What we learned spending £1M on Meta for UK finance brokers in 2023
The year-end teardown - cost curves, creative winners, and what we'd do differently in 2024.
Capital Edge spent just over £1M of client budget on Meta for UK finance brokers - mostly bridging - through 2023. This is the honest year-end teardown: what worked, what didn't, what cost more than it should have, and what we would do differently going into 2024. Most of these lessons cost real money to learn.
The cost curve
Blended cost per booked call across the portfolio rose by 34% over the year - from roughly £180 in January to roughly £240 in December. About half of that was iOS-driven attribution erosion (a measurement effect), and about half was real channel inflation as more bridging brokers piled in.
The split matters because the measurement half was solvable with better conversion infrastructure, and we got most of it back through Q4 by moving accounts onto server-side Conversions API.
Creative winners
Founder-on-camera UGC outperformed everything else, consistently, all year. Static creative held its own in retargeting but lost decisively for cold acquisition. The single best-performing creative of the year was a 22-second piece from a Manchester-based broker explaining exactly when a developer should and shouldn't call them - it ran for nine months before fatiguing.
Polished agency-style brand video underperformed UGC by 40-60% across the portfolio. Production value did not predict performance. Specificity and authenticity did.
What cost more than it should have
Slow conversion infrastructure. We had three accounts running on browser-pixel-only attribution for most of the year because the broker's tech setup made server-side hard. Those accounts looked underperforming and probably got more budget cut from them than they deserved.
Late adoption of Advantage+. We were too slow to move cold prospecting onto Advantage+ structures, partly out of agency habit (we liked manual campaigns) and partly out of healthy scepticism. The accounts that moved earlier outperformed.
What we would do differently in 2024
Standardise server-side conversion infrastructure across every account in the first 30 days, not the first 90. Default to Advantage+ for cold prospecting and earn the manual structure by proving it beats the machine. Push creative cadence to a hard minimum of 3 new ads per fortnight per account rather than treating it as a soft target.
And spend more on landing pages. The accounts where we forced landing page redesigns in Q4 outperformed the rest of the portfolio by enough to make us regret not doing it in Q1.
The honest summary
Meta for UK bridging in 2023 was a working channel that got harder all year. We were good at it, the unit economics held, and we built a real business doing it. We also could see by December that the trend was unfriendly - the same craft was producing thinner margin every quarter, and that was a setup for a hard 2024.
Which, in fact, is exactly what happened. By Q2 2024 we were already piloting the AI outbound motion that would become our main business. The 2023 Meta work paid for that pivot.
A million pounds of paid social spend is a lot of tuition. Most of the lessons compounded into the playbooks we ran through 2024 and the conviction we needed to pivot the business in 2025. The channel was good to us right up to the point where it wasn't.
Capital Edge publishes one note a month on UK bridging finance, paid acquisition, and AI-led outbound. Written for brokers, by the team running the playbook.