Founded as the UK’s smallest building society, Ecology Building Society has grown to over £350 million in assets under management by 2025 while remaining committed to supporting sustainable homes and greener communities.
Ecology offers a distinctive range of ethical savings products alongside specialist mortgage lending, including renovation, conversion and self-build mortgages – many of them unique in the UK market.
The people at Creode have worked with Ecology since 2009, supporting their digital growth across paid media, organic search, website delivery, and performance strategy.
The Challenge
In 2017, Ecology approached us with a clear problem.
Paid search had strong potential for both savings and specialist mortgage acquisition – but previous activity had struggled with high cost per click, low conversion volumes, unsustainable cost per acquisition, and limited visibility into true performance.
They needed a channel that could scale efficiently without compromising their careful approach to growth.
What we did
We rebuilt the paid search programme from the ground up. This included:
- restructuring campaigns around genuine user intent
- improving conversion tracking across the mortgage and savings journeys
- aligning measurement with real commercial outcomes
- refining landing journeys from first click to completed application
- developing ad copy that qualified the right users without reducing reach
The result was a step-change in performance.
Paid search became a reliable acquisition channel that delivered increased volume while reducing cost per acquisition—particularly within Ecology’s specialist mortgage products, where cost per lead fell to approximately £30.
The impact
Over time, paid search evolved into a scalable performance engine supporting both savings growth and mortgage enquiries.
Key outcomes included:
- increased conversion volume
- reduced acquisition costs
- improved measurement accuracy
- stronger alignment between marketing activity and commercial outcomes
Beyond Paid Search
Our work extended well beyond media performance.
Creode also supported Ecology with:
- organic search strategy and traffic growth
- website redesign and rollout of the updated Ecology brand
- content planning and delivery
- analytics and performance consultancy
Together, this created a more coherent digital platform capable of supporting long-term sustainable growth.
Jon and the team have been instrumental in improving the effectiveness of our digital marketing. They reduced acquisition costs significantly while helping us scale activity sustainably, and their strategic support across search, content and analytics has been invaluable.
Chris Meadows, Ecology’s Head of Marketing