Higher-Ed Growth and Efficiency

The Granular team has extensive hands-on experience managing full marketing strategies for higher-ed clients with 7 and 8-figure annual digital marketing budgets. Our Founder, Jordon Meyer ran PPC in-house for two leading Midwest for-profit colleges and our team has collectively managed higher-ed PPC for over a dozen colleges and universities.

Background

This university was seeking to improve the performance of its paid search. Management of the paid search accounts was previously handled by a prominent Seattle-based agency, and the university had a hunch that they were getting “the B team”. Granular conducted an extensive paid PPC audit where we uncovered extreme amounts of neglect and inefficiency.

The Opportunity

Step one was to stop the bleeding caused by a national PPC agency. CPCs over $100 per click were rampant throughout the account…when the average of our other higher-ed clients was much lower for similar targeting. After we restructured the entire account, it only took one month to reap the rewards of granular, data-driven account management.

Goals

Identify areas of waste, reduce media budget, and pay for Granular’s services through efficiency
Develop a roadmap for growth
Prove that PPC can be scalable while remaining efficient

Granular’s Solution

We performed a comprehensive PPC audit and found areas for immediate cost-cutting and efficiency gains
The restructuring of the accounts saw immediate positive returns that set the groundwork for continued success
CPC reduction with Ad Quality Score improvements based on architecture and keyword mapping
Advanced reporting dashboards and value-based bidding to ensure that we aim to attract the most valuable students

The Outcome

Google Ads Leads increased by +61% year-over-year
Google Ads Cost Per Lead reduced by –28% year-over-year