79% decrease in CPL for Education First Meta ads campaign
During major Meta ads privacy update.
EF Education First is an international education company that specialises in language training, educational travels, academic degree programmes, and cultural exchanges. Attracting students to learn languages abroad from all around the world.
The Objective
Purer Digital were tasked with overseeing Education First’s Meta ads (Facebook and Instagram ads) across 13 international markets for their High School Education Programme.
This involved paid social strategy, planning, creative development, implementation and optimisation.
Specifically over a period where Meta advertising implemented a major update to their privacy policies, that had a direct impact on targeting prospective users. This also led to an substantial increase in competitors bidding for advertising space and inflated Cost’s per lead as a consequence.
Naturally this had a direct impact on the volume of leads coming into sales team and quality of these leads as paid social audiences became saturated within the market. This had a knock on effect on key markets, to include French and Korean markets, where Education First still needed to attract students to their year abroad programmes in the US, UK and IE.
The Solution
After an initial audit of advertising formats within Meta ads manager - we identified key creative to adapt, refine and A/B test. Off the back of this we developed a high impact campaign across all 13 markets with 4 x key objectives:
To Drive down Cost per lead in 2 key markets - France and Korea, where lead volume had been impacted most negatively. Allowing for media spend to go further.
To significantly increase lead volume in 2 key markets - France and Korea, where lead volume had been impacted most negatively as a result.
To continue to maintain necessary lead volume across the remaining 11 markets
To continue to maintain a healthy Cost per lead across the remaining 11 markets
The focus of the new campaign was to:
Revitalise advertising messaging and creative to ensure we were nurturing prospective audiences at each stage of their customer journey.
Refining targeting by moving away from relying too heavily on Facebook’s detailed audience options which were changing for their specific demographic (under 16’s) negating this with existing customer profiling to begin build ing highly targeted audiences.
We moved towards a focus on Parent targeting on Facebook and Instagram
The Result
In the four month period, we managed to maintain cost per lead and lead volume across high priority markets. We also managed to significantly reduce cost per lead in the worst impacted markets, which naturally led to a positive surge in lead volume. Of particular note:
78% reduction in cost per lead in French market over 4 x month period
The French market saw cost per lead decrease from $10.29 / lead in October to $8.85 / lead in November, then down to $6.41 / lead in December to finally a $2.19 / lead in January.
79% reduction in cost per lead in Korean market over 4 x month period
The Korean market had seen Cost per lead surge to a whopping $80 / lead in it’s worst period. We managed to get this right back down to $44 / lead by mid December and $17 / lead by the end of January.