Paid acquisition built from zero to 170 to 180 new clients a month for a currency exchange service in Thailand.

Starting point

ARBI Exchange runs a currency exchange service in Thailand. Before this engagement the company had no paid acquisition channel: no live campaigns, no lead tracking tied to cost per lead or cost per client, and no brand identity or website built to convert a visitor into a lead. Growth ran on foot traffic and word of mouth, a real channel in a market with steady tourist and expat demand, but one with a ceiling that a paid channel could move past.

A currency exchange service also carries the kind of trust question a paid ad cannot answer on its own: a visitor has to believe the rate is real and the company will still be there tomorrow before they hand over money. That made the brand and website work a precondition for paid spend to convert at all, not a separate project to run in parallel.

What we did

We started with the two assets a paid channel needed before it could run well: a brand identity and a website built around converting a visitor into a lead, not just describing the service. Our team designed and built both from the ground up. Once the site could carry a lead form and a working attribution setup, we built the paid acquisition function from zero: audience segmentation by intent, creative tested in short cycles, and campaign budgets tied to cost per lead and cost per client rather than raw click volume.

Each week we reviewed the same two numbers with the client: what a lead cost that week and what a new client cost that week, by channel and by creative. Underperforming combinations were cut fast, and budget moved toward what was already converting. This is the weekly loop behind our Growth Lab practice, run here for a market and a regulated financial service neither team had handled paid acquisition for before.

Alongside paid growth, the new brand identity and website gave the business a stronger footing for organic reach in Thailand, and awareness of ARBI Exchange grew through that channel as the paid program matured. Neither side of that growth ran on its own. The same lead-tracking setup that judged paid campaigns also showed when a spike in organic interest was worth matching with more paid budget behind it, so the two channels reinforced each other instead of competing for the same weekly review time.

What the team kept

ARBI Exchange kept the brand identity, the website and the lead-tracking setup that ties spend to cost per lead and cost per client. The weekly review rhythm, deciding which campaigns and creative to scale or cut based on those two numbers, stayed with the in-house team as the standard way the channel is managed going forward.

Figures reported by the client and by our own campaign dashboards for the period stated.