Ilouz Group: cutting cost per qualified lead by 94% with a BI-driven media system

Ilouz Group sells apartments in a market where a single sale is worth more than most companies’ annual ad budget, which makes lead quality the only metric that really matters. Volume was never the problem. Across the 21 weeks before we took over, paid media was generating a steady flow of leads at around $31 each, well within what the category considers healthy.

The problem was what happened after the form fill. Of 1,323 leads in that period, 25 became marketing qualified. That is a 1.89% conversion rate, or roughly one qualified prospect for every 53 people the sales team called. Cost per MQL sat at $1,615 and cost per SQL at $1,923. The campaign managers had no way to see this in flight. Facebook and Google both reported the campaigns as performing well, because both platforms count a lead as a lead. There was no link between what happened inside the ad accounts and what happened inside the CRM, so budget kept flowing to the campaigns that produced the cheapest leads rather than the best ones.

We started by closing the loop. Working with the client’s sales team, we helped structure their CRM and connected it by API to our BI dashboard, so every lead carried its source campaign, ad set and creative all the way through to qualification status. That single change turned lead quality from a monthly retrospective into a live optimization signal.

With that visibility, we inverted the usual optimization logic. Ads with a higher CPL but a lower cost per MQL were kept and scaled. Ads with a cheap CPL that produced nothing the sales team could work were cut, regardless of how good they looked in platform reporting. The budget shifted toward the campaigns that were actually feeding the pipeline, and because the same MQL data covered both platforms, the campaign manager could move spend between Google and Facebook on a common quality metric instead of two separate CPL numbers.

Two creative decisions did as much work as the media structure. First, we replaced the direct sales offer with a VR experience letting prospects see how an apartment would look under different renovation options. It lowered CPL, which we expected, but it also raised lead quality, which is unusual and told us the offer was attracting people genuinely picturing themselves in the property. Second, we localized campaigns for a large relocated community in their native language, a high income segment that sits squarely in the target audience and had been reached only in the market’s default language until then.

Cost per MQL fell from $1,615 to $95, a 94% reduction, and cost per SQL fell from $1,923 to $109. The shift showed up fast: by the fourth week cost per MQL had already dropped below $155, and it stayed there.

The more telling number is conversion. Lead to MQL went from 1.89% to 29.99%, moving the sales team from one qualified prospect in every 53 leads to nearly one in three. Among paid leads specifically, the MQL rate rose from 5.61% to 35.28%. Total MQLs went from 25 across 21 weeks to 272 across 12, at a comparable weekly budget. Blended CPL barely moved, $31 to $28, which is the point: we did not buy cheaper leads, we bought better ones.

None of this was available to a campaign manager working from platform data alone. Facebook and Google were both reporting healthy performance throughout the earlier period. It took connecting the CRM to a BI layer to see which creatives were producing buyers and which were producing noise, and once that was visible, the optimization work became straightforward. Ilouz Group now has a media system where every creative decision is measured against pipeline value rather than platform metrics, and a sales team receiving a fundamentally different quality of lead.