Case study
MidwestOne Bank
MidWestOne Bank needed their new Home & Construction Loan product line to cut through in a crowded lending market across Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.
We needed to find the right messaging, target audiences, and ad creative strategy that would generate ample brand awareness, make people interested in their new lending offer, and generate additional website traffic and leads.
Clicks only matter if the right people are clicking. Across the Home & Construction and 1st Time Homebuyer campaigns, we sent a combined 2,959 visits directly to MidWestOne’s home loan pages — and did it more efficiently than the bank’s other lending campaigns running at the same time.
Project scope:
Paid social strategy, ad creative & headline testing, multi-market audience targeting, campaign optimization
Other details:
Meta Ads (Facebook & Instagram)
Kind words
From client
“My revenue doubled and I finally have systems that support growth.”
— Amanda, Strategist
The Before
The After
Delivered a 4.74% CTR — Over 7x Higher Than Comparable Campaigns — While Cutting Cost-Per-Click by Nearly 40%
The Home & Construction campaign didn’t just outperform on paper — it isolated exactly which creative, audience, and placement was doing the work, so every future dollar could follow the proof instead of a guess.
- Because every click landed on a product-specific page, each visitor arrived already in an active home-buying or building mindset — the exact audience MidWestOne’s loan officers needed at the top of the funnel
The Business Challenge
Our Results
- Four creative and headline variations had never been tested head-to-head to see which message actually motivated action
- Spending too much time on admin instead of strategy or growth.
- No verified conversion tracking meant results had to be proven through Meta-native engagement data
- Three distinct geographic markets (Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin) needed to be evaluated to find where ad spend worked hardest
- 4.74% CTR on the Home & Construction campaign — compared to 0.63% and 0.53% on the bank's concurrent HELOC campaigns, run at more than double the spend
- $0.83 cost-per-click, roughly 40% lower than the $1.34–$1.37 CPC on those same HELOC campaigns
- One creative variation — plain-language, no jargon — drove 1,713 of the campaign's 1,751 total clicks (98%) at a 5.69% CTR, outperforming the other three variations tested (0.44%–0.66% CTR)
- Minnesota outperformed both Iowa and Wisconsin (6.57% CTR vs. 4.24% and 4.13%), pointing to a market worth reallocating budget toward
- Audience Network placement hit a 13.3% CTR, more than 6x the Facebook Feed CTR (2.15%) within the same campaign — a placement most advertisers underspend on
- Total spend for the full campaign: $1,459.10 — less than half the budget of either HELOC push it outperformed