65% More Leads on Less Spend for a Regulated Financial Services Brand
Ireland’s largest tax refund provider relied almost entirely on Meta and was blocked by Google’s financial services rules. We got Search approved and properly measured, added TikTok as a second engine, and delivered 65% more leads on 5% less spend.
Project Overview
Our client is Ireland’s largest tax refund provider, helping PAYE workers claim back tax they’ve overpaid. It’s a financial services business in a regulated category. It doesn’t sell anything online, and every customer journey starts with a form that asks for sensitive personal and financial details, so the business runs on a steady, affordable flow of qualified leads into its CRM.
The challenge was scale. Demand in this category is intensely seasonal, building as the tax year closes and peaking when new claims open in January. Meta was carrying almost all of the budget and leads, which left the business exposed to rising auction costs on a single platform at exactly the moment it needed to grow. Google, the natural home for high-intent searches, is also a restricted category for tax services. Advertisers need financial services verification and a compliant landing experience before a single ad can serve.
Strike Digital was brought in as the client’s paid media partner to grow lead volume, keep cost per lead under control as budgets increased, and build measurement the client could trust on every channel. More than two years in, we manage a six-figure monthly budget across seven platforms, including Google, Bing, Meta, TikTok and Taboola, with daily contact over Slack and twice-weekly performance reporting.
Project Execution
Winning Search in a restricted category
Google treats tax services as a restricted financial services category, and plenty of financial brands stall before an ad ever serves. We worked within Google’s financial services policy from day one. The account completed financial services verification, and we built a dedicated, compliant landing experience for paid traffic on its own domain. Ads pointing to it were approved and have served since early 2024. That same landing experience now supports YouTube-led Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns, which carry most of the Google budget and put the brand in front of people before they’re actively searching.
Measurement we could stand behind
The biggest early call was lead form versus landing page. The account had leaned on Meta’s instant lead forms, and within weeks of taking over we moved lead capture fully onto the client’s own site. Instant forms tend to report a cheaper lead, but these couldn’t capture the details a claim needs, such as a PPS number, or pass them into the client’s CRM.
On Google, the lead form sits in an iframe on a third-party form platform that doesn’t integrate with Google Ads, and submissions weren’t reliably passing back. We specified a same-origin confirmation page that fires a dedicated lead event on every submission. It went live in September 2026, and Search bidding is once again optimising on real leads. We also check the ad platforms against GA4, so we know the growth is real and not just the platforms claiming more credit.
Meta: building reach and owning the category
We rebuilt Meta in July 2024 around broad, prospecting-first conversion campaigns optimised for completed registrations on the client’s own site. Targeting is left open and the creative does the work, with copy, visuals and sometimes the landing page tailored to each audience. The client wanted to own the category in Ireland, so Meta does brand-building work as well as lead generation, and higher frequency is a deliberate choice.
Campaigns are organised by the relief people can actually claim. Single-parent credits, mortgage interest relief, the rent tax credit and general “how to claim” messaging each get their own space, so we can see clearly which reliefs are pulling their weight. Seasonal pushes sit on top, timed around Christmas, the four-year claim deadline and the January launch of the new rebate year. Recent converters are excluded for 20 days, then brought back in with a different credit or a nudge to add family members to their claim.
Adding a second engine
With growth resting almost entirely on Meta, the account needed another route to market. Tax refunds aren’t an obvious TikTok category, but younger workers spend more time there than on Facebook or Instagram, so we launched it in July 2025. The best performers were simple, self-made videos explaining one specific tax relief, and that creative style now runs on Meta too, in one of the account’s largest campaigns.
Results
We compared the 12 months before we took over Meta (August 2023 to July 2024) with the most recent 12 months (August 2025 to July 2026), both covering a full tax-year cycle. Leads from paid media grew 65% while ad investment fell 5%, so blended cost per lead came down 42%. Matched month for month, cost per lead was lower in all 12 months. GA4’s own count of paid-channel form submissions grew 64% over the same period.
Budget moved to where it worked hardest. Meta spend fell 37% while its leads rose 12% and cost per lead fell 44%. TikTok bought reach at a CPM 65% lower than Meta’s and delivered 28% of all leads on 32% of spend in its first full year. Its cost per lead fell 31% between its first 90 days and the following peak season. On Google, Search cost per lead fell 77% in 2025 while lead volume grew 32%.
From November to February, the months that deliver nearly three-quarters of the year’s leads, lead volume grew 93% on the same months before we took over, at a 22% lower cost per lead. January 2026 was the biggest lead month on record, and growth has continued since, with 37% more leads in the last 12 months alone.
