#ŻAK #Ads
We have increased the number of enrollments in courses while simultaneously reducing conversion costs
ŻAK is the largest nationwide educational company in Poland, with branches in 80 Polish cities. The company offers one-year courses, two-year vocational schools, medical schools, adult high schools, and short courses. Over half a million students have benefited from education at ŻAK.
Challenge:
The account included over a thousand active campaigns that significantly complicated advertising optimization, testing various solutions, and effective budget management. Therefore, we focused on reorganizing the account to achieve our main goals: increasing the number of school and course enrollments while reducing conversion costs.
We are proud of:
- reducing conversion costs by over 60% from January to March 2023 compared to the previous year.
- increasing the number of conversions by almost 180% in the first month after implementing changes.
Our Actions:
We began by streamlining the client's advertising account and reducing the number of active campaigns on the account that were not delivering the expected conversions by about 90%. We also changed the previous targeting approach – instead of separate campaigns for each location with individual budgets, we created one campaign with customized locations. This allowed us to consolidate a larger ad budget and gain easier control over account activities.
We rebuilt ad groups according to the SKAG strategy, which involves using one keyword per ad group in a given campaign. In simpler terms, we created a separate ad group for each selected keyword. This precise matching allowed us to achieve better campaign results and enabled detailed campaign optimization.
Analyzing keyword lists, we noticed many irrelevant and low-quality phrases, as well as the absence of Brand exclusion for some campaigns. We created two lists of excluded keywords – brand terms and mismatched or non-converting phrases. Importantly, these lists were prepared before the campaign launch, so from the first days of advertising activity, we avoided low-quality traffic and prevented unintended display of ads for brand-related phrases.
As part of our tests, we created a DSA campaign with the Brand excluded, which yielded expected results – we obtained a high number of leads at a low conversion cost. This allowed us to increase the effectiveness of search network advertising and reach a larger number of potential ŻAK customers.
We also focused on Performance Max campaigns: we increased the number of campaigns from one (covering the entire offer) to seven, creating separate campaigns for each category. As a result, the average conversion cost decreased by 59.8%, and the number of conversions increased by 178%.
Our final actions were related to audience lists. Although many audience lists were created on the advertising account targeting specific categories, campaigns only utilized one list – encompassing all website visitors. We decided to utilize the remaining lists, enabling precise ad targeting and exploring interest in the offer among different audiences.
Results:
Reducing ineffective campaigns and reorganizing them allowed us to regain control over the account. Thanks to the introduced changes, we achieved our intended goals. We recorded significant drops in conversion costs in the first quarter of 2023 compared to the first quarter of 2022 (January – 69.1%, February – 66.6%, March – 62.6%). In the same period, we achieved a significant increase in the number of conversions (January – 178.8%, February – 204.9%, March – 174.4%). The results obtained demonstrate that it's not the quantity but the quality of advertising campaigns that determines marketing success.