2M+leads, 12,000 landing pages, and a 28.1% gross margin in 2018
How do you scale lead generation into the millions and stay profitable? You stop treating campaigns as craft projects and start treating them as a production line. Between 2013 and 2021, through my own practice Cob Editions, I built a performance marketing system that generated 2M+ B2B and B2C leads, on 2.19M euros of cumulative media spend across Meta, Google and LinkedIn, for media and consumer brands, Canal+ among them.
The system sustained 1,000+ sales per month, through cascading offers and continuous A/B testing. Creative production was industrialised: 12,000+ landing pages, 50,000 campaigns, 200K ads, and 12M keywords and placements bid on every day. The machine was portable: the same production line ran for other advertisers and other categories, on the same measurement discipline.
These are 2013-2021 numbers, dated as such, and each one is traceable to a file. What has not aged is the principle: profitable scale is an engineering problem. This page details the constraint, the production line, and the results.
No agency overhead, no rate card, just performance. Cob Editions was my own consulting practice, built to answer one question for large media and consumer brands: can lead generation run at industrial volume without the ROI collapsing? Canal+ needed subscribers and buyers at scale, every month, at a cost that made sense against lifetime value.
Performance at this volume is unforgiving. Every ad fatigues in days. Every audience saturates. A 10% drop in conversion at this volume is not a bad week; it is a contract at risk. The media money was real, 2.19M euros of it over the period, and the margin had to hold campaign after campaign, with clients measuring every euro. Manual operations could not survive at that scale. Neither could guesswork.
1 · Cascading offers.
One product, a sequence of offers, each catching the prospects the previous one missed. The funnel did the segmentation by behaviour, live.
2 · Industrialised creative.
12,000+ landing pages and 200K ads, generated from templated systems, so testing never waited on production. When an ad fatigued, ten variants were already queued.
3 · Continuous A/B testing as the operating mode.
Nothing ran on opinion. Headlines, offers, pages, audiences: everything tested, everything measured against ROI, weekly.
4 · Automated bidding at machine scale.
12M keywords and placements bid on every day across Meta, Google and LinkedIn. Fifty thousand campaigns ran through the same production line, on the same naming and measurement rules.
5 · The same engine, other scales.
The system was portable. The same production line moved to other advertisers and other categories without being rebuilt, because the measurement layer travelled with it.
All figures dated: cumulative series 2013 to 2019, production volumes 2013-2021.
- 2M+ B2B and B2C leads generated, 2,402,428 cumulative from 2013 to 2019
- 2.19M euros of cumulative media spend from 2013 to 2019, across Meta, Google and LinkedIn
- 28.1% gross margin in 2018
- 12,000+ landing pages, 50,000 campaigns, 200K ads, 12M keywords and placements bid daily
- 1,063 monthly sales excluding duplicates on average, over the September to November reference window
- 50,000 campaigns run through one production line, on one naming and measurement standard
I did not learn systems thinking from a book. I ran a machine that placed 12 million bids a day and had to be profitable every month. That discipline, measurement, automation, testing as a reflex, is what I now install inside companies. The scale changes; the engineering does not.
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