Turning Meta Into a Scalable Acquisition Channel for Royalty Team Gear

Client Overview

Royalty Team Gear makes fully custom apparel for high school and club athletic programs: uniforms, warmups, player packs, team stores. The buyer is not a consumer. It is a coach, an athletic director, a booster club organizer, or a team parent placing a bulk order for twenty to sixty athletes, usually once a season, usually on a deadline set by a schedule they do not control.

That buyer changes what a Meta account has to do. There is no impulse purchase to optimize toward and no cart to retarget. The unit of progress is a qualified inquiry that an appointment setter can call, and the account is only worth what those conversations are worth.

The brief was to build that inquiry flow on Meta and keep it cheap enough to be worth scaling.

The Challenge

The first version of the lead campaign was too expensive to scale

We launched team gear lead generation in December 2025. Across its first three months the original campaign spent $10,151 and returned 277 leads, a $36.64 cost per lead. February was the worst month of the three at $43.95. Nothing about that is a scandal for a cold start in a new category, but it is not a number you put more money behind. At $44 a lead, every budget increase makes the sales problem worse rather than better.

The geography was wrong, and it was wrong expensively

The account had been built around Minnesota, where the business is based. Local proximity is a reasonable first assumption for team apparel and it turned out to be the single most expensive assumption in the account. The addressable market of athletic programs inside one state is small, the same coaches were being reached repeatedly, and the cost per lead reflected it.

Lead volume alone was not the goal

Leads here go to a human who calls them. A cheaper lead that nobody can close is worse than no lead, so cost per lead could not be pushed down by loosening the offer or the targeting until the form filled up with people who were never going to order forty hoodies.

What We Did

1. Tested the geography before committing to it. In February 2026 we opened a separate campaign targeting states outside Minnesota on a deliberately small budget, $258, while the main campaign kept running. It returned 60 leads at $4.30 each in the same month the incumbent campaign was paying $43.95. That was the answer, and it cost less than a day of the existing budget to get it.

2. Moved the account behind the result instead of hedging. In March the state expansion campaign took $4,862 and produced 498 leads at $9.76. By April the original Minnesota-led campaign was off entirely and the expansion campaign was carrying the account. We did not run both for a quarter to be diplomatic about it.

3. Built creative around the order, not the product. The winning concepts sell the thing a coach actually has to solve: a player pack that covers the whole roster, a turnaround time they can plan a season around, a first order that comes with something free. The two highest-spending ads on the account are a player pack static and a video built on a game framing, and both hold above a 1.99% click-through rate against a 1.01% account average.

4. Kept a second funnel honest rather than hiding it. A quiz funnel runs alongside the main campaign and converts at $26.39 per lead against the main campaign’s $9.87. It is inside the blended number rather than excluded from it, because a blended figure that quietly drops its expensive half is not a blended figure.

5. Held the line for seven months instead of one. Every month from March to September 2026 the main campaign came in between $7.71 and $11.88 per lead while monthly spend sat between $4,100 and $6,200. The account has not had a month that needed explaining since the rebuild.

The Results

All figures cover 1 January to 21 September 2026, read directly out of the Meta ad account on 21 September 2026. Leads are Meta-attributed website lead events.

Across the account, $67,852 in spend produced 4,992 B2B leads:

• 4,992 website leads at a $13.59 blended cost per lead

• $11.52 blended CPM across 5.89M impressions

• Just over 1 million Meta accounts reached

• 59,692 link clicks at a $1.14 cost per link click

• The main acquisition campaign alone: 3,966 leads at $9.87, on $39,147 of spend

The before and after is the part that matters. The original campaign’s first three months ran at $36.64 per lead. From March onward the rebuilt campaign averaged $9.96, a 73% reduction, and it did it while monthly spend roughly doubled from the January level.

Month by month on the main campaign: $9.76 in March, $7.71 in April, $10.69 in May, $10.63 in June, $9.85 in July, $10.38 in August, $11.88 through 21 September. Seven consecutive months inside a four dollar band, on a channel that was returning $44 leads in February.

One note on the blended figure, because the honest version is more useful. The $13.59 contains two funnels running at different costs. Direct lead capture runs at $9.87 and carries 79% of the leads. The quiz funnel runs at $26.39 on 30% of the budget for 15% of the leads. We report the blend rather than the better half of it.

Top-Performing Creative

Ranked by spend. Six ads produced 62% of the account’s leads on 44% of its spend.

• Player Pack 01 - C: 613 leads · $10.35 per lead · $6,342 spend · 1.99% CTR

• Let’s Play A Game, Video 01: 584 leads · $10.44 per lead · $6,095 spend · 2.23% CTR

• Player Pack 02 - A: 553 leads · $8.93 per lead · $4,937 spend · 2.09% CTR

• Player Pack 02 - E: 515 leads · $8.93 per lead · $4,597 spend · 2.53% CTR

• Team Gear UGC 02: 499 leads · $8.65 per lead · $4,314 spend · 1.66% CTR

• April Static 07: 356 leads · $10.95 per lead · $3,900 spend · 1.10% CTR

The player pack concept is the account’s engine. It works because it matches how the purchase is actually made: a coach is not buying a hoodie, they are outfitting a roster in one decision, and an ad that prices and pictures the whole pack removes the step where they have to imagine it themselves. The game-framing video sits a hair behind it on cost per lead at more than double the click-through rate, which is why both stay funded instead of one replacing the other.

Key Outcomes

• Generated 4,992 B2B leads on Meta in under nine months at a $13.59 blended cost per lead

• Cut cost per lead on the main campaign 73%, from $36.64 across the first three months to $9.96 from March onward

• Held the main campaign between $7.71 and $11.88 per lead for seven consecutive months while monthly spend roughly doubled

• Found the geography problem with a $258 test rather than a quarter of split budget, and moved the whole account behind the answer within six weeks

• Bought 5.89M impressions at an $11.52 CPM and just over a million people reached

• Built a creative system where six ads carry 62% of leads on 44% of spend, so the next test has a clear bar to beat

The Bottom Line

Royalty did not need more leads. They needed leads at a price that made the next dollar worth spending, which is a different problem and the one that decides whether a channel is a channel or an experiment. The account was paying $44 a lead in February because it was built around the state the company sits in. We tested that assumption for $258, got an answer worth acting on, and rebuilt the account around it. Since March the main campaign has produced 3,906 leads at $9.96, every month inside the same narrow band.