What did shakalakaa do for Manulife?

Restructured Google Search around high-intent wealth and retirement queries, ran Meta lead campaigns with qualifier fields, routed every lead to an adviser within five minutes, sent CRM milestones back to Meta and Google, and built 180+ ad assets through Manulife's internal legal review.

What were the results?

From January to August 2026: advisory leads from 280 to 1,344 a month, cost per qualified lead from SGD 142.00 to SGD 68.20, consultation show-up from 7.4% to 24.6%, and attributed first-year premium pipeline from SGD 1.1M to a peak of SGD 4.3M a month.

Why send CRM milestones back to the ad platforms?

A form fill is not a client. Telling Meta and Google which leads completed a consultation, passed underwriting and took a policy lets their bidding find more people like the ones who actually became clients.

Is the SGD 68.20 cost per lead shakalakaa's fee?

No. It is the client's media cost divided by qualified leads. shakalakaa does not publish its fees.

Financial services Singapore

Manulife: Financial Advisory Lead Generation in Singapore, from 280 to 1,344 Leads a Month

Meta and Google Ads lead acquisition for Manulife Financial Advisers in Singapore — wealth advisory, retirement planning and critical illness cover — wired into the adviser CRM so campaigns are judged on consultations and premium pipeline, not form fills.

The client

Manulife Financial Advisers is Manulife's financial advisory arm in Singapore, advising on wealth and legacy planning, retirement income and critical illness protection. Its best clients — high-net-worth individuals, accredited investors and business owners — research carefully, compare providers, and only convert after a consultation with an adviser.

The problem

At the start of 2026 the paid accounts ran on fragmented ad sets. They produced about 280 advisory leads a month at SGD 142.00 each, only 7.4% of leads went on to attend a consultation, and the pixel alone was missing a share of iOS conversions — so the bidding was learning from an incomplete record of who actually became a client.

What we did

Intent-tiered search. Generic finance queries separated from high-intent searches such as retirement annuities and whole-life coverage comparisons, with Target CPA bidding and portfolio bid caps replacing manual CPC, and more than 620 low-value queries excluded.
Qualified lead forms. Meta Advantage+ lead campaigns with three qualifier fields — income band, age bracket and current CPF coverage — and a confirmation step that filters out accidental submissions.
High-net-worth audiences and timing. Campaigns aimed at accredited investors and business owners looking at legacy planning, with budget surges for the SRS top-up tax season and mid-year bonus periods.
Search ads that earn the click. Responsive search ads tested on Singapore retirement and CPF themes, sitelinks with adviser credentials, retirement calculators and policy brochures, and impression share held above 90% on brand and core commercial terms.
Speed to adviser. Every lead routed by webhook to a dedicated Manulife adviser within five minutes, followed by automated SMS and email calendar confirmations.
Outcome tracking. Meta Conversions API and Google offline conversion import sending CRM milestones — completed consultation, underwriting approved, policy issued — back to the platforms for value-based bidding, with hashed first-party matching and deduplication across web and CRM data.
Creative through legal review. 180+ assets built from pre-cleared modular templates that pass Manulife's internal legal review, with the required disclosures on every asset, run as 9:16 reels and multi-card carousels on Instagram and Facebook.

What we delivered

180+

ad assets built and iterated in-house

Carousels, adviser video explainers and retirement-gap calculators.
620+

low-value search queries excluded

Job, login, claims and free-course searches — 22% of budget recovered.
5 min

from form to adviser

Webhook routing of every submitted lead to a dedicated adviser.
3

CRM milestones sent back to Google

Completed consultation, underwriting approved, policy issued.

Deliverable counts, supplied by shakalakaa. Not performance metrics.

Results (January–August 2026)

Metric	Before	After
Advisory leads a month	280	1,344 (4.8×)
Cost per qualified lead	SGD 142.00	SGD 68.20 (−52%)
Attributed first-year premium pipeline a month	SGD 1.1M	SGD 4.3M (3.9×, peak run-rate)
Advisory consultation show-up rate	7.4%	24.6%
Google search impression share, core wealth terms	—	94.2% (5.8% lost to rank and budget)
Absolute top impression share	—	91.5%
Search ad click-through rate	4.1%	8.9%
iOS conversion signals recovered by server-side tracking	—	+26%
Lead form conversion rate (Meta)	—	8.2%

Sources: Meta Ads Manager and Google Ads (leads, cost per lead, click-through rate), Google Ads Auction Insights (impression share), the Manulife adviser CRM and Salesforce Financial Services Cloud (premium pipeline and consultation attendance), Meta Events Manager and the Google enhanced conversions audit (signal recovery) and Meta Creative Hub (form conversion). Cost per lead is the client's media cost divided by qualified leads; it is not shakalakaa's fee, which we do not publish.

What this means for your financial advisory firm

The plain-language version. In eight months Manulife's paid channels went from about 280 to 1,344 advisory leads a month, each costing half as much. More of those leads now sit down with an adviser — 24.6% against 7.4% — and the first-year premium pipeline traced to digital ads rose from about SGD 1.1 million to a peak of SGD 4.3 million a month.

What this says about shakalakaa: for a regulated financial services firm in Singapore we run Google Ads and Meta Ads as one acquisition system, tied to the client's CRM, and judge it on consultations and pipeline. The same approach is set out on our Singapore performance marketing page.

Related at shakalakaa: See our Singapore performance marketing or the pricing guide. Working with a large brand? See how we work with large brands in Singapore.