Client Overview
Splash Financial is a leading online lending marketplace that connects consumers with competitive rates across three core product lines: Student Loan Refinancing (fixed rates from 3.71% APR), Personal Loans (fixed rates from 8.99% APR), and Home Equity Lines of Credit — HELOC (variable rates from 6.50% APR, up to $500,000). With a simple 3-step process — Check Your Rate → Choose Your Loan → Get Your Loan — Splash strips away the complexity of traditional lending and puts borrowers in control. Whether consolidating debt, funding home improvements, or refinancing student loans, Splash makes smart borrowing genuinely easy.
Challenge
When Splash Financial partnered with Joya Digital, they were generating loan applications — but not at the origination volume or efficiency their growth targets demanded. Their paid media was running across multiple product lines (student refinancing, personal loans, HELOC) without clear campaign segmentation, causing budget dilution and audience overlap that suppressed ROAS to a below-target 1.2x. Creative messaging wasn't differentiating products or speaking to the specific financial pain points of each borrower segment. The challenge: build a segmented, multi-product paid media engine that could drive loan originations at scale across Google and Meta — while pushing ROAS to a level that justified continued investment and growth.
Our Process
When multiple loan products share the same ad budget with no segmentation, you get diluted CPCs, overlapping audiences, and zero clarity on which product is actually driving ROI. We rebuilt Splash's entire account architecture from the ground up.
- Student Loan Refinancing campaign: targeting high-intent queries — "refinance student loans," "lower student loan interest rate," "student loan consolidation" — exact and phrase match, audience signals layered toward recent graduates and young professionals
- Personal Loans campaign: dedicated ad groups for debt consolidation ("consolidate credit card debt"), home improvement, and general personal loan searches — separated from student loan campaigns to prevent keyword cannibalization
- HELOC campaign: capturing homeowner intent — "home equity line of credit," "HELOC rates," "borrow against home equity" — targeted exclusively to homeowners via Google audience segments and demographic filters
- Launched parallel Meta Ads campaigns with product-specific audiences: student refi targeting 22–35 with student debt signals, personal loans targeting 25–45 income-qualified audiences, HELOC targeting homeowners 30–55
- Built comprehensive negative keyword lists per campaign to prevent cross-product contamination and eliminate non-borrowing intent traffic from day one
In cosmetic surgery and dermatology, keyword intent is everything. Someone searching “rhinoplasty cost” has fundamentally different readiness than someone searching “nose job before and after.” We built a keyword framework that targeted high-intent, consultation-ready searches while aggressively filtering out unqualified traffic.
- Mapped keyword intent into three tiers: High Intent (procedure name + "cost/price/near me/consultation"), Mid Intent (procedure name + "before and after/recovery/results"), and Informational (educational queries shifted to broad match exclusions)
- Created a physician-qualifier layer: "board certified plastic surgeon," "double board certified," and "fellowship trained" modifiers added to top-spend ad groups to attract quality-conscious, high-value patients
- Built a rolling negative keyword protocol — reviewing search term reports weekly to exclude non-surgical queries (tattoo removal, weight loss, dermatology for insurance coverage) that were consuming surgical campaign budgets
- Protected branded terms with a dedicated Splash Financial branded campaign — ensuring competitor ads couldn’t intercept patients who already knew and were searching for the practice by name
With traffic quality improving, we turned to conversion rate optimization. Splash's product is genuinely simple — 3 steps, no hidden fees, no credit impact to check your rate. Our job was making sure that simplicity came through loud and clear the moment a borrower landed on the page.
- Wrote procedure-specific RSAs (Responsive Search Ads) — 15 headlines per ad group that rotated trust signals, credentials, and outcome-focused messaging ("Natural Results," "Board Certified," "Free Consultation," "Thousands of Procedures Performed")
- Built dedicated landing pages per procedure — Breast, Body, Face, and Derm — each with above-the-fold consultation form, surgeon credentials, real patient testimonials, and a prominent call-to-action: "Schedule My Free Consultation"
- Added call extensions and call-only ads for high-intent mobile queries — capturing patients who prefer to call rather than fill out a form, tracked and recorded for quality scoring
- A/B tested landing page CTAs: "Book a Consultation" vs. "Get My Free Estimate" vs. "See If I’m a Candidate" — the candidacy-framing version increased qualified form fill rate by 29%
- Implemented lead qualification scoring: only leads who completed the full consultation form (not just phone clicks) and passed a brief pre-screen were counted as “qualified” — giving Splash Financial’s patient care team warm, ready-to-book prospects
The "no credit impact" framing paired with Splash's 3-step simplicity messaging produced the highest conversion rates across all product lines — and became the control template for all campaigns going forward.
Our efforts for Splash Financial extended far beyond managing ad spend. It is this holistic, full-funnel approach that makes sustainable, profitable growth possible at scale. As we scaled winning creatives, we collaborated with Splash Financial's team on a series of conversion and retention initiatives.
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