You are a farmer in the United States or Canada.
You harvest your grain, start preparing money bags where you plan to put the profits from selling quality grain at $ 7 per bushel.

But here’s the problem, the grain is hit with Ergot, Chaff, Vomitoxin, etc. disease.

Your money bags are replaced with a place in your pocket, because you won’t get more than $ 3 a bushel for infected grain.

A lot of effort, time, and money has been invested in the crop, and the profit from the sale is barely enough to cover some of the previous expenses.

What to do, how to cure the grain?
How to maximize profits?
Who to turn to?

Metra Grain Cleaners is a lifeline that can completely change such a plight.

The company sells grain cleaning equipment that helps to cure grain and sell it at a favorable price to maximize profits.

Let’s omit the standard stages, such as:

• analyzing previous advertising campaigns, web analytics;
• working with the brief;
• creation of CA segments, search for pains and solutions;
• competitor analysis
and other preparatory moments for the launch, which are done on new projects, with which we start working.

But, it is worth mentioning that another contractor was already working on the project and had been running it for the past few years.

Our team originally went in to work the first month for a test.

Early March 2023.

The bulk of leads during this period came from a Google Ads channel from another contractor at a cost of $ 200-$ 250+

Facebook Ads was used for retargeting campaigns. There were very few leads from this channel.

We had a task to drive traffic to a new website that had not been tested yet and get leads from it up to $ 100.


We decided to test two types of campaigns in Google Ads at the start:

1. Search — as a basis for targeted traffic.
2. Performance Max — as an additional direction to increase traffic.

From search campaigns came good leads, most of them were targeted, but the total number was extremely small, like 1 liter of water in the desert for 15 people.

Performance Max gave a lot of traffic, but the conversion rate was minimal and the quality of leads was very questionable.

Also in parallel to the test we ran ads for cold audience in Facebook Ads with two strategies:

1. Conversions from the website.
2. Messenger FB posts.

Previously, all analytics were configured in a standard way and passed only browser events.

In the new customization everything worked via API. This allowed us to get more accurate data.

But, we didn’t stop there.

The funnel in the project consisted of 4 steps:

1. Lead comes in, gets into CRM.
2. The OP (sales department) conducts qualification using
the BANT system.
Qualified leads get into the A and B category.
3. An invoice is issued for payment.
4. Sale, closing the deal.

We thought: why don’t we feed the entire funnel back into analytics to see the maximum data across the entire funnel.

Through the API, all stages of the funnel were passed from
the CRM to the analytics systems.

In GA4 it looks like this:

1. lead — lead from the website;
2. join_group — qualified leads A and B;
3. generate_lead — invoice issued. The amount of
the invoice is transferred;
4. purchase — sale. The amount of the transaction is transferred.

In August we gained momentum again, but because of the failed July, the project lost sales and profits.

We needed new points for rapid growth. This is where the Growth Hacking method came in handy.

The Grouse Hacking method is a constant search for and testing of new ideas for rapid growth.

In 2 months we tested 6 different hypotheses.

The most successful was the Ergot hypothesis for Canada.

We prepared special offerers and creatives that covered the pains and needs of farmers whose grain was affected by Ergot disease, and ran these creatives for several states in Canada.

This hypothesis produced good qualified leads.

In two months of testing different hypotheses, we received over 300 leads, which was an all-time record for the project.

While working with the project, we faced a situation when our advertising materials (offers, creatives) were censored, regulated by the project marketer.

Most of the criticism was related to the design of creatives.

The marketer made his arguments:

— creatives should be made beautifully, design-wise;
— clients will like it because it already worked in the project 2−3 years ago;
— it will support the image of the company.

Our arguments that we create materials for advertising, based on the analysis of previous results, the analysis of competitors and our own oversight, did not work (at first).

In the end, we were able to defend our position and work with the materials we created, without editing by the marketer.

And the results didn’t wait long. Our creatives yielded leads at a good price.

Image advertising ≠ Lead generation.

What worked a few years ago will not give the same results now.

In order to get results, you need to break through the banner blindness of your target audience.

There are 2 conclusions that can be drawn from this situation:

1. You don’t need to think for your clients.
You need to be based on working statistics, results, data obtained.

2. It makes no sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do — Steve Jobs.