Case Studies

Kaplan Singapore Search Engine Marketing Campaign

Kaplan Singapore is part of one of the world's largest education companies, Kaplan, Inc., a US$2.6b business owned by The Washington Post Company.  Kaplan provides educational and career services for individuals, schools and businesses, catering to more than 1 million students annually from approximately 500 locations around the world.  

Kaplan Singapore, through their various marketing effort, realized that they have not fully maximize their returns from search engine marketing (SEM).

They were looking at 2 objectives:

1.    To double their leads
2.    To reduce Cost Per Click of competitive keywords like business degree, MBA, etc.

The Challenge

Their digital marketing channel did not reap the ideal result as their campaign Average CPC (Cost per Click) is $3.50.

Estimated Avg. CPC for targeted search term amounting to $3.00 per click

With high CPC, they fell short of their leads expectation with the marketing dollars invested.  The reason for high CPC is because their current campaign keyword themes are not segmented appropriately. This made the Avg.CPC expensive.

The challenge that we faced is that the educational industry in Singapore is extremely competitive, with keyword CPC ranging from $3 to as high as $5. In order to double their leads expectation, we MUST be able to first reduce their CPC, and then make sure that their ads and landing pages reap the most conversions as possible. 

The Strategy

We did a major overhaul to the campaign once we took over:

1.    Keyword research & analysis - removed non-performing keywords and added new targeted keywords to the campaign.

2.    Re-segmented keywords into relevant themes to improve Quality Score of the campaign. (Cost-per-click will decrease with better Quality Score)

3.    Strategically bidded for keywords to prevent budget wastage.

4.    Created 2 ad copies for each ad group and continuously tested & monitored the ads every month. This process of split-testing is the key fundamental to achieve the “almost perfect” ad copies which led to better conversion rate.

Spit Testing the Ad Headline for the keyword “Business Degree”

5.    Measure conversions with 3rd party tracking technology (Fournaise) and continuously tweaked the campaign and landing pages to further improve conversions.

Results

After 6 months, we have not only doubled the leads acquisition but also lowered the cost per acquisition by 7x for Kaplan Singapore.

By split testing the ad copies to see which advertisement attracts more clicks, it significantly improved CTR and increased conversions. Furthermore, an increased CTR further reduced the Avg CPC of keywords.

With CTR improved by 7% and Avg.CPC went down dramatically from $3.50 to $0.60, Kaplan Singapore received 3 times more visitors with the same amount of marketing budget from previous campaign.

OOm has successfully saved 600% of marketing budget and the increase in visitors led to 190% increase in conversions.

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