Italy Case Study: 25 Qualified Appointments on $20 a Day

One of our advisors is running a single ad creative to a single funnel at $20 a day, and it has quietly become one of the cleanest campaigns we’ve seen inside the program.

We’ll call her Samantha. She’s focused on Italy, she shot the creative herself while she was there, and she’s been collecting planning fees that more than cover her ad spend. Below is the full breakdown: the numbers, the funnel, the ad script, and the scaling decision she’s facing now.

The Setup: One Creative, One Funnel, $20 a Day

There’s nothing exotic here. Samantha niched into Italy, we wrote her a script, she filmed it on location, and it went to one funnel. That’s the whole machine.

• Ad spend: $20/day, roughly $600/month
• Runtime: about two and a half months
• Survey submissions: 126
• Qualified booked appointments: 25
• Cost per qualified appointment: under $40 (it started near $27 and settled around $37)
• Click-through rate: 10%
• Cost per landing page visit: under $1

The economics are what make this work. Samantha charges a planning fee on every client she closes, and those fees have already offset her monthly ad spend. Everything she earns in commission on the back end is profit.

Lead quality held up too. Plenty of submissions came in at $5K to $7K per person, $7K to $10K per person, and a few above $10K per person. Not every lead is a winner, you’ll still get the occasional “under $1,500 per person” request, but that’s exactly what the qualification survey is there to filter.

Why Simple Funnels Outperform

The most common objection we hear, almost always from people who have never run ads, is that our funnels are “too simple.” After millions of dollars in ad spend, and knowing plenty of operators spending tens of thousands per day, the answer hasn’t changed: simple funnels win.

Here’s the entire structure:

1. 1A short landing page with the offer and a clear explanation of how you fulfill it
2. 2A qualification survey
3. 3A booking calendar for the people who qualify
4. 4A thank you page with next steps
5. 5A value-based nurture sequence by email

No testimonials, no endless scroll, no stacked bonuses. The nurture emails are niche-specific, in Samantha’s case they’re Italy tips and travel advice, and they aren’t selling anything. Their only job is to position her as the subject matter expert so people actually show up to the call.

There are exceptions. Low-ticket ascension funnels and webinars need more on the page, usually the presentation, a call to action, and proof. But for a discovery-call offer like this one, extra page length is friction, not persuasion.

The Ad Script, Scene by Scene

The creative is a 10-scene script broken into three parts. Understanding those parts is what lets you turn one winning video into ten.

Scenes 1 and 2: The Hook

Call out a specific person, then agitate the problem they don’t know they have. Samantha opens with Italy visibly behind her: “If you’re planning your first trip to Italy and you already have 12 cities on your list, stop for a second.” Then the agitation: “You’re about to make the same mistake I see couples make all the time.”

Scenes 3 to 9: The Body

Name the pain, then establish authority. Everyone wants Rome, Florence, the Amalfi Coast, and Tuscany in 10 days, and then spends the whole trip in transit instead of actually being there. From there she earns the right to advise: “I’m Samantha, I plan trips for a living, and I’m here right now. The difference between a good Italy trip and an unforgettable one isn’t seeing more, it’s knowing what to cut, where to base yourself, and how to route it.”

Scene 10: The Call to Action

Keep it direct: “Tap the link, grab a time, and let’s build the Italy trip you’ll actually remember.”

Here’s the leverage. The body stays fixed, the hook is modular. Swap scenes 1 and 2 to call out a different avatar and you have a brand new creative without reshooting the whole thing:

• Planning your first trip to Italy
• Planning a 30th or 50th anniversary trip
• Worried about the heat and when to actually go
• Visiting a child studying abroad in Florence

The Grand Slam Offer and Risk Reversal

This is the part that makes advisors uncomfortable, and that discomfort is worth examining. Hesitating here usually means you don’t fully believe you can outplan someone who has never been to Italy. If that’s the case, the offer isn’t the problem.

In practice, almost nobody invokes it. You can give real feedback on a discovery call, ask for the planning fee, and close. Something would have to go genuinely wrong for a client to call it in, and if it does, honor it and move on.

Reading the Numbers

A 10% click-through rate means one in ten people who see the creative stop scrolling and engage with it. Paired with under $1 per landing page visit, that tells you the creative is doing its job before the funnel ever gets a chance.

Her frequency is sitting at 1.86, which is low. That means the creative isn’t fatiguing and the same people aren’t being hit over and over. Facebook is still finding fresh audience at this spend level.

The Scaling Decision: More Spend or More Creative?

Samantha is in an enviable, slightly awkward spot. Her creative is winning, so the instinct is to test new ones, but new creative can cannibalize a winner that’s already working. With a creative this strong, she could realistically run it for a year, even at $200 to $400 a day, before it dies.

There are two clean paths forward:

1. 1Increase spend on the winner. More budget pushes Meta to find new pockets of audience rather than re-serving the same group.
2. 2Split into a testing campaign and a winning campaign. Keep the proven creative in the winning campaign, run new ideas on a small budget in the testing campaign, and graduate anything that performs.

If availability becomes the constraint, the fix is capacity: bring in another advisor, have them cut their teeth on the disqualified appointments, then graduate them into qualified calls while you scale the creative.

Repurpose the Creative Everywhere

Samantha took the same video she was running as a paid ad and posted it organically on TikTok. It brought in more leads and more bookings, at no additional cost.

That’s the tell of a genuinely good creative. If it works on one platform, it will usually work on another, because the hook and the offer are doing the heavy lifting, not the algorithm. Organic takes longer to compound, but it costs nothing to post what you’ve already made.

Key Takeaways

• You don’t need a big budget: $20/day, one creative, and one funnel produced 25 qualified appointments.
• Niche down: “Italy” beat “Europe.” Specificity is what makes the hook land.
• Keep the funnel simple: landing page, qualification survey, calendar, thank you, nurture. That’s it.
• Structure the script: hook, body, CTA. Keep the body, swap the hook, and one creative becomes ten.
• Make the offer risk-free: a real risk reversal removes the reason to say no.
• Protect your calendar: a 72-hour booking window protects your show rate, and availability caps how far you can scale.
• Reuse what works: the winning ad creative is also your best organic content.

Want a Campaign Like This?

Inside The Travel Agents Academy, we build these campaigns with you: the funnel, the script, the offer, and the live account reviews where we read your real numbers and tell you exactly what to do next.