The idea driving this work was simple but ambitious: transform a highly constrained, pixel-less environment into a scalable growth engine that could educate patients and generate a high volume of leads for life-saving early cancer detection.
GRAIL’s mission relies on increasing awareness of multi-cancer early detection (MCED) screenings like their Galleri test among healthcare providers and patients. As healthcare becomes patient-driven, success requires a dual pathway: providers recommending Galleri, and patients asking about it. Meta offered an opportunity to reach and educate patients at scale, enabling lead generation that converts awareness into action through GRAIL’s telemedicine pathway.
Privacy and data collection restrictions prevented site-based conversion tracking, eliminating pixel data, retargeting, and conversion optimization. Rather than treating this as a limitation, Butler/Till redesigned the lead generation experience — creating a value-driven journey that improved performance and enabled a high volume of leads at lower costs while compliantly collecting valuable first-party data.
We pivoted to Meta’s in‑app lead forms, building a platform acquisition model that restored optimization signals. The campaign centered on three goals:
By rebuilding the feedback loop inside the platform, the campaign shifted from relying on a traffic campaign to generate leads to deploying a true in-app lead model— lowering acquisition costs, accelerating qualified lead growth, and deepening first‑party audience intelligence to advance GRAIL’s mission to detect cancer early, when most curable.
This campaign was designed to reach and engage patients—recognizing their growing role in initiating conversations about diagnostic care—while simultaneously driving higher lead volume at lower acquisition costs and building scalable first‑party data to fuel long‑term growth. In a new and emerging category like multi‑cancer early detection, user education was critical. The initial strategy focused on driving users to the website, where patients could access a more robust educational experience and, ideally, convert.
Pixel implementation was not a viable option, and we needed a solution that would keep users engaged on Meta while still capturing meaningful patient lead data. Early efforts that drove users directly to the website proved inefficient and expensive, largely due to privacy and legal constraints which prevented deploying a pixel or setting up conversion tracking. Without those signals, Meta lacked the feedback necessary to optimize form completions, making traffic campaigns the brand’s closest approximation of lead generation. While traffic campaigns could effectively drive clicks, there was no reliable way to determine whether those users ultimately converted into leads—a significant limitation given that traffic and lead objectives are not directly comparable on a 1:1 basis.
Our solution was a shift to Meta’s in-app lead generation products, enabling users to submit information without leaving the platform. By leveraging Meta’s native lead ads, we securely passed first-party lead data directly back into Meta—restoring the feedback loop needed for campaign learning, optimization, and audience development. This approach fundamentally changed how the campaign functioned. Targeting initially relied on broader, patient‑relevant interest‑based audiences to drive scale while introducing the category. As first‑party lead data began to populate through in‑app forms, we evolved the strategy—transitioning from prospecting via interests to activating higher‑quality audiences built from actual patient engagement and conversion behavior. This foundation enabled precise retargeting and scalable audience expansion, allowing us to activate lead‑based custom audiences, re‑engage high‑intent users, and build lookalike audiences that could be leveraged both within the campaign and across future initiatives.
The form followed Meta best practices: concise, intuitive, and able to auto‑populate information for ease of use. This ensured that lead capture remained efficient while still signaling patient intent. By continuously monitoring performance and quality signals, we optimized toward outcomes that balanced volume with relevance, delivering a streamlined experience that leveraged the platform’s strengths rather than relying on un-trackable site behavior.
What made this campaign unique was its ability to transform a technical constraint into a strategic advantage. By using platform-native tools, we rebuilt the brand’s data infrastructure, unlocked meaningful optimization, and created long-term value beyond a single campaign. For a brand that cannot run on-site conversion campaigns due to pixel restrictions, in-app lead generation offered a measurable, scalable, and highly efficient alternative—replacing an unreliable link-click approach with a self-contained lead acquisition engine.
By meeting patients where they already were and designing an acquisition strategy around education, privacy, and platform‑native data, the campaign demonstrated how patient‑first marketing can still drive measurable growth in a signal‑constrained environment.
The campaign exceeded its core objectives by dramatically increasing lead generation from paid social and restoring actionable conversion data within Meta’s ecosystem. By shifting to in‑app lead generation, we were able to pass conversion signals back to the platform, enabling smarter optimization and the creation of high‑value audience segments.
This shift transformed paid social into a scalable performance channel. The Meta in‑app lead campaign generated 96x more leads than the on‑site approach, delivering a $48.15 CPL—6,706% lower than the traffic campaign driving to an external form. Performance strengthened over time as Meta’s optimization engine learned from first‑party data. Nearly 49% of all in‑app leads came from an audience built using lead‑form signals, and this segment delivered leads at a 25% lower CPL than the in‑app average, proving the compounding value of high‑intent data.
The in‑app lead gen campaign intentionally prioritized high‑intent actions over broad reach, resulting in five times fewer impressions than the traffic campaign. Even with this more focused delivery, in‑app lead generation produced substantially more leads at a significantly lower cost—demonstrating the effectiveness of optimizing for intent and user experience rather than impression volume.
Beyond immediate gains, the campaign created durable value by building scalable custom and lookalike audiences that continue to power future initiatives. What began as a workaround to data constraints ultimately redefined social as a measurable, performance‑driven growth engine.