LinkedIn Ads success story · Corporate card and spend management company

How a fintech company cut its LinkedIn cost per lead by 56% by teaching its ads what a real deal looks like.

Name: Overtop Media Digital Marketing
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Alaan sells corporate cards and spend management to finance leaders, a careful audience that wants proof before it buys. Once its LinkedIn campaigns could see which leads became opportunities and signed deals, the ads found better buyers and the budget case wrote itself.

Business: Alaan
Market: Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Goal: Prove what LinkedIn ads earn, then scale them

Finance leader presenting spending data from a laptop to a screen in a meeting room

The results.

Compared with its cost per lead before it started sending CRM conversions (opportunities and signed deals) back to LinkedIn.

56%lower cost per lead
2XLinkedIn budget, backed by the data

Before-and-after comparison of cost per lead. LinkedIn does not state a time window. Self-reported by the advertiser and published by LinkedIn; results for other businesses will differ.

The challenge.

Alaan is a fast-growing corporate card and spend management platform for businesses in the Middle East. Its buyers are chief financial officers and finance directors, people who are paid to be skeptical and who want strong proof before they trust a new provider with company money.

LinkedIn was already producing leads, but the team could not see clearly what happened to them after the form. Which campaigns turned into opportunities? Which turned into signed deals? Without that link, every request for more budget rested on lead counts, and lead counts alone do not convince a finance team.

LinkedIn example of a Campaign Manager report listing campaigns with spend and website conversions

What they did.

Conversion tracking with CRM data · Predictive audiences · Thought Leader Ads · Lead generation

Sent real outcomes back to LinkedIn: Alaan connected its CRM to LinkedIn's conversion tracking, so opportunities and signed deals counted as results alongside online form fills. The campaigns could now learn from revenue events, not just clicks.
Reached the whole buying committee: With better data in place, the team built predictive audiences around chief financial officers, finance directors and the people who influence them, instead of chasing a single job title.
Mixed trust-building with lead capture: Thought Leader Ads from people inside the company and brand awareness campaigns ran next to lead generation, so prospects met the brand before they were asked for their details.
Refined from full-funnel data: Every change to targeting, creative and budget was judged on what moved opportunities and deals, then rolled into the next round of campaigns.

Why it worked.

Our read on the decisions behind the numbers, and what any business can take from them.

The ads learned what a customer looks like: When LinkedIn only sees form fills, it finds more people who fill out forms. When it sees signed deals, it finds more people who sign. That shift is usually where the biggest drop in cost per lead comes from.
Finance buyers need several touches: A CFO rarely books a demo from one ad. Thought leadership and brand campaigns built familiarity first, so the lead form arrived as a natural next step rather than a cold request.
Proof unlocked budget: Showing leadership a line from LinkedIn spend to pipeline turned the channel from an expense into an investment, which is how the budget doubled.
Committees, not individuals: Business purchases involve several people. Reaching the influencers around the decision maker raised the odds that the whole group already knew the name when the deal came up.

How we would run this play for your business.

You do not need a national budget to use the same ideas. This is how Overtop Media Digital Marketing puts them to work in our linkedin ads management.

Connect your CRM before you scale: We send qualified leads, opportunities and closed deals back to LinkedIn, so the system optimizes for revenue, not form fills.
Map the buying committee: We list every role that signs, approves or influences the purchase and build audiences for each, by job function, seniority and company.
Earn trust before the ask: Posts from your own leaders and customers, promoted to the right accounts, warm the market so lead forms convert better.
Report in pipeline: You see cost per opportunity and revenue influenced next to cost per lead, measured with the same server-side tracking we use across every channel.