42%
Reduction in CPL
Industry: Education, Study Abroad Advising
Platforms/Tools: Meta Ads, Pipedrive, GA4, LinkedIn Insights, AiSensy, Mailchimp
Brand Overview
CollegePass, a platform helping students in their college applications for top global universities, needed to solve a nuanced acquisition challenge: attracting parents of high-school students from elite Indian schools, who were evaluating undergraduate options abroad.
The Challenge
Difficulty in acquiring qualified leads from a high-value but narrow TG.
Inconsistent lead quality through traditional interest-based targeting.
Drop-off in user conversion due to gaps in nurturing across CRM and app.
The Goals
Improve lead quality
Reduce cost per lead
Increase monthly revenue
Strategy
Channel Focus: Meta First, Powered by LinkedIn Data
Used Meta Ads as the primary acquisition engine due to its wide reach and fine targeting controls.
Installed the LinkedIn Insight Tag, which provided behavioural data on decision-makers and students visiting the site.
This tag helped indirectly optimise Meta audiences by shaping custom and retargeting lists based on site behaviour.
Audience Engineering with Lookalikes
Segmented CRM and platform data into focused lists:
Webinar participants
App users
High-school parent inquiries
SQLs at different funnel stages
Created list-specific Lookalike audiences instead of one monolithic segment.
This experiment ran for ~4 months and surfaced strong, repeatable wins:
~40% lower CPL across best-performing lookalike cohorts
Improved lead quality and conversion from ad → call → app usage
These insights were consolidated into an internal playbook, a documented system used for repeatable scaling going forward.
Creative Testing at Scale
Rolled out AI-generated creatives, emotion-led storytelling, and carousel + video hybrid formats.
Focused on parental motivations, student success stories, and outcome-based CTAs.
Weekly A/B tests helped identify the hooks, formats, and placements.
CRM-Led Deep Nurturing System
Activated cold and mid-funnel leads via personalised drip campaigns on:
WhatsApp
Email
Push notifications (via app)
Based on app activity (e.g., video watch % or module engagement), users received contextual nudges to take the next step.
Dormant MQLs/SQLs were reactivated through automated re-targeting and timely expert webinar invites.
Website Hierarchy Redesign
Restructured the website to improve navigation, internal linking, and crawl depth. Prioritized discoverability of top services and cities, aligning both with user journey and Google’s indexing behaviour.
Key Results
Key Takeaway
With Meta and LinkedIn insights working in tandem, creative testing frameworks, and a CRM-powered nurturing engine, CollegePass unlocked sustainable paid growth at scale. The team’s ability to dissect user data, build lookalike-powered campaigns, and document learnings into a replicable internal growth playbook became the foundation for continuous optimisation and future expansion.