Learndirect: 400%+ any-touch ROI, four months running

Judge the ads by sales

The targets grew with the work: a number of leads at the start, monthly course-sales goals by the end. Leads got cheaper fast, but sales still lagged. So we stopped reading Ads Manager alone and followed each lead into the CRM, with Karman Digital, who looked after the client’s HubSpot.

The sales data showed us four things:

• How long the sales cycle ran: a time lag between lead and payment in more than 60% of deals
• How the sales team processed each lead
• Which managers closed nursing-course leads best
• Which quiet leads were worth a second try

From June we reported on three clocks. Daily: leads, cost per lead, sales, cumulative ROI. Weekly: creative and audience performance. Monthly: time-lag analysis and overall performance.

From one tired audience to an evergreen core

One audience had carried the campaign for three months, so frequency climbed and the ads burned out. We tested new audiences and creative on a small slice of budget first. What the tests showed:

• Fresh creative revived even old, saturated audiences
• Women 55+ gave the cheapest leads, but few of them converted
• Male-only audiences responded weakly, even to personalized messages
• Career, employment and distance-education interests became the focus

By the end of March we ran the whole budget. From June, the ads and audiences that kept selling became a permanent evergreen core, with a set budget beside it to test new ideas against our benchmarks.

An offer worth answering

We turned the course’s features into an offer: enroll any time of year, study around your existing commitments, pay in installments, no formal qualifications needed. 99.5% of leads came in on mobile, so the ads and the landing page had to work on a phone first.

Most leads were men and women aged 25 to 54, skewing 35 to 44, with women ahead 5 to 1. We tried 5 new headlines and 5 new texts, and one interview with a salesperson gave us 2 clear personas to write for.