The six Meta Ads Manager numbers that matter for MCA

Last week I spent $18,452.78 on Meta ads for my MCA brokerage clients. There are a lot of numbers that go into managing an operation at this scale, and there are obviously much bigger operations and much smaller ones. I’m just telling you what we saw from our numbers: which numbers specifically, which metrics we care about in Meta Ads Manager, so that you can implement that into your own system if you’re running Facebook ads for yourself. As you can see, this generated 767 leads. For a merchant to be considered qualified they had to be doing at least $30,000 a month in revenue and requesting a bare minimum of $15,000.

As you can see, the requested amount is much higher than that, and the average deal size is actually much bigger than that too. Six months in business, four months of bank statements available, a mobile-verified phone number with a one-time passcode, meaning they have to enter a one-time passcode sent to their phone number back into the application in order to submit the form, and valid contact info: email addresses, all of that. In terms of the statistics, the average monthly revenue is $87,652 and the average requested amount is $92,408. So even though it’s a minimum of $15,000 for a lead to be considered qualified, they’re actually requesting a lot more than that. The average deal size that we end up seeing from the clients we get feedback from is $60,000 to $65,000.

The top industries for these leads last week were transportation and trucking, which was by far the majority. Restaurants and food service was second, and coming very close after that was landscaping companies. This is pretty typical. Transportation is usually the top one; sometimes restaurants or other home-service companies end up exceeding it, depending on which messaging pocket we’re focusing on within the ad spend. But this is pretty typical for us.

Now, as I mentioned, there are a lot of metrics when you log on to Ads Manager. There are probably, literally, hundreds of different numbers you can look at, and it looks very intimidating when you first log on, and even after a few times. My goal here is to give you clarity on what is actually worth focusing your efforts on, and what these numbers should actually look like. I’m going to rank them from least indicative, meaning these don’t matter as much but are still worth looking at, a factor you should have in the back of your mind, to the most relevant one, which you’ll see at the bottom: the most important one, the one everything actually comes down to.

Number one is CPM, your cost per thousand impressions. You’re obviously not going to base your whole campaign on this, but it is an interesting factor for seeing whether things are going well or not early in a campaign. The average you should have is around a $30 CPM, plus or minus $5 to $10. It isn’t the most important thing, but if you have a $200 CPM, you know something is wrong. And you’ll notice I’ve written “if higher: make better ad creatives”, because that is most likely what is wrong. These are suggestions. If there are other factors, and there are always other factors within the funnel, those can also be affecting your rates.

What I would say is this: the further down the funnel you go, the more variables there are, and the more variables can be causing an irregular number. Up here, if you have a high CPM, it’s safe to say you just have to make better creatives. But later down the line, if you have a high cost per funded deal, there are so many different things that could have gone wrong up to that point in the funnel that it’s really hard to say what it is without your specific data. So CPM is one thing. Anywhere from $20 to, let’s say, $40 is fair. You’re pretty much good if you’re within that range.

Number two is link CTR. On this campaign, over the past week, we’ve been averaging two and a half to three percent. We’ve gone up to five, five and a half percent on some really good campaigns, but this is a good average. If you’re hitting it, you’re good. If you’re much under it, you should definitely re-evaluate. It’s still pretty safe to say it’s something to do with the creatives or the offer. After this, though, the actual cause of a low number becomes a lot more varied.

Number three, landing page conversion rate, is also pretty important. There are a lot of definitions you can go by here, so what I mean is: how many people land on the landing page in total, and how many end up becoming actual qualified leads. If you get 5%, then of a hundred people who land, five should be converting into qualified leads. If it is much lower than that, say 2% or 3%, I would most likely say it’s too much friction, or offer dilution, meaning the thing you said in the ad is wildly different from what you said on the landing page, and that made people bounce right away.

Another thing I say in all my videos when it comes to landing pages: the more data you have, the better. So you should definitely install this software called Microsoft Clarity. It’s completely free, and it shows you the heat maps, the dashboards and everything like that when people go onto your website. It’s basically a screen recorder for whenever a lead lands on your website, so you have all the actual data to see what is going on there. So this should be around 5%.

Cost per lead. This can vary depending on what is on your landing page. If you’re asking for bank statements, if you’re asking for a one-time passcode on the phone number, it moves. It can go down to $5 or $10 a lead if you really have no qualification, but it can also go up to $60. I’ve seen people with a $60 cost per lead who still run it, because it makes them money. At the end of the day, if it makes money, it makes sense. If it’s higher than this range, like I said, a lot more variables can be going into it, but very broadly it can be the creatives, the landing page qualification, your tracking: a lot of different things can go wrong at this point.

Number five, lead-to-submission rate, meaning from the point that someone is considered a qualified lead, they submit the form and do the one-time passcode or whatever it is, to the point of submitting an application with the lender. This should be 15%. I’ve seen people go as low as 10% and still make it work. I’ve seen people go as high as 20%, low twenties, and make it work. So it can vary, but on average you should be looking at around 15%.

Number six, and this is the most important thing. This is much more important than cost per lead at the end of the day; much more important than anything else. Cost per funded deal. Your average cost per funded deal, depending on your deal sizes, should be anywhere from $1,000 to $1,500. That is on average what we see pretty consistently when people are paying us $60 a lead, so you can do the maths on how many leads it actually takes. At $1,000 you’re well within the safe zone. I’ve even had people push it to $2,500 on bigger deals.

At the end of the day it really depends on your model and how willing you are to spend money to acquire more customers, because there are also some clients we have who only care about acquiring a customer. They’re willing to break even on the first customer and only make a profit on the reorders. So it depends on your risk tolerance and how you run things. Those are the six numbers I would look at if I were you, if I were running my own advertising for my MCA shop. And as I mentioned, the further down the funnel you go, the more variables can be going wrong. Up here it’s very apparent what could be going wrong; further down, more external variables could be affecting your rates.

Now, the actual return calculation. Let’s say you have a $1,500 cost per funded deal, which is pretty average, pretty high to be honest, for our clients, but let’s call it average. Our average deal size is $60,000. If you’re making ten points on $60,000, that’s $6,000 in commission. That’s a 4x return on the initial deal, let alone the returns on future deals.

So really, all you have to understand is: if you know your numbers, you know how much you’re willing to risk and invest to get one customer. I’ve said this in multiple videos. If you know your numbers and you know your data, that is pretty much all you need to scale. If you have everything floating around in a bunch of different Excel spreadsheets and you don’t actually know your numbers, it’s going to be very hard to scale, because you’re unsure whether it even works. If you know the proper numbers, not just the pile of numbers Meta Ads Manager gives you, you’re going to be in a much better position to scale.

So if you’re an MCA brokerage looking for more high-quality, exclusive leads delivered to your CRM in real time, all meeting these criteria, $30,000 a month in revenue, six months in business, requesting $15,000, four months of bank statements, on a pay-per-qualified-lead basis, book a call below and we’ll talk about how to implement that in your business. We charge $60 per qualified lead, sent directly into your CRM the moment it is generated, from this very funnel I just showed you. If that sounds interesting, there’s a link below. Book a call there and we’ll talk soon.