The Brief
A real estate developer and agency based in Dubai was launching a new residential project and needed a pipeline of qualified buyer leads — not just enquiries, but people with genuine purchasing intent and the budget to match. They had run Meta Ads in-house previously with inconsistent results and a cost per lead they could not scale. The brief was simple: more leads, lower cost per lead, higher quality.
Our Approach
We started with a market audit. The UAE real estate market on Meta Ads is competitive, which means the audience targeting had to be precise — broad audiences produce cheap clicks from people who will never buy. We identified three core audience layers: high-net-worth UAE residents interested in property investment, GCC nationals (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar) who regularly invest in UAE real estate, and expat professionals in the UAE in relevant income brackets. Each audience got a distinct creative and messaging approach. UAE residents responded to lifestyle messaging; GCC investors responded to ROI and yield data; expats responded to lifestyle plus ease of ownership for non-citizens.
Execution
We launched three separate campaign structures — one per audience layer — each with its own creative variants, lead form, and budget allocation. The lead form was deliberately short (name and phone only) above the fold, with property interest and budget range collected in a post-submit qualification step. This two-stage approach maximised form completion rate while giving us the qualification data we needed. In week two, we introduced a retargeting campaign targeting people who had visited the project page or watched more than 50% of the video ad without converting. By week four, the campaign had enough conversion data for Meta's algorithm to find lookalike audiences based on actual leads — these became the highest-performing cold audience segment by the end of the campaign.
Results
1,500 qualified leads over 90 days at a cost per lead significantly below the client's target. The retargeting layer alone contributed 23% of total leads at 40% lower CPL than cold traffic. The lookalike audiences built from real lead data outperformed all other cold audience segments by week six. The campaign was renewed for a second phase targeting a second project launch.