AI platform for brands: 712 sign-ups for a B2B conference, webinar at 134% of plan
Updated:
The task
Phygital+ is a generative AI content platform for brands: videos and visuals for retail, fintech and streaming. Its clients are marketing teams at large companies like X5, Sber and Kinopoisk. The product sells slowly and through demonstration: until a marketer sees a “wow video” for their own task, there is no conversation.
So the team runs free events — the AI Summer Conf on July 9, 2026, industry webinars, lead magnets with pipelines. They needed a channel that would bring not just anyone, but people from target corporations. Internally these sign-ups were called Tier-3 and tracked as a separate conversion.
Russian ad platforms delivered expensive sign-ups, while peers reported about 40 RUB in Meta. That was the number they came with: a budget of 67,500 RUB, a plan of 1,687 sign-ups at 40 RUB each. We said upfront the benchmark was too low: a corporate B2B audience in Meta costs more, and a price can only be fixed honestly after the first week of delivery. That is what we agreed on.
What we did
Reworked the creatives before launch. The client sent eight screen recordings of their AI generator: beautiful, but you cannot tell what is being advertised. We proposed overlaying the conference name and date, adding direct static ads with the topic and audience, and recording UGC invitations from speakers. We made the statics ourselves; the overlay and new banners with our headlines came from the client’s designers. The statics ended up carrying the price.
Fixed analytics before turning on traffic. On the landing pages pixel events fired on page load, a foreign Pixel ID was installed, the form returned a server error and lost sign-ups, and some buttons led to a personal account on another domain. We found all of this before launch, wrote a spec, and brought it down to a single CompleteRegistration event on successful form submission. Without that the campaign would have learned on garbage.
Five verticals — five landing pages and five creative sets. FMCG retail, fashion, fintech, streaming, branding agencies. On day three we split creatives by vertical and saw who converts: fintech gave a 1.44% CTR and a 30% landing page conversion, fashion was switched off. Budget went to the strong combinations.
Kept the share of target companies, not just the price. As the budget grew from $70 to $550 a day, the Tier-3 share dropped from 11% to 4%: Meta was drifting into expensive geos. We moved target countries into separate ad sets and the share came back to 9%. When frequency reached 4 and the audience burned out, we added broad geo targeting and a “last call” retargeting for people who visited the site but did not sign up.
After the conference — lead magnets and webinars on the same combinations. We built a lookalike from 228 target sign-ups from the conference and the client’s database, launched three lead magnets (case studies, pipelines, the conference recording) and a webinar with M.Video. For lead magnets we passed a qualified lead through CAPI: the client marks a contact as a target in a sheet, the event goes to Meta, and the campaign learns on the right people.
Results
AI Summer Conf, June 18 — July 9, 2026
- Ad spend: $4,488
- Impressions: 993,018, clicks: 6,183
- Landing page visits: 4,412, sign-up conversion: 16%
- Sign-ups: 712 at $6.30
- Of them, contacts from target corporations: 228
- Best days: June 28–29, 51 sign-ups at $1.83
Webinar with M.Video, August 15–24, 2026
- Ad spend: $1,631
- Sign-ups: 365 at $4.47 against a plan of 273 — plan exceeded by 34%
- Landing page conversion: 16%, share of target companies about 12%
Lead magnets, July 28 — September 9, 2026
- Ad spend: $2,686
- Leads: 471 at $5.70
- Cheapest — the conference recording: 103 leads at $4.11; most target contacts — the Alfa-Bank case study
Total for the period: $9,724 spent, 1,583 sign-ups and leads. After the test conference the client kept Meta as a permanent channel for every event.
Insights
A sign-up for a free B2B conference in Meta costs $2–6, not 40 RUB, depending on how narrow the audience is. The cheap days came at a $70–90 budget: the algorithm found the hottest people. Every budget doubling raised the price and diluted the share of target companies, because Meta takes volume from expensive geos. You have to manage two numbers at once: the price and the Tier-3 share, and the second matters more.
Three of the four campaign problems were not in the ads but on the site: events on page load, a broken form, and on the Sreda webinar a geo-redirect script that sent visitors from the CIS to a page without the pixel, so the campaign learned blind. A tracking audit before launch saves more than any bid optimization.
Product screen recordings without a caption do not work as event ads. A static with the talk topic and the speaker’s company collects target people better than a “wow video”, because it filters the audience before the click.
