FOUNDER CASE STUDY · PIT PRO
I learned customer acquisition from the advertiser’s side of the table first.
24,000+
Pit Pro sales
£50+
CAC during a brief Google PPC test
~£12
Meta CAC achieved for a sustained period
Pit Pro is Liam’s own business, not a client of The Enquiry Works. Meta was its main sustained paid acquisition channel; the 24,000+ sales figure is not being attributed entirely to Meta advertising.
I started using Meta Ads within the first week of launching Pit Pro. There wasn’t a sophisticated acquisition strategy behind it at that point. I needed customers, Meta showed enough promise to keep pursuing, and I gradually learned more about what worked. My first adverts were pretty basic. Over time, I taught myself to use Canva, started producing my own creative and collateral, and began testing different approaches rather than simply deciding which advert I personally liked best. Advertising became much more useful when I stopped treating creative as something that should simply “look good” and started treating it as something that could be tested and improved.
During Pit Pro’s first year, I hired an external agency to set up and manage Google PPC. It lasted a few months. Customer acquisition cost was more than £50 per customer, and for Pit Pro the economics simply didn’t make sense. So I stopped it. I handled SEO and organic search myself, while Meta increasingly became the paid channel I concentrated on. That experience taught me something quite early:
Paying an agency does not automatically mean the numbers will work.
An advertising channel can generate traffic and still be the wrong commercial decision for the business paying for it. It also pushed me to understand customer acquisition properly myself instead of simply outsourcing it and hoping somebody else would make it work.
The real change came the following year when Pit Pro moved onto new backend software. Combined with Meta Pixel tracking, I could finally get a much clearer view of customer acquisition. And once I could measure customer acquisition cost properly, the way I approached advertising changed.
Instead of asking
“Are the ads working?”
I could ask
“What is it costing me to acquire a customer?”
That gave me something concrete to manage. I could compare periods, change the creative, adjust the targeting, test different approaches and see whether those changes were actually improving the economics. Advertising stopped being guesswork and started becoming something I could systematically work on.
There wasn’t one clever trick that suddenly fixed everything. The improvement came from repeatedly changing and testing different parts of the system. I improved the creative and collateral. I changed the way I targeted potential customers. Over time, I built a more deliberate audience structure involving:
Cold audiences
To reach new potential customers.
Warm audiences
For people who had already interacted with the business.
Lookalike audiences
Based on people already showing the right characteristics.
Meta’s targeting systems have changed considerably since then, so the point isn’t that the same historical setup should simply be copied today. The important lesson was broader. I had moved from putting adverts on Facebook to thinking about the whole thing as a customer-acquisition system.
Through measurement, testing and optimisation, Pit Pro’s Meta customer acquisition cost eventually came down to approximately £12 per customer. It then stayed around that level for a sustained period. But the number only mattered because I knew what a Pit Pro customer was worth. For another business, £12 could be terrible. For another, £120 could be excellent.
Once you understand both sides of that equation, CAC becomes commercially useful. Without customer value, a cheap acquisition number can be almost meaningless.
Pit Pro has now generated more than 24,000 sales, with Meta having become its main and sustained paid customer-acquisition channel. For me, the important part isn’t simply the headline number. It’s everything that happened behind it. I’ve experienced advertising when it worked. I’ve experienced it when it didn’t. I’ve paid more than £50 to acquire customers through a channel that didn’t make commercial sense. I’ve seen Meta CAC come down to around £12 after improving measurement, creative and targeting. I’ve watched campaigns perform strongly. And I’ve seen what happens when previously successful advertising starts to lose momentum. That experience is why I tend to look at paid advertising commercially before I look at it as a marketing exercise.
Advertising isn’t something you set once and assume will continue working forever. Audiences change. Creative gets tired. Competition changes. Performance moves. What worked yesterday isn’t automatically what will work tomorrow. So you measure it. You watch what is happening. You test. And when the numbers start telling you something has changed, you do something about it.
I didn’t start Pit Pro because I thought I would eventually run a Meta Ads business. The Enquiry Works came much later. But running Pit Pro meant I learned paid acquisition from the advertiser’s side of the table first. I know what it’s like to approve an advertising bill and wonder whether that money is actually coming back. I know why a cheap lead isn’t particularly exciting if those leads don’t turn into commercially valuable customers. I know why CAC needs to be understood alongside customer value. And I know why simply showing a business clicks, impressions or attractive-looking adverts isn’t enough.
What is a new customer actually worth? • What can you afford to spend acquiring one? • Can the business convert the enquiries advertising produces? • Are the numbers improving or deteriorating? • If performance changes, what are we going to do about it?
The Enquiry Works may be new. But I’m not learning those lessons for the first time using somebody else’s advertising budget. I spent years learning them using my own.
I’ve put together a free guide covering 7 Expensive Meta Ads Mistakes to Avoid Before Hiring an Agency. It’s designed to help business owners understand some of the commercial questions worth answering before putting more money into paid advertising.
GET THE FREE GUIDE