Driving Lead Quality For Century Business Finance

Century Business Finance approached Circus PPC Agency with a clear, ambitious goal: to increase their market share and become the biggest business loan company in the UK. To achieve this, they understood the critical need to capture as many people looking for a business loan as possible – a strategy demanding both scale and precision.

However, they faced significant hurdles. Their previous agency’s performance had been subpar, leading to questionable lead quality. This directly undermined their growth aspirations, making it difficult to increase application volume and, more importantly, to convert those applications into profitable loans.

Our mission was clear: help increase application volume alongside lead quality, enabling the business to scale by capturing a higher share of leads compared to competitors and generate more revenue with better converting, higher quality leads.

We understood that simply generating more leads wouldn’t suffice, and these leads needed to drive tangible revenue and support Century Business Finance’s ambitious scaling objectives. Our strategy focused on:

1. 1. Deep Diving into Targeting & Intent: Moving beyond broad keywords to identify and target users with higher intent for a business loan, ensuring that every click had a greater potential to convert.
   2. Optimising for Funnel Efficiency: Implementing campaign adjustments to not just drive clicks, but to maximise the generation of ‘strong eligible leads’ – those most likely to convert into actual loans.
   3. Prioritising Loan Value: Shifting emphasis towards metrics that directly correlate with revenue, ensuring that increased spend translated into increased ‘GCLID loan value’.
   4. Continuous Performance Monitoring: Closely tracking lead quality indicators like ‘pass rate’ and ‘cost-per-lead’ to ensure that scaling efforts did not compromise profitability.

Deep dive: what are GCLIDs, and how can they be used to improve PPC account performance?

Our data-driven approach focused on creating pathways to achieve business outcomes, and helped transform challenges into extraordinary growth.

We successfully addressed the client’s key challenges, proving that aggressive market share growth can be achieved hand-in-hand with superior lead quality. YOY (Jun-24 vs June-25), we saw a remarkable 375% increase in GCLID loan value, which is a direct reflection of our ability to drive not just leads, but profitable, high-converting opportunities.

By strategically increasing spend and refining targeting, we delivered a pipeline of leads with a pass rate almost four times higher than the previous year. This directly fuelled the client’s ambition to scale and solidify their position as a dominant force in the UK business loan market.