Direct-acquisition validation for Consumer Legal Group, a consumer-debt law firm. Phased Google → Bing → Meta paid program across thirteen states with full-funnel tracking, a Webflow landing-page system, an SEO program, and a sales-process diagnostic. Hit a $910 CAC at 5.53 ROAS at the constrained operating point. New York identified as the anchor market.
| Engagement | Industry | Company size | Services |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4-month base + 2-month bridge | Legal services / debt resolution | Scaleup | Paid acquisition (Google, Bing, Meta), landing-page system, content/SEO, sales-process diagnostic, attribution and dashboarding |
CLG was spending $1-3M per month buying customers from third-party affiliate marketers, a model that produced volume but had three structural problems. CPA was flat year-over-year with no compression. Lead quality was dirty and carried compliance exposure inherited from the affiliate funnel. And the firm had no brand of its own. The validation question was specific: can a structured direct-acquisition program hit a $1,000-or-better CAC at meaningful scale, and what does that program need to look like operationally?
A phased validation program. Each phase ran 4-week sprints with daily monitoring, weekly reporting, and structured re-calibration between sprints.
Cross-cutting workstreams ran through every phase: compliance-driven creative iteration (Google's Debt-Services policy, state bar advertising rules, FDCPA-language constraints); a per-state regulatory matrix as a campaign-design input; a sales-process diagnostic mapping lead-to-close funnel and response-time SLAs; an SEO/content program with four blog posts through compliance.
Small budget, tight operating constraints, 4-week sample, kill/commit threshold. The discipline that produced the $910 CAC, office-hours-only, demographic restrictions, daily optimization, is what made the result reproducible.
State bar advertising rules, attorney-name disclosure requirements, jurisdictional limits, built as a week-one campaign-design input rather than a downstream review step. The matrix shaped channel selection, creative approval workflows, and per-state landing-page variants.
Cost-per-lead, lead-to-call rate, call-to-signed rate, and lead-quality misclassification rate as the unit of weekly analysis. Conversion happens off-platform in this category, so the funnel diagnostic is what surfaces the levers.
Medical Debt, Collection Attorney, Garnishment, Lien, each with its own landing page, copy, and conversion intent. Top-of-funnel volume and creative breadth that the single-generic-LP setup could not produce.
Replication-ready landing-page system with multivariate testing built in. Replaced an IT-bottlenecked HTML site that couldn't keep up with the variant velocity Phase 2 required.
Mapped the lead-to-close funnel, response-time SLAs, and lead-quality patterns through structured interviews with the enrollment team. The diagnostic surfaced the levers that drove the Phase 4 CAC compression.
Three patterns are portable: the constrained-operating-point sprint shape (small budget, tight operating constraints, 4-week sample, kill/commit threshold); the per-state regulatory matrix as a campaign-design input rather than a downstream review step; the multi-tier funnel diagnostic as the weekly unit of analysis when conversion happens off-platform. The work is the cleanest example in our archive of paid-acquisition validation against a hard CAC target in a regulated category.
The framework we used inside CLG scales to any regulated category, legal, financial, healthcare, insurance. Tell us what you are validating and we will tell you what the program should look like.
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