A European business school let us run side by side with its existing agency — same ad account, same months, same tracking. For the same spend, our campaigns brought in 2.3× the leads. If your cost per lead climbs every time you raise the budget, this is the comparison you want to see.
Meta-reported leads (instant forms and website forms), same ad account, 1 September – 31 October 2026. The two agencies ran different programmes (ours: MBA and Mini MBA), so read the comparison as directional. Budgets are kept confidential.
Admissions call back and get voicemail. The report says cost per lead is fine. Sales says the leads are cold.
The account reaches the same small group of people already comparing programmes — the ones every other school is bidding for.
A programme photo, a deadline, "apply now". New intakes, same creative. Nobody can tell you which message actually brings in students.
This school had all three. The fix wasn't a new targeting trick. It was what the ads said, who they spoke to, and what happened after the click.
An MBA is one of the biggest professional decisions people make. It takes months to decide, and the price is high. Yet the existing account was built like a webshop: instant-form campaigns aimed at people ready to sign up, running unchanged month after month.
That setup only works on the small slice of people already looking for an MBA — the 3% every competitor is bidding for. Each time the budget went up, so did the cost per lead. The account had hit its ceiling.
We built a set of advertorials around real graduates and their career problems — the stalled promotion, the business that outgrew its founder, the new board seat. Written like articles, filmed and edited by us. They reach people who aren't looking for an MBA yet, but recognise themselves in the story.
Before: programme ads aimed only at people already searching.
Instead of one-tap forms, readers go from the article to a dedicated landing page per programme, then to a short form. Every lead is tracked back to the ad and story that brought them in. A separate retargeting layer follows readers through a decision that takes weeks.
Before: instant forms, pre-filled by Meta, no context.
Results decide what we make next. Angles that bring qualified leads get scaled; angles that don't get cut, and the insight goes into the next brief. Because we write, film and edit ourselves, a new idea goes live in days.
It matters: in the same campaign, the best-performing story brought in leads at a fifth of the cost of the weakest. Without testing, you never find that story.
Before: two instant-form campaigns, unchanged for months.
Normally, scaling a lead-gen account makes every extra lead more expensive. Here leads went up eightfold while the cost per lead went down — and in the same months, the same account, our campaigns beat the incumbent on cost per lead by 57%.
All figures are Meta-reported leads (instant forms and website forms), whole account. Cost per lead is shown as an index to keep the client's budget confidential.
Each advertorial targets a different reason someone starts thinking about further education.
A specialist passed over for leadership roles, and what changed when she stopped waiting to be picked.
Running the company on instinct worked until it didn't.
A market-angle piece for people stepping into board work.
Anonymised for client confidentiality. Images are illustrative.
New persona-based lead-form concepts, tested next to the advertorial funnel. We're following these leads through to enrolment before we scale them — cheap leads only count if they turn into students.
You don't have to fire anyone to find out. Give us view-only access and we'll show you where your budget is going, what your ads are actually saying, and what we would change first — the same way we started with this school.
How much of your spend only reaches people already comparing programmes — and how much reaches the people who'll enrol next year.
Every live creative mapped to the stage of the decision it speaks to. Which angles are worn out, and which stories you're not telling yet.
Instant forms vs. landing pages, retargeting, and whether your tracking can tell a lead from a student.
Concrete, prioritised, with the result we'd expect. Yours to keep, whether or not we work together.
The market changes the stories, not the method. People in any country put off a degree for the same reasons — the stalled career, the growing company, the new responsibility. We build the advertorials around your graduates and your audience, and we already run campaigns in English and in other markets, including the US and Romania.
So did this school. That's why the case is a head-to-head. The audit doesn't require you to change anything, and if you want proof before you move budget, run a share of it side by side with us for two months, the same way they did.
View-only partner access to your Meta ad account. We don't need admin rights, we never open lead lists or CRM data for the audit, and you can remove access the moment we're done.
It's free and you keep the findings. The catch is that it's how we find our clients: if the audit shows we can make a real difference, we'll tell you what working together would look like. If it doesn't, we'll tell you that too.
A fixed monthly fee, agreed up front, with no long binding period. Production — filming graduate interviews and advertorials — is quoted separately by volume and location. We'll give you exact figures on the call.
We don't judge success by cost per lead alone. Every lead is tracked back to the story and ad that brought it in, and we work with your admissions team on which leads turn into applications and enrolments — then we optimise for those.
A free audit, a recorded walkthrough within five working days, and three changes you can make whether or not we work together.