In the third and final part of our series on lead generation with Xevio co-founder and CEO, Nadim Kuttab, we’re looking at how to approach end-to-end optimization of your lead gen funnel, from initial ad impression to final conversion. This involves a more holistic view of the customer journey and financial outcomes, rather than isolated campaign metrics like cost-per-lead: Think not just tactical optimization, but strategic business growth.
When you talk about building a funnel from scratch for lead generation, what are the foundational steps, and how do you define success at each stage?
I’d give the same advice as when we talked about content strategies for high-quality lead generation — having a clickable trigger question followed by a couple more concise clickable things, then asking for personal data.
How do you approach A/B testing across the entire lead funnel, from ad creative to landing pages, to continuously improve conversion rates at scale?
We use a tool called Voluum — it’s a native tracking tool. It can be used for other things, but it’s built for native and we’re constantly rotating in tests. At any given point in time, we might have between two and five different pieces of content live per campaign and one to three different lead forms per lead gen campaign. We’re constantly trying to see what thread of ad, publisher, content piece, and lead form is driving the best ROAS for us and for our clients. So, how do I approach AB testing? We test everything all the time — that’s it. If you find something that works, scale it while on a small budget and try to find the next big thing.
That’s essentially our testing philosophy: Always testing, but not blindly. I see a lot of companies just 50/50 splitting their traffic between different pages at random. Do it systematically: Have 90% or 95% of your traffic go to things that have been proven to work, but always have a little bit of traffic that explores newer things. Doing it at an even mix is a terrible idea unless you’re starting from scratch. You have to buy data to see what works.
As you know, Realize offers tools like Pacing Health Score and Custom Rules. How can performance advertisers leverage these features to optimize their lead generation campaigns efficiently?
Custom rules — we call them parachute rules — are always a good idea. If you’re just one person, or a person who likes to have their days off or their evenings to themselves without their laptop open, set custom rules that essentially catch your campaigns when they fail. Say, if CPA goes above 2x your target and spend is above X a day, it should stop. That limits your losses when tracking breaks, or when there’s some sort of tech issue. Yesterday or the day before, there was a huge outage from one of the bigger trackers out there. Three hours of data, wiped out! If you didn’t react, those three hours of clicks were sent into the Nether. Realize’s Custom Rules to catch the campaign when that happens would have saved you money and time.
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What are common bottlenecks or drop-off points you’ve identified in lead generation funnels, and what are your go-to strategies for fixing them?
Using a crappy form, or a form that comes from Google or Meta and not adapting it to native or content-based marketing in general, can really halve your efficiency. It’s unbelievable how much money can get lost with a bad form. A lot of people use unoptimized forms, or try to build their own rather than using off-the-shelf solutions like HeyFlow that cost $100 or $200 a month, but just work. There’s a lot of firepower behind those servers — they’ll last if you scale up, right? Trying to save $5 in hosting costs by building your own form will cost you dearly if things go wrong.
For another bottleneck, the first question on your form is a huge one. Don’t ask complex first questions, I cannot stress this enough.
As you advised when we discussed content strategies for high-quality lead generation, the form should be mostly clickable rather than typable.
Exactly. Our go-to strategies are to look at where drop off rates are bad, then split test different things to see if we can improve them. Sometimes it’s actually not a bad thing if your drop off rate is higher at the beginning, because then it tends to taper down towards the end and you might have a better conversion rate overall on the form if you filter people a bit more aggressively. But, again, it’s so scenario-specific that it really depends on the product, where you’re running it, how you’re running it, etc. I’d say look at the data, optimize based off of the data, but don’t be too obsessed with trying to squeeze 5% more out of the first question because, at the end of the day, it might actually be counterproductive.
How do you ensure that scaling lead generation efforts doesn’t compromise lead quality or significantly increase CPA?
There is always going to be a plateau. At some point, it’s not worth putting a dollar more in because your efficiency decreases. That plateau can be $5,000 a day, it can be $100,000. It’s never $500 a day. If you’re seeing it plateau that low, there is something wrong with your funnel or your media buying strategy.
Beyond immediate conversions, how do you factor in metrics like Lifetime Value (LTV) and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) when optimizing lead generation funnels?
As I mentioned when we talked about AI-powered lead generation, any data we can get back from the call centers or anything else that happens post-lead is massively valuable in helping us squeeze out more from the campaigns. The quicker we’re able to get the data into the click level analysis, the better we are at managing traffic that converts.
One last thing on that topic: It really depends on the client. Some clients have built these huge models, but they’re built on Google, so when you apply them in native, they fail. I’ve seen this time and time again. The best way to do it is start slow, spend a couple grand, see how it converts. If it shows promise, continue spending more. Don’t 100,000x your budget overnight. With lead gen, it’s a slow but steady burn: With e-commerce, you can be very aggressive, but with lead gen, you have to be a bit slower because there are so many factors in extracting value out of a lead. The initial metrics might look good, but then the revenue is zero — that’s not good if you’re spending $100,000 a day.
What role does post-conversion follow-up or nurturing play in maximizing the value of generated leads, and how does that influence your initial funnel design?
You lose 20% of a lead’s value if you call them after 12 minutes versus after 30 seconds. You start losing 20% more if you take from 12 minutes to 30 minutes. So, you’ve lost 40% of a lead’s value if you don’t call them within 30 minutes. That’s wild! So, obviously, a quick follow-up (or AI validation, or whatever) is incredibly important for keeping people warm. They’ve just filled out a form, they don’t want to wait three days to hear back from you, because the truth is, most likely you won’t be the only form they filled out, and they will not remember who the hell is calling when you call them three days later.
For advertisers looking to scale their lead generation on the open web, what’s the single most important piece of advice you can offer for funnel optimization?
With lead generation, you should be very fast at optimizing. You have a relatively low CPA compared to e-commerce or higher ticket items, so start slow and increase gradually as you get more confident in the data that you’re seeing. I’ve seen a lot of lead gen people come in with very big budgets and then realize, “Oh crap, we’re not on Google. We’re not on Meta. This is a different channel, we need to approach it differently.” We’ve been able to compete with Google and beat Meta almost consistently across our portfolio of lead gen projects — Realize offers unmatched quality if done right, but it is a very slow burn.
I’ve yet to see a lead gen project that’s ticked all the boxes right off the bat. There’s always something that has to be optimized, whether it’s lead quality, price, sources, content, whatever. There’s something that needs to be fixed along the way. With e-commerce, we’ve had campaigns that have launched overnight and done well, but that never happens with lead gen, ever. It’s always going to take longer because there’s so many pieces involved. So, just hold steady!
