Lead Generation
Exotic Miles: from 600 cheap leads to twice the bookings
Rebuilding a high-volume, low-quality enquiry engine for Kashmir, Ladakh and Nepal packages around qualified enquiries instead of raw form fills.
Headline results
Oct 2024 – Mar 2025
168
Qualified enquiries
per month, up from 87
41%
Qualified lead rate
up from 14%
₹950
Cost per qualified lead
down from ₹1,500
51
Bookings per month
up from 22
Challenge
- Around 620 enquiries a month at a cost per lead of ₹210 — a number that looked excellent in reports and that the sales team had stopped trusting.
- Only 14% of enquiries were workable. The rest were price-checkers, students and people who did not remember filling in a form.
- Kashmir, Ladakh, Nepal and pilgrimage packages all ran from one Meta campaign and one Google campaign, so budget drifted to whichever destination produced the cheapest clicks.
- No qualification data reached Google or Meta, so both platforms kept optimising towards the cheapest possible form fill.
Strategy
- Change the primary success metric from cost per lead to cost per qualified lead, agreed in writing with the sales team before any campaign changed.
- Split campaigns by destination and intent so budget could follow margin, with Kashmir and Ladakh family packages as the priority.
- Qualify at the point of enquiry — travel month, group size, departure city and budget band — rather than on a phone call afterwards.
- Feed qualified status back to both ad platforms so delivery improved over time instead of degrading.
Implementation
01 Campaign restructure
Meta rebuilt into cold, warm and hot stages per destination; Google split into brand, destination and package campaigns. A shared negative keyword list of 1,100+ terms removed jobs, salary, free and competitor traffic.
02 Package landing pages
Six message-matched pages for the top-selling itineraries, each showing a price band per person, inclusions and exclusions, departure cities and a day-by-day itinerary above a five-field form with a WhatsApp alternative.
03 Qualifying lead forms
Meta instant forms switched to higher-intent mode with three screening questions. Website forms captured travel month, travellers and budget as dropdowns that map straight into the CRM.
04 Offline conversion feedback
Qualified and booked statuses uploaded to Google Ads and sent to Meta through the Conversions API twice a week, with lookalike audiences rebuilt from qualified leads only.
Result
- Qualified enquiries per month: 168 (from 87)
- Qualified lead rate: 41% (from 14%)
- Cost per qualified lead: ₹950 (from ₹1,500) on a monthly spend of ₹1.6 lakh
- Bookings per month: 51 (from 22)
- Total enquiries fell from 620 to 410 a month — by design
Key learning
The campaign with the cheapest leads — a broad Meta audience for Nepal — turned out to be the most expensive source of bookings in the account. Once qualified-lead data was visible, turning it off was the single biggest improvement, and nobody would have done it on cost per lead alone.
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