The Challenge:

A large public university offered dozens of online undergraduate and graduate degree programs, from psychology and business administration to environmental engineering and construction management. All of them competed for budget inside a single 12-month, $1.2M paid media program, with roughly $100,000 deployed each month. The portfolio ranged from established, high-volume degrees to new and niche programs, and the existing structure let the biggest names absorb most of the budget while smaller programs never received enough spend to become efficient. Average cost per lead sat above $300 at the outset, producing steady volume without the portfolio working together as one system.

Our Approach:

We regrouped programs by cost efficiency, replacing the department-based structure with tiers built on each program's individual cost per lead. High performers stopped drawing budget away from lower-volume programs that needed room to compete. The change caused a short-term dip in form fills of roughly 10%, the tradeoff for a structure that could sustain lead volume across the full program list. Within three months, cost per lead had fallen from over $300 to $120. Geography followed the same logic, with ten individually managed state campaigns and one national campaign regrouped around the regions converting most efficiently.

Retargeting moved entirely into Performance Max, freeing social budgets to focus on prospecting new audiences. Lead capture was rebuilt so in-platform forms on Google and Meta fed a CRM-matched tracking structure, which made it possible to evaluate performance program by program instead of as a single channel-level average.