About the client
The client is a FinTech product partnered with a bank: a debit card with cashback and digital onboarding. Marketing’s job was not “reach for the slide deck” but completed applications on a CPA basis followed by scoring and approval. The market is saturated with card offers; users need a clear value prop, trust in the placement, and a simple path to the form.
GUGA MEDIA built a funnel so the top of the pipe was interested traffic — people already reading about money, investing, and everyday spending. Launch KPIs: lead volume, CPL, and application quality (share reaching approval). Every source used UTMs; the client ran end-to-end analytics on application status.
Strategy and tools
The core stack was Telegram Ads + finance channels. Telegram ads can target interests and in-app behaviour; native posts in mid-size and large finance channels add trust (“I follow this topic and accept recommendations in my feed”). We did not mix the banking offer with meme entertainment channels without a finance core — that immediately cuts junk applications.
Creatives focused on concrete benefits: cashback in familiar categories, no maintenance fee under condition X, fast virtual card issuance. Each block carried mandatory disclaimers and a link to product terms per regulator requirements. Landing pages and bot flows were pre-cleared with the bank’s legal team so A/B tests did not break the live funnel.
Scaling moved in waves: first a limited channel set, then expansion to lookalike subscriber profiles and new Ads combinations. For every wave we tracked not only CPL but approval rate — cheap leads that never approve are a loss for the bank.
Challenges and fixes
The main challenge was traffic quality as budget grew. Some channels showed low CPL but collapsed approval conversion because age and income cohorts did not match the product. We introduced a strict blacklist and minimum approval benchmarks: any source below the rolling-window threshold was switched off.
Legal approvals were the second bottleneck. To avoid freezing media plans we built a library of cleared wording, standard banners, and posts where only cashback numbers changed. A third issue was seasonality and auction competition in Telegram Ads: in peak weeks bids rose; we shifted budget to fixed-fee native placements where CPL stayed predictable.
Results in detail
The campaign delivered 12,000 leads at an average CPL of 380₽. On the quality slice of sources, approval conversion reached 34%, above the bank’s initial benchmark and enough to keep the CPA partnership economically sound.
Best performers were “finance channel + expert-toned native post” and tight Telegram Ads sets around cashback and savings interests. Weaker: generic “card in five minutes” creatives — cheap clicks but weak approval.
The final report broke down every channel, weekly CPL and approval dynamics, scaling recommendations, and a placement list for the next launch. The client used it in partner negotiations and internal benchmarking against search and affiliate networks.
Operations mattered: daily spend monitoring, fast creative swaps when audiences fatigued, and sync with the call centre during application spikes — without that, 12,000 leads would have broken service levels and approval quality.
We also tested geo targeting: in several regions approval was higher on the same creatives, letting us reallocate budget without raising federal CPL. The next cycle added “region + local finance digest” bundles for stronger offer relevance.
We documented how CTA copy affected completion of the ID step: neutral “apply for the card” outperformed aggressive “instant approval” promises that lifted clicks but increased drop-off at verification.