Meta Ads
This Meta Ads case study shows how I helped Many Rivers, a national for-purpose organisation supporting Indigenous and disadvantaged Australians into business, generate 72% more leads while reducing their cost per lead by 27%. Through a Meta Ads audit, first-party audience targeting, campaign consolidation, and improved conversion tracking, we turned an underperforming account into a high-efficiency lead generation engine.
Many Rivers is a for-purpose organisation that provides Microenterprise Development (MED), Small Business, and Community Economic Development (CED) support to Indigenous and other Australians who want to access the economy but lack the financial or practical business support to do so. Their purpose is to walk alongside individuals and communities over the long term, offering accessible business development support, pro-bono legal advice, and microfinance business loans.
Since FY08, the MED program has supported over 14,505 clients in their business journeys. The CED program has provided support to over 52 Indigenous Communities since 2015, representing over 10,600 adult members. It’s meaningful work with real impact — and they needed their digital marketing to match.
Many Rivers had an internal marketing manager running their Meta Ads campaigns, but with her heading on maternity leave, the organisation needed a specialist who could step in to manage the account and — more broadly — bring specialist knowledge to help reduce their cost per lead and grow their pipeline.
The campaigns were generating leads, but not efficiently. After conducting my initial audit, I quickly identified several areas holding performance back. The account was running three separate campaigns that were competing against each other for the same audiences, fragmenting the budget and driving up costs. The extensive first-party data the organisation had built over years — thousands of client records and community contacts — wasn’t being leveraged for audience targeting.
Key pain points:
I started the engagement with a thorough audit of the Meta Ads account to understand what was working, what wasn’t, and where the biggest opportunities sat. The findings shaped a clear roadmap.
The first major change was consolidating three overlapping campaigns into a single, focused campaign structure. When multiple campaigns target similar audiences on Meta, they end up bidding against each other in the same auctions — driving up CPL for no reason. By consolidating, we eliminated this internal competition and gave Meta’s algorithm a larger, more unified dataset to optimise against. The budget was now focused rather than fragmented.
Next, I leveraged Many Rivers’ extensive first-party data to build custom audiences and high-quality lookalike audiences. This was a significant untapped opportunity — the organisation had years of client data that could be used to find more people like their existing clients. Combined with refined interest and demographic targeting, this gave us a much sharper audience strategy.
optimise towards higher-quality leads, not just volume.
Finally, I developed new ad creatives and angles to test against the existing assets. Fresh creative is one of the highest-impact levers in Meta Ads — and pairing new messaging with better-targeted audiences amplified the results.
Key actions taken:
Metric | Improvement |
Leads | +72% vs. previous period |
Cost per lead (CPL) | -27% vs. previous period |
Conversion rate | +130% vs. previous period |
Ad spend | +25% vs. previous period |
Timeline: Results achieved since takeover of the Meta Ads account.
The numbers tell a clear story: Many Rivers generated 72% more leads while spending only 25% more — meaning the efficiency gains were substantial. Cost per lead dropped by 27%, and the conversion rate more than doubled with a 130% increase. The combination of campaign consolidation, first-party audience targeting, and sharper conversion tracking meant every dollar worked harder. More of the right people were seeing the ads, and more of them were converting into genuine leads for the MED and CED programs.
