Case study · Education & community
One of Victoria’s newer schools, Hume Anglican Grammar was established in 2008 by St Peter’s Church and a group of passionate local parents who saw a need for an additional School in the area.
The challenge
Hume Grammar now has three campuses, at Mt Ridley, Donnybrook and Kalkallo, each offering specialist programs. As a newer school it is competing for families against schools with long established histories in Victoria, and it spoke to us about how digital marketing could win it a larger slice of the educational pie.
The school had a strong story to tell. What it lacked was a reliable way to put that story in front of the parents most likely to respond to it.
All parents have a big decision to make when it comes to their child’s education. Location, spiritual learning, fees, track record of results, extracurricular activities and much more all have to be weighed, and no advertisement settles that decision on its own.
Our challenge was to generate qualified leads from parents who were already aligned with the school on those core considerations, and to increase the number of school tours booked so families could experience the difference for themselves. More tours, in turn, would mean more enrolments.
Approach
Google Search became the core of the campaign, because it reaches parents at the moment they are comparing schools. We targeted the searches parents make while weighing up their options and wrote ads that spoke to the factors that matter to them, from location and specialist programs to the school’s approach to spiritual learning. Every click was pointed towards a single action: booking a school tour.
Alongside the advertising we ran ongoing SEO optimisations on the website, so that generic searches, not just searches for the school by name, produced conversions as well. That kept the cost of each conversion low and lifted organic traffic in parallel with paid.
The shift
Tell us what your project needs to do, and we will help identify the next step.
The work
Over six months the search campaigns delivered 62,617 clicks to the website, and the quality of that traffic improved as the account was refined. Tighter keyword targeting and ad copy written around what parents were actually weighing lifted the average click through rate to 2.54%, and a growing share of enquiries came from generic searches rather than from families who already knew the school.
Increase in conversions over the six month period.
Increase in click through rate over the six month period, to a 2.54% average.
Average cost per click over the six month period.
Traffic grew on both fronts. Paid traffic to the website rose as the campaigns scaled, and the SEO work lifted organic traffic alongside it, so the school was no longer relying on advertising alone to be found. Existing keywords improved in rankings, with ‘private school’ moving from position 42 to 17 during the campaign. More than 1700 new users arrived on the website over the period, and goal completions on the website rose by 84%.
The school tour remained the measure that mattered. Families who visited a campus had already narrowed their decision, and the campaign kept the calendar of tours filling with parents who fitted the school rather than parents who had simply seen an advertisement.
Increase in paid website traffic over the six month period.
Increase in organic traffic over the six month period.
Keep reading
Cosmic Polish
Meta advertising rebuilt around moving creative for an eCommerce nail polish brand.
Read more →
Milone’s Tree Solutions
Local SEO that lifted organic traffic 450% and tripled ranked keywords in a year.
Read more →
+450% organic traffic, over twelve months.
Boniik
Lifecycle email marketing rebuilt to scale revenue for a K-beauty eCommerce retailer.
Read more →
Continue the conversation
Proud partners
