4,200 Paid Enrolments in 6 Months
How a Bangalore EdTech platform scaled from 180 to 840 monthly paid enrolments by rebuilding their paid acquisition stack across Google and Meta — without increasing spend.
Overview
An online learning platform offering upskilling courses for working professionals was spending ₹2.8L/month across Google and Meta, generating 180 paid enrolments at a ₹980 CPL. Their course catalogue ranged from ₹4,999 to ₹29,999. The challenge: high-ticket courses had near-zero paid traction while low-ticket courses were over-indexed. We needed to rebalance the funnel and fix the mid-funnel drop-off problem.
The Situation
Challenge: Online course platform needed paid enrolments at scale without burning CAC.
- Google Search campaigns were bidding on category-level keywords ("online courses", "upskilling") with no intent segmentation.
- Meta campaigns were running conversion objectives but landing on course listing pages — not individual course pages.
- No email/WhatsApp nurture sequence. Leads who didn't purchase on the first session were never followed up programmatically.
- Course-specific landing pages didn't exist. All paid traffic hit the same homepage.
- ROAS calculation was based on first-click revenue — upsells and second purchases (avg. 1.4 courses/buyer) not attributed.
The Approach
We split the acquisition architecture into two parallel systems: Google Search for high-intent buyers (people actively searching for specific skills), and Meta for demand generation and retargeting the platform's massive existing content audience. Both feeds into a WhatsApp-first nurture sequence with 7-touch automation.
Funnel Audit & Infrastructure
- Full GA4 + Meta Pixel audit — found 40% of conversions were being double-counted between platforms
- Built course-specific landing pages for top 8 courses (accounted for 80% of revenue)
- WhatsApp Business API integration with automated lead nurture: enrolment → syllabus → demo class → offer
- Set up Google Tag Manager with custom events: course page scroll depth, video play, syllabus download
Google Search Rebuild
- Killed all broad match campaigns. Rebuilt on exact + phrase match with tight negative lists
- Segmented campaigns by course category and price tier — separate budgets, separate bidding strategies
- Smart Bidding (Target CPA) enabled only after 30+ conversions/campaign/month threshold
- Competitor brand terms campaign with comparison landing page — 34% lower CPC, 2.1× CTR
Meta Demand Generation
- Built interest + behavioural audiences around job titles (mid-level professionals, career changers)
- Video-first creative: "Day in the life after completing [Course Name]" format — 4.2× video view rate
- Retargeting: blog readers and YouTube video viewers shown course-specific social proof ads
- Free webinar funnel as top-of-funnel — CPL ₹85 for webinar registrant vs ₹980 for direct enrolment
Nurture & Conversion Optimisation
- 7-step WhatsApp sequence: Welcome → Syllabus PDF → Demo class link → Student testimonial → FAQ → Limited offer → Follow-up
- Email sequence synced with WhatsApp — 3-day delay between channels to avoid fatigue
- Early-bird pricing window (48 hours) for webinar attendees drove 28% of all paid enrolments
- Cohort analysis revealed Thursday/Friday evening traffic converted 2.8× better — shifted 40% of budget to those windows
Results — Before vs. After
Key Insights
The webinar funnel was the single biggest unlock — ₹85 CPL for a registrant who then had a 22% paid conversion rate effectively meant ₹386 blended CPL, beating direct enrolment campaigns.
Fixing conversion tracking double-counting immediately showed real ROAS was 1.1× — not the 2.4× the platform believed. This reset all bidding strategies to rational baselines.
Thursday/Friday 6–9 PM accounted for 42% of conversions despite being <20% of impressions. Time-based budget shifting was free ROAS improvement.
Course-specific landing pages (vs. homepage) improved conversion rate from 0.9% to 4.1% — the single biggest leverage point in the entire funnel.
“We thought we had a traffic problem. Turns out we had a conversion and attribution problem. Deepanshu fixed both, and now we finally know which channels actually make us money. The WhatsApp nurture sequence alone recovered hundreds of leads we were losing every month.”
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