The Challenge

A year of spend.
Nothing to show for it.

Karo Realty came to us in Q3 2023 with a straightforward problem: they had been running Meta ads in-house for 14 months, spending between KES 80,000–120,000 per month on paid acquisition, and their pipeline had not grown. Worse — their cost per lead had tripled from KES 1,400 in the early months to over KES 4,200, while their conversion rate from lead to viewing had dropped from 22% to under 8%. Their sales team had started to lose confidence in digital. The internal narrative was shifting toward "digital doesn't work for high-value real estate in Kenya." The MD had one more quarter of budget before the channel would be shut down entirely. They needed a diagnosis, not a rebrand. The problem wasn't that digital didn't work — it was that almost everything about how they were running it was wrong.

The Brief

"We're spending KES 100K a month and getting leads that don't convert. Either fix it or we're done with digital. We need to see meaningful results within 90 days."

Our Approach

Diagnose first.
Then rebuild.

Before touching a single campaign, we spent the first five days doing a full account audit. What we found confirmed our suspicion: the problem was structural, not budgetary.

01

Account Architecture Rebuild

The existing account had 23 active ad sets with overlapping audiences, cannibalising each other at auction. We collapsed it into 4 clean campaigns — cold, warm, retargeting, and lookalike — each with a clear objective and non-overlapping audience pools.

02

Audience Repositioning

The original targeting was too broad — 25–55, Nairobi, "interested in real estate." We rebuilt audiences around behavioural signals: people who had visited competitor websites, looked at property listings, and had income signals consistent with KES 8M+ property. Tighter audiences, higher intent.

03

Creative Overhaul

The existing ads were all "aspirational lifestyle" content — beautiful photos, no specific offer, no urgency. We introduced direct response creative: specific properties, specific prices, specific calls to action. The first test showed a 3× improvement in click-through rate within 10 days.

04

Landing Page Reconstruction

Traffic was landing on a generic "Contact Us" page. We worked with Karo's team to build property-specific landing pages with clear value propositions, social proof, and a single CTA. Conversion rate from click to enquiry improved from 3.1% to 11.4%.

05

Lead Qualification Layer

Not all leads are equal. We introduced a qualification question in the lead form — budget range and timeline — which reduced lead volume by 30% but increased the sales team's conversion rate from lead to viewing by 180%. Fewer leads, better leads.

Execution

Week by week.
No black box.

Week 1–2

Audit, Teardown & Strategy

Full account audit completed. 23 ad sets paused. New campaign architecture designed and signed off. Audience research conducted. Landing page brief written and handed to Karo's dev team.

Zero spend during this phase
Week 3

Creative Production & Launch

6 new ad creatives produced — 3 static, 2 carousel, 1 short-form video. New campaigns launched at reduced budget (KES 40K) while landing pages were finalised. Early signals monitored daily.

Reduced budget phase
Week 4–6

Landing Pages Live & Optimisation Sprint

Property-specific landing pages launched. CTR jumped from 1.3% to 4.1% within 7 days of new creative going live. Budget increased to KES 70K. Weekly creative refreshes to combat fatigue.

Scale phase begins
Week 7–12

Full Scale & Compounding Returns

Budget returned to KES 100K with ROAS now at 4.2×. Retargeting audiences growing as funnel fills up. Lookalike campaigns introduced using converted lead data. By week 12, ROAS at 4.7× — sustained.

Full budget — sustained ROI
Results & Metrics

The numbers,
unfiltered.

These are 90-day results compared against the prior 90-day period at equivalent spend. We don't cherry-pick timeframes or compare against the worst possible baseline.

312%
Increase in qualified leads (defined as enquiries with budget ≥ KES 8M and a viewing timeline within 60 days)
Prior 90 days: 48 qualified leads → 197 qualified leads
4.7×
Return on ad spend — measured as attributed sales revenue divided by total media spend
Prior period ROAS: 1.2× (essentially break-even)
62%
Reduction in cost per qualified lead
KES 4,200 → KES 1,590
11.4%
Landing page conversion rate
Up from 3.1% pre-engagement
180%
Lead-to-viewing conversion rate
Better leads = better sales outcomes
Client Testimonial
"

We'd almost written off digital entirely. The previous approach had been so disappointing that the MD was ready to go back to print and events. Team Digits took about a week to tell us everything that was wrong — and they were right about all of it. Three months later, digital is our strongest acquisition channel and our sales team actually looks forward to Monday morning pipeline reviews again.

D

David Mwangi

Marketing Manager, Karo Realty