Case Study
407 Sign-Ups per Month
with an Average CPA of €3.65
The Client
- A Business School focused on selling courses dedicated to Digital Marketing.
- The company operates in three countries: Spain, Portugal, and Italy.
- The owner had been “burned” by a previous lead generation campaign, which had been commercially challenging.
Inizial Situation
- A recently revamped website that was still unstable, with no tracking systems in place.
- A very broad and unclear training offer.
- An e-learning platform with high-quality content but lacking proper campaign structure.
- The owner was skeptical due to past negative experiences with lead generation.
Objectives
- Acquire high-quality leads genuinely interested in the courses.
- Create a strategy to drive final conversions.
- Define and optimize the advertising budget.
Action Plan
1. Product, Competitor, and Audience Analysis
Before launching advertising campaigns, I analyzed which courses and topics were most followed by current students on the platform. This step, combined with other technical audits, gave me a clear picture of the situation. I then analyzed competitors to understand how they promote similar training programs. Finally, I studied the target audience on social networks to identify the most searched topics among potential business school students. I supported my research with free yet powerful tools such as Exploring Topics, Answer the Public, and Google Trends.
2. Paid Advertising Strategy & Value Proposition
With all the data collected, I defined the paid advertising strategy. Google Ads emerged as the primary lead acquisition channel due to high search volumes and relatively low keyword costs. The plan was to segment the most profitable training programs into dedicated campaigns, with ad groups targeting the main topics of each course. The value proposition was built based on the most viewed content and cross-referencing platform insights with my analysis.
I also reworked the ad copy and collaborated with the company to create new, compelling visuals.
3. Google Ads Strategy
I started with highly targeted search campaigns for the top-performing courses. I avoided Performance Max at first to maintain greater control over keyword selection for campaigns and ad groups. In total, I launched two campaigns segmented by specific course categories: A search campaign focused on the company’s main offers, and another focused on the company’s secondary offers. After the initial phase, I introduced a Performance Max campaign, strategically segmented by audience types for remarketing and to capture traffic from competitor websites.
4. Meta Ads Integration
To further boost remarketing efforts, I introduced Meta Ads with dedicated campaigns. I created mid- and bottom-funnel campaigns using Lookalike and Remarketing audiences. While initially focusing on the best-performing courses already promoted via Google Ads, I later expanded to lesser-viewed courses, testing new audiences that showed potential interest.
The Final Outcome
The primary result was a much clearer definition of the training offer to be promoted through paid advertising something that even the owner had struggled to identify.
Additionally, user engagement on the platform increased significantly:
• Average time spent on courses grew by 8% in 2 months, and by 14% in 5 months.
• The average monthly CPA of the campaigns dropped to €3.65.
• Monthly sign-ups rose to an average of 407 new users, leading to a 20% increase in company revenue.
The overall CPA achieved was €1.56.
The Outcome
Budget Invested
Average CPA
Leads
Average MER
Ready to become my next success story?
My approach is based solely and exclusively on data. Without it, it’s impossible to develop a winning strategy to scale advertising campaigns — or to identify audience niches that could be genuinely interested in your product.
