Case study · Clinical research · Meta ads

150 participants. 6 days. $875.

People Science needed qualified clinical-study participants — and the industry standard was 45 to 60 days and up to $15,000 per cohort. Here’s how we did it in six days, for the price of a decent office chair.

Client · People Science✳ Channel · Facebook & Instagram✳ Result · 80%+ under budget

Get results like these Read the story

Qualified participants

0 days

vs. the typical 45–60

Total ad spend

Below typical budget

01 · The challenge

Recruitment was bleeding time and money.

People Science runs clinical studies — and every study lives or dies on recruiting qualified participants, fast.

Their reality: cohorts took 45–60 days and up to $15,000 to fill. Worse, the data couldn’t tell a qualified lead from an unqualified one until a human screened them — so budget burned on both equally. And applicants had learned to game the screening quiz, retaking it 7 to 11 times until they “passed.”

What we walked into

45–60 days per cohort
Up to $15K per recruitment round
Qualified & unqualified leads looked identical
Men barely converted at all
Quiz gamed 7–11 retakes per applicant

02 · The strategy

Fix the data first. Then feed it winners.

No amount of ad budget fixes a funnel that can’t tell good leads from bad. So we rebuilt the measurement before touching the media.

Attribution rebuild

Locked down the URL structure and conversion tracking so the account could see qualification — not just clicks — in real time. Suddenly the algorithm knew what a good lead looked like.

14 segmented creatives

Men weren’t converting because the ads weren’t talking to them. We shipped 14 gender-segmented ad creatives with distinct hooks — and let the data pick the winners per audience.

Audience engineering

Built lookalike and custom audiences straight from the CRM’s qualified participants — so Meta went hunting for more of the people who actually pass screening, not just anyone who clicks.

Daily hands-on management

Six days is no time for “set and forget.” Budgets, bids, and creative rotation were tuned every day — losers cut within hours, winners scaled the moment they proved out.

03 · The execution

Six days, start to filled cohort.

Wire the tracking

URL structure & attribution rebuilt; qualification visible in-platform.

Launch segmented

14 creatives live against CRM-built audiences on Facebook & Instagram.

Cut the losers

Underperforming hooks killed fast; budget flows to what converts.

D4–5

Scale the winners

Male conversions climb 30% as segmented creative finds its audience.

Cohort filled

150 qualified participants — quiz retakes down from 7–11 to 1.5.

04 · The result

A 60-day grind became a 6-day sprint.

150 qualified participants in 6 days for $875.45 — over 80% below the typical budget.

The side effects mattered as much as the headline: male conversions came in 30% higher once the creative spoke to them, and cleaning up the screening flow cut quiz retakes from 7–11 per applicant to 1.5 — an operational fix People Science didn’t know they needed.

“Mad Marketing Labs not only achieved our recruitment goals in record time but also helped us uncover and address operational inefficiencies we didn’t even know we had.”
— People Science Representative

// people_science · final readout

Timeline

0 days

▼ vs 45–60

Ad spend

▼ vs $5K–15K

Under budget

▲ savings

Male conv.

▲ vs baseline

// quiz retakes: 7–11 per user → 1.5

The takeaway

Your funnel probably has the same leaks.

Broken attribution, creative that ignores half your audience, budget spent on leads that never qualify. The audit finds them — free, in plain English, yours to keep.

Get My Free Audit More work & results