West London College

Helping West London College attract students in key geographic locations (WLC)

We ran a campaign using Google Ads, Facebook and Instagram to cost-effectively increase student enrolments

Client Information

West London College is a further and higher education college that provides training and development for over 10,000 students. The consists of colleges based in Park Royal, Ealing, Hammersmith and Southall. The College offers a wide range of vocational qualifications, GCSE English and Maths, Access and Higher Education courses, English as a Foreign Language, and distance learning qualifications.

Goals and Objectives

WLC wanted to increase the number of applications for their courses and to attract students aged 16-18 and 19+ living in London and South East UK.

What we did

To achieve successful and manageable results, we set up a Google Ads campaign with a combination of search only and remarketing. Based on analysis of keyword search trends, we developed a feasible budget schedule and a matching campaign layout. Our focus was on getting a list of well-converting keywords for each campaign while filtering low-intent queries.

We have created a series of organic posts in FB and IG to build trust, transparency, and brand engagement and loyalty

We successfully completed the whole media plan for 3 months with 16 posts for August, 14 posts for July, and 11 organic posts for June. All designs were custom created according to WLC’s brand guidelines and the texts were written to support WLC’s unique style. Posts were scheduled according to the most active times of our audience and we used hashtags to reach new audiences.

Our organic content was designed to convert an existing Facebook audience and our sales funnel looked like this:

  • Awareness: A person likes or follows WLC’s Facebook page.
  • Interest: They see and click on an organic Facebook post for a course, which is provided.
  • Evaluation: They arrive at a course ‘landing page, which includes an Enquire and Application form
  • Decision and action: They fill in the form and apply for the specific course

Specifically targeting demographics through social media ads to increase brand awareness and engagement

By implementing highly-optimised campaigns through the advanced Facebook and Instagram Business Manager, we ensured all ads were fully tested for excellent delivery, optimised and shared only in the placements where it is most likely to generate results feeding into college’s objectives.

Specifically targeted Facebook Ad campaigns were utilised to generate awareness and reach the relevant audience. We used standard Facebook pixel to re-target and optimise ads for conversion

Results

For the whole campaign period 5th of June – 5th of September 2020, we’ve achieved the following results in Google Ads:

  • We’ve achieved a great CTR of 14.25% and the Avg. CPC for the whole period was reduced to £1.31. Managing and optimising an account is an ongoing process. We were constantly monitoring the account for changes and looking for new ways to increase click and conversion rates while also simultaneously decreasing their price.
  • We achieved 1,045  conversions
  • Completed applications for the whole period: 176;
  • Completed enquiries for the whole period:: 52;

Thanks to constantly improving of our keywords’ quality score, daily monitoring of the keywords bids and analysing the collected data, we can easily see that we achieve the best PPC performance. We used all the collected data to make our analyses to create new target audiences, to set up an ad schedule of our ads, to test and create new ads in order to reduce our cost and achieve more conversions for the same budget.

KPIs and Sumammary based on Facebook paid campaign:

We used traffic campaign in order to send people to the course page and we set also a remarketing campaign.

In short, the biggest benefits to running a remarketing campaign were two-fold:

  • The ads were front and centre in potential leads’ Facebook feed: in other words, they occupy prime real estate.
  • Facebook remarketing isn’t impacted by ad blockers which are crippling most native ads these days.
  • Completed applications for the whole period: 199
  • Completed enquiries for the whole period: 30

We used a cost-effective way to find and attract potential students, educate them on the opportunities that the College provides and help them to start, complete and submit application forms. It was challenging to get the remarketing and one of the ad sets out from the learning phase because of the small budget and limited ad delivery as a consequence. We allocated some of the budget on these ad sets to push Facebook’s algorithm to optimise their delivery and get out of the learning phase. After that, we continued monitoring the different courses and their performance and when needed made suggestions for replacing with other courses or allocating the budget.

Our campaigns for WLC have extremely high traffic, and due to our targeting and optimisation, the number of applications to WLC’s programs has increased while the cost-per-conversion has gone down.

PROJECT DETAILS

CLIENT

West London College

CATEGORY

Pay Per Click Advertising on Google Ads, Facebook and Instagram

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