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Studyportals boosts conversion rates 300% with custom display ads

Conversion rate increase
300%
Increase in conversion rate
reduced CPAs
72.5%
Decrease in CPA

Asking "How can we do better?" when you're already successful takes a special kind of foresight.

 

Studyportals already had a successful performance-focused marketing strategy that attracts hundreds of thousands of prospective customers to their website. Yet, they knew that even better performance - higher conversion rates, lower CPA - was within reach.

Studyportals
200+ employees
Education

They already had a solid plan to reach these higher goals. However, with only one performance marketeer and one designer working across teams, the time and resources required to build the campaigns were holding them back. With display being almost half their ad spend, they needed a solution to optimize their workflow. When they started using Bannerwise, they discovered that the creative management platform was the solution they were looking for.

 

About Studyportals

 

Studyportals is an online platform dedicated to helping students with education choices. It was born out of frustration over the lack of information about the ever-growing study options. Now, the company helps prospective students explore programs and make informed decisions. In 2020 alone, Studyportals helped 45 million students choose education programs in 110 countries. Display ads play a major role in reaching these millions of students across the world.

 

The challenge

 

Display campaigns amount to nearly half of Studyportals’ online marketing efforts. Until recently, a single performance marketeer was building all of their intricately designed campaigns with the help of a designer and a collection of half-useful tools. The way they were executing their strategy wasn’t as scalable nor as effective as it could be.

As often is the case, display campaign creatives were amongst many other responsibilities for the team’s designer. So, developing custom creatives for each campaign in 15 sizes for 3 different networks wasn’t always a priority.

So, with general input from their designer, Studyportals’ performance marketeer was building all their display ads, including creatives, for thousands of campaigns with specific targeting.

Considering their lack of ad-building resources and the reputation Google’s Responsive Display Ads have on delivering high CTR and CPC numbers, the team focused on RDA campaigns. The goal was to drive conversion and increase ROAS.

 

Responsive display ads Studyportals used on google display network

The ads Studyportals built with Google's RDA builder had no branding and looked like they could be an ad for anything.

 

However, campaign building was still taking too much time.  Google’s Responsive Display Ads builder didn’t live up to its reputation of quick set-ups. They still had to create and upload all assets into the platform. On top of that, they were facing a new creative challenge: they had to come up with ad copy that would match all of their visual assets since they had no say over asset combinations in their ads. 

 

With plans to grow the team and scale their display campaigns, their current solution wasn’t scalable enough to hold up to the company’s growth potential. 


The executive marketeer at Studyportals wanted to have full control over their campaigns, from audience targeting to sets of creatives for each platform they run ads on. With their Responsive Display Campaigns running on the Google Display Network she had little control over creatives and very basic data on campaign performance.

 


 

Are you considering running Responsive Display Campaigns? Read about the pros and cons of RDAs and decide if they’re right for your business goals. 

 


 

With an established audience across the world, Studyportals is staying ahead with its marketing strategy to stay competitive and grow even further. While their main priority is still performance, they are now moving away from a pure performance focus and towards a strategy that still prioritizes performance but with branding in mind. They needed to find a way to optimize their performance marketing channels and increase their ROAS while implementing branding elements to their campaigns.

 

The solution

 

To easily create branded campaigns without giving up their focus on performance, Studyportals decided to use Bannerwise as their creative management platform.

The ability to create templates that can be reproduced, edited, and scaled with a few clicks saved them a significant amount of time even in their first test runs. With Bannerwise, the team's designer only had to worry about creating good-looking templates instead of creating hundreds of frustratingly similar visuals.

For the marketeer, dealing with the same visuals, having to create and adjust them is no longer in their job description. Using the templates the designer creates, they can now scale and run their campaigns within minutes.

 

google display ads studyportals created in Bannerwise

Custom display ads Studyportals built with Bannerwise did more than improve performance. They are also aligned with their overall branding and look much better.

 

The fact they could directly push the ads directly from their Bannerwise dashboard to their display channels also fit perfectly within Studyportal’s scaling plans.

 

Being able to build several ad sets to test within minutes meant Studyportals could focus on optimizing ad performance and increasing their ROAS. And optimize they did. The tests they ran to calculate the impact of switching to a creative management platform clearly showed it was the right decision.

 

The result

 

By using Bannerwise, the performance marketeer at Studyportals was able to create display ads tailored specially for their campaigns’ target audiences. For example, they could create an ad set for a target audience of people who are interested in short-term postgraduate programs, with a focus on the Business field.

 

On the tests they ran on the Google Display Network, the custom ads Studyportals created with Bannerwise had a conversion rate of 11,84%, while their conversion rate for non-customized RDAs stayed behind with 2,96%. 

 

This significant increase in conversion rates didn’t cost them a great amount of time nor resources. On the contrary, both the designer and the performance marketeer saw their ad creation process was decidedly smoother and less time-consuming. They in fact decided to replace the online tool they use to produce their ad creatives with Bannerwise.

 

Studyportals uses Bannerwise to focus on attracting high-quality traffic and significantly improve campaign performance with branded ads. As well as using the creative management platform to build all their future Google Ads, the team is planning to start using it for social campaigns and replace all current ads with ones made with Bannerwise in all advertising networks.