they think: this is someone I should opt in with.

Here’s an example of a video ad you could run. Obviously don’t copy it; it’s for inspiration.

“If you need working capital in the next few days, don’t start with your bank. A bank application takes four to six weeks minimum, and what they’re actually deciding on is your personal credit score, not what your business brings in. So if you need money this week, that route’s dead. What you want is revenue-based funding. You send three months of bank statements. That’s it. It goes out to lenders who underwrite off your deposits. Offers come back the same day. Money’s in the account inside 72 hours. Up to 500 grand. No hard pull on your credit. Doing 30 grand a month or more? Links below.”

So you can see it’s a very simple ad. Very direct. A lot of companies try to be cute with their ads and try to be creative. Just get to the point. There are a lot of creative variants, and with AI nowadays that ad was made in five minutes and nobody edited anything. You really have to try a bunch of things. That’s the main creative strategy right now: a lot of creative output. We create hundreds of ads per week, literally all day, and let the data decide what’s best. We have no clue what’s going to work. We have an idea of which creatives will do better, and over time we see a common preference towards certain types, but at the end of the day the data decides. That is the best way to run this.

Next is the funnel. The main thing here, and you’ll see this is a recurring theme, is do not overcomplicate it. The funnel is simply supposed to take the prospect from finding the ad interesting to giving you their information, qualifying or disqualifying them, sending their data back to Facebook if they’re qualified, and collecting their info so they land in your HubSpot, your Salesforce, your CRM. Literally any landing page software that lets you do all that. A lot of my clients use GHL, some use WordPress, ClickFunnels. Some are moving into custom builds with Claude or Manus or GPT, because it’s easy to iterate and you can make really good landing pages there. If you’re more technical and want a nicer page with more capability, go the custom route.

One thing that is non-negotiable, which we run on every one of our landing pages and explicitly advise every brokerage we work with to install, is Microsoft Clarity. It’s completely free, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable. Clarity screen-records every live session on your website. Whether they submit all the way or drop off at a certain point, it records it, and you use that data to see where the drop-offs are, whether there are issues in your funnel, where people take the longest. So you have data to act on when you make edits. That way every decision in your funnel, whether it’s a creative, a landing page or tracking, is tied back to numbers, not emotions, not “I think this is the reason”. There is a very specific reason your funnel isn’t working right now, and if you had the proper data set up, which you probably don’t, you could make an educated decision on it. At the end of the day it’s just data, and the best data is your own.

Another thing I see a lot of brokerages get wrong on the funnel is friction. They assume more friction is always good friction. It isn’t. There is good friction and bad friction. Good friction is a mobile one-time passcode: at the end of the submission they have to enter a six-digit code sent to their mobile number before they can submit. If they don’t enter it, they cannot submit the application and you never see that person. That helps a lot with spam. Our spam rate, across hundreds of thousands of leads at this point, is very low: low single digits, one to three percent. That’s because of the mobile one-time passcode and the email verifier. It also means you’re not calling VoIPs, landlines or company numbers. You’re calling the specific business owner. And the email verifier: you cannot submit an application on our funnels, or most of our clients’ funnels, without a valid email address. We run a third-party check that it’s a real, active address, so you can’t put abcdefg@gmail.com.

Bad friction: slow page speed, which is just being lazy. Document upload: most of the time we see it isn’t worth it. The only document upload I’d recommend is Plaid for bank statements, and even that is double-edged, because your cost per lead goes up. Quality goes up too, but only to a point, so you have to make it make sense within your funnel and your budget. Captcha, I’ve seen, is pretty much a waste of time for these people and doesn’t help much. And a desktop-optimised page instead of mobile-optimised just loses you conversions: eighty or ninety percent of your traffic is coming from mobile, so it has to be mobile-optimised by far. Obviously you need friction. You don’t want to collect everyone’s data, because not everyone is qualified. Other than that, the application should ask for contact information, revenue, requested amount, industry and state.

Now, tracking and iteration. This is by far the most overlooked thing. Everyone thinks they need the best creatives, the best funnel, the best everything, but this is where it all comes together and where you really control your data. Even when I meet the big MCA people in New York, New Jersey and Florida, the main thing they focus on is data. They own all their traffic. And the way you do it is simple: the Meta pixel plus the Conversions API. Look up the most generic tutorial on how to set that up and it will work for your MCA shop. The main thing is that you only want it firing for qualified form submissions. You want immediate delivery to your CRM through an API or webhook so you can call them within sixty seconds. And you want end-to-end data.

Meta is running your ads and getting you traffic, and you send data back to Meta for the qualified submissions. There are two stages. If you’re running a low budget, the green line is a qualified lead. Once they get past the qualification barrier — they make the right amount of money, they’re requesting the right amount, everything is good — you send that back to Meta and say: this is a qualified lead. That has, let’s say, a 1x weight in their system, meaning: this is a good lead, get more of these. If it is a disqualified lead, do not send it back to Meta. You need a separate disqualification landing page, where you can maybe redirect them to another offer, but the pixel should not fire a lead event on that page. That data should never touch Meta. If you send it back, you are telling Meta to find you more of these disqualified people, and you do not want that.

If you’re running at higher budgets with more conversion events, you can take it a step further with offline events from your CRM: when a person is funded, which is the highest-quality lead, the one that actually converts — maybe five, ten or fifteen percent of the leads that come through — you send that back to Meta. This is only for higher-budget campaigns because you need at least fifty conversion events a week. That means funding at least two hundred deals a month from your Facebook ads for it to make sense, because that becomes the event Meta optimises for. If you only send back five conversion events a week, they don’t have enough data to optimise on. That’s why this is only for the big shops running $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 a day. Even for the smaller shops running $100, $200, $500 a day, qualified form submissions are good enough. Just make sure you are not sending back any disqualified leads. So: use the standard Meta pixel and Conversions API setup on your landing page, and make sure it only sends back the qualified data.

The next thing is budget and ad fatigue. This isn’t a specific part of the process but it’s an extremely important part. Your budget and the number of creatives that will fatigue go up in proportion. If you start at $100 a day, which is by far the bare minimum I would recommend for any campaign — if you’re doing anything less than that you should not be running ads — then as you add budget you will need more creatives. It’s as simple as that. It’s running through more traffic, showing to more people, so the creatives fatigue quicker. At $100 a day you don’t need that many creatives: maybe twenty or thirty. At $1,000 a day you need proportionally more, because it’s showing to more people and you don’t want your frequency to get too high on any one ad. It is very much underestimated how many more creatives you need as you scale, and how much quicker they wear out.

That’s basically everything I wanted to show you. If you’re running an MCA shop with five, ten, fifteen, twenty reps and you’re looking for more leads on a pay-per-qualified-lead basis, we supply exclusive, pre-qualified MCA leads: at least $30,000 a month in revenue, requesting a bare minimum of $15,000 in working capital, six months in business, four months of bank statements available. You get their state, their industry, and they verify with a mobile phone number. We run them through a very similar process, just with a lot more volume. They cost $60 per lead. You can start with anywhere from 50 to 100 to 1,000 leads at a time, and we deliver them directly into your CRM, whether it’s HubSpot, Salesforce, Google Sheets, whatever you’re on. If that sounds interesting, there’s a link below to book a call with me. Either way, I hope you found value in this video. Talk soon.