Remaking the Lending Process

Upstart has a Consumer and B2B side of the business. DNW was brought in from a partner agency to help right-size their media efforts and drive more effective leads across their two main verticals: Auto Dealers and Lenders (Banks/Credit Unions).

The Ask

Upstart has been running evergreen campaigns across Google, Meta, and LinkedIn for years, driving leads, but noticed a dip in performance at the start of 2025. Campaigns were fatiguing quickly and they didn’t feel like they were getting proactive approaches to improve the performance.

DNW stepped in during the fall of 2025 with the following approach and results.

Audit

Its more important to start with an audit because nearly all brands have a long history, with a lot of good and bad elements running. Platforms are evolving and automating and it’s easy to run campaigns with the best of intentions only to see them go sideways over time.

We spotted a few things early on that made it clear, it wasn’t the platforms, it was the strategy and execution that were hurting performance.

The main problem was frequency. With targeted lists being used, Upstart needed to spend less. More spend didn’t mean more results, it just meant oversaturating their audiences. We even saw some frequencies on retargeting campaigns north of 80x over just a couple months. A secondary thing we noticed was the absence of non-lead generation campaigns. Nearly all dollars spent were for lead generation, and while this is the end goal, this one way street of communication can hurt long term and miss out on people who could be interested but need more information.

Solution

Across both Lenders and Dealers we right-sized the budgets across the 3 platforms, mixing in a multi-objective approach across paid social. Working with our creative partner, we built a suite of new assets to nurture our audience. In Awareness our ads where our focus on video views that we could retarget and in Traffic we focused on driving people to ungated content. We continued with Lead Gen campaign using case studies, but at a more reasonable spend to control frequencies.

The result of the campaign were dramatic.

Results

·      On Dealers we spent 36% less YoY, but increase our leads by 100%.

·      For Lenders increased our Leads by 23% while lowering our spend 50%

 Recap

Sometimes spending less is the best approach and more is not always better. DNW focused on right-sizing their spends across their key platforms to help drive meaningful growth while also investing beyond just Lead Gen ads. The combination was successful and has been adopted in 2026 based on the campaign success.