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“Everything that you have shown us in Galileo is a dream for us.”
Head of Admissions
THEIR STORY
Refocused Goals and Core Practices Drive Recruitment for Top MBA Programs
A leading private university needed to increase enrollment in their renowned business degree programs. With different MBA programs aligned with different student needs (FT, PT, 1 or 2 year) and specific verticals, all were highly valued with proven ROI for graduates.
Arcalea rebuilt digital marketing by optimizing existing and new platforms, introducing new ad formats, and filling key gaps. Efforts were realigned with revenue goals, while expanded ad distribution and AI helped attract new prospects.
THE CHALLENGE
Market Expansion
The brand needed to increase enrollment within a market requiring long cycle times (as high as 1 to 5 years), possessing limited customer data, and legacy marketing focused on awareness and low-value intermediate goals.
THE SOLUTION
Harnessing Data and Multi-Channel Strategies to Lead the Market
The brand partnered with Arcalea to build a strategic roadmap for success. The collaboration focused on leveraging data and insights to unlock growth opportunities:
Strategic Audit and Planning:
Arcalea assessed current programs, platform configurations, and existing data to identify opportunities for immediate tactical remediation and longer-term strategic improvements. Ad platform analysis revealed counterproductive keyword strategies, including redundant keywords that could favor weaker conversion rates, global negative keywords that blocked strong query matches, and keyword organization techniques better handled by native platform AI.
Optimized Paid Media:
Across all ad platforms, Arcalea shifted focus away from awareness goals toward goals more directly predictive of enrollment and revenue. Intermediate goals were evaluated for relevance, and changed from awareness-focused conversions (e.g., “time on site”) to conversions in which prospect information is exchanged.
Advanced Tracking and Analytics:
Analyzing each lead source for volume of cost-effective conversions allowed the brand to shift resources to the most effective networks. Intentionally expanding to effective publishers beyond Google allowed the brand to reach new audiences through a broader collection of relevant blogs and media companies.
Data Infrastructure Analysis:
Analysis of the brand’s data landscape revealed gaps in both legacy results and customer information. Critically, customer data infrastructure was lacking, allowing no insights into the number of unique prospects moving through each part of the funnel from awareness to enrollment. To address these gaps, Arcalea began validating existing customer data with the goal of an eventual Identity Resolution process.
Results
Data-Driven Leadership in
Data-Driven Leadership in
Higher Education
The strategic initiatives delivered transformative results:
By shifting focus from awareness to revenue conversions, the brand gained from synergies between organic and programmatic. Additional blending of AI to identify those hi-value digital behaviors ensured relevance and increased revenue.
Arcalea helped the brand understand their funnel, their real cost of customer acquisition (CAC), and the opportunities available to drive traffic and growth. The efficacy of new data tactics demonstrated the brand’s increased data science maturity resulting from the partnership.
To maximize ad impact, Arcalea deployed an AI that analyzes ad placement pages and visitor browsing history for contextual relevance. Though newly applied to this brand, past use improved matches and conversions.
Market Leadership
Arcalea boosted enrollment for a leading private university’s business programs by revamping digital marketing, optimizing paid media for revenue goals, and leveraging AI-driven ad platforms. Strategic audits and data analysis improved targeting, enhanced funnel visibility, and addressed gaps in customer data. This data-driven approach expanded market reach, increased cost-effective conversions, and delivered measurable enrollment growth.
- +115% App Submits
- -35% CAC
