What We Achieved for Kaplan in 2022

Who are Kaplan?

Kaplan offers courses for professional development and career progression. Learn online, on-demand, or in one of their geographical classroom locations all over the UK. Despite offering many different courses, social work specialises in one area. They have become one of the leading education providers in the world. They’ve worked with over 3 million individuals and businesses across the globe.

The Brief

Kaplan came to Embyro with the goal of increasing the number of online purchases and leads, as their account had been struggling to take it to the next level. Their previous strategy was to run conversion campaigns optimising towards ‘purchases’ and ‘add to carts’. With the help of assisted Traffic, Brand awareness and Video Views campaigns to run alongside them.

We should use all stages of the marketing funnel to target new and returning customers. This would be possible by using different campaign objectives, such as brand awareness, video campaigns, Traffic campaigns etc.. to help build as many high-intent audience pools as possible, which would then give us the ability to target them further down the funnel.

Our Approach

When looking at Kaplan’s strategy before we took over, it was clear that the account wasn’t at full optimisation and there was huge room for growth. Due to the KPI being to drive as many purchases and leads as possible, we completely restructured the account by moving away from running boosted posts and other non-purchasing objectives, as these campaigns are running to increase the engagement of the account and have no monetary value to the business.

Instead, we would redirect the majority of the budget to other objectives that will be far more effective at driving purchases and leads. With immediate effect, we paused all the conversion campaigns that were optimising towards add-to-cart and replaced them with a custom URL thank-you page conversion. Our reasoning is that add-to-cart is higher up the funnel, and by optimising lower down the funnel, it becomes more refined, allowing the algorithm to fully optimize towards users who may be potential customers.

YoY Results

As mentioned in our approach, the first thing we changed was the transition to optimising towards our custom conversion, which is optimising towards the ‘thank you URL’. Ever since post-IOS 14.5, attribution has been hugely affected therefore meaning that the audience sizes/pools have been reduced drastically which has increased the competition as more businesses are fighting over the same users, however, the audience sizes are much smaller. This causes the auction place to be much more competitive, which can increase your costs, making it even more crucial to gain that competitive advantage over your competitors.

Even though the figures aren’t exactly accurate, there’s no exact figure on how much of Meta’s data is lost in tracking. There are definitely discrepancies between the back end and platform figures. That’s why using third-party attribution partners such as TripleWhale, or Google UTMS is a good way to add validity between Facebook and the back end.

As you can see in the table above, spend remained relatively flat YoY, however, Purchases/Confirmed URLS increased by 45%, CPA (Cost per acquisition) decreased by 29% and leads increased by 173%. The lead volume is slightly skewed due to increased spend but the most important thing is that the CPL remained stable YoY.

How Did We Achieve This?

When creating a successful marketing campaign, it’s important to consider all stages of the marketing funnel.

TOF – Top of the funnel, this is reaching new users

MOF – Middle of the funnel, this is targeting people who are at the nurturing stage / already in touch with your business.

BOF – Bottom of the funnel, high-intent users who have already been on your website / already searched for you.

We used TOF campaigns such as video views to help increase the audience size and then we would run additional campaigns to retarget the thruplay user’s audience further down the funnel. Due to the campaign’s success in generating a lot of sales, a significant proportion of the budget was allocated to it; however, the campaign that was by far the most successful at generating sales was targeting website visitors.

The key difference between this year and the previous year was that we ran multiple creative styles and adifferent tone of voice, which helped as time went on because we were able to scale the budget towards the winning creatives and capitalize on demand. Using different creatives helped to keep the metrics low and gave us control when a creative would burn, we would already have a few good ‘backup’ creatives ready which would take over immediately, instead of having an initial downtime/learning period which could take weeks. This made the account much more healthy and helped to decrease the CAC as we were always ahead of the game.

Has Your Social Account Plateaued?

Are you looking to get ahead of your competition? Are you struggling to scale your account and reaching that next level? Are you struggling to use the best Meta optimisations? Get in touch with our award-winning paid social team and we can help you plan out the perfect strategy to fit your business! Or get in touch with Embryo via our contact page.