A US bath remodeling company operating across multiple states had acceptable aggregate metrics and a serious market-level problem. Missouri was silently absorbing budget and dragging account-level results. A state-by-state creative audit found the signal buried in the noise and built a repeatable framework from it.
The account ran across a wide geographic footprint and the aggregate CPL, around $114, looked within range. The problem was that Missouri, which had a large audience size, was absorbing a disproportionate share of spend in all-zips campaigns and quietly dragging down results everywhere else. Spend in Missouri was subsequently capped and redirected to stronger markets.
The deeper issue was creative. Some ads were generating strong lead volume while producing near-zero sales. That pattern only becomes visible when you look at lifetime data by ad, evaluated all the way through to close rate. Looking only at CPL, those ads appeared healthy.
There was also a structural retargeting problem. The campaigns ran as CBOs with two adsets sharing one budget. One adset was much larger than the other. A CBO almost always starves the smaller audience, which in this case was the hotter, closer-to-converting one.
CPL looked acceptable. Sales per creative did not. The account needed to be evaluated at the sale level, not the lead level, before any scaling decisions could be trusted.
The same CPL was producing very different outcomes across segments. The problem was not volume. It was how performance was being interpreted.
The audit produced a consistent finding across markets: close rate and set rate diverged sharply between creative types even when CPL was similar. Format mattered more than cost.
The account brought cost of marketing down from 25% to 17%, beating the internal target of ~21%. CPL dropped from $114 to an average of $85 across states, with some markets reaching below $50. The deeper win was structural: a ranked creative framework that made new market launches faster and more predictable.