Case Study | UP Education’s Journey to Data-Driven Marketing Transformation

UP Education, a trailblazer in the education sector, was at a pivotal juncture. With a diverse mix of schools and courses across New Zealand, the group faced growing challenges in marketing effectiveness and personalisation. Despite a wealth of student and course data, a fragmented approach to data management hindered their ability to target and engage prospective students effectively. Recognising the need for a unified strategy, UP Education embarked on a journey to elevate its marketing approach in a fast-evolving education landscape.

Here’s a closer look at the main challenges UP Education faced:

The Challenges

1. Lack of a Unified First-Party Data Strategy
In a complex, multi-school structure, each institution managed its data independently. This disjointed approach led to siloed data collection and storage, limiting the potential of advertising use cases and hindering accurate lead quality measurement. Without a cohesive data strategy, campaign performance and cross-portfolio insights remained elusive.

2. Inefficient Paid Media Spending
Without a consolidated view of its target audience across brands, UP Education risked serving irrelevant ads to students and even competing against its campaigns. Inefficiencies in paid media spending meant that UP was often in the dark about how well its marketing dollars worked.

3. Limited Personalization in Campaign Messaging and Targeting
UP Education had valuable data about courses, including start dates, prerequisites, and career outcomes. However, without a means to integrate this data into their marketing strategy, they were missing out on opportunities to personalize messaging in ways that could resonate deeply with prospective students.

The Solution

We came in to help UP Education tackle these roadblocks head-on. We began by conducting a data maturity audit, which revealed that, without intervention, UP’s customer acquisition costs could spiral in the coming years.

Following the audit, we collaborated with XPON to build a comprehensive, cutting-edge solution centred on Wondaris, a composable Audience, Enrichment, and Activation Platform. The four pillars of this solution were:

1. Unifying Customer Data with Wondaris

XPON and UP Education collaborated on integrating a daily CRM data push into Wondaris to address data fragmentation. This enabled real-time access to unified data across all UP schools. To protect privacy, personally identifiable information (PII) was encrypted using SHA256 hashing, ensuring the highest data security standards.

2. Automating Audience Creation and Activation

With Wondaris, D3 and UP Education could build dynamic customer segments. The solution enabled seamless daily syncing of these segments with Google Ads and Meta platforms, allowing for more precise audience targeting based on criteria like course, campus, and lead stage. By creating audience segments unique to each UP school, they could target and reach potential students with unmatched precision.

3. Developing a Live Course Information Feed

A custom feed was built for integration with Search Ads 360 (SA360). This feed allowed automatic ad and keyword generation based on available courses, keeping ads up-to-date and relevant. Dynamic ad content was implemented to reflect the latest information on course start dates, and the system automatically paused keywords for courses no longer available, reducing ad spend wastage.

4. Implementing Advanced Analytics

The team created a powerful Tableau dashboard for attributing enrollments at a granular level, linking data from multiple sources, including Google Analytics 4 BigQuery exports and various ad platforms. A consistent key, the hashed email address, was used throughout the system, enabling reliable data matching across sources and providing robust, user-level insights.

The Results

With D3’s strategic guidance and the implementation of XPON’s Wondaris platform, UP Education successfully boosted its data maturity, achieving impressive growth in online lead generation and marketing efficiency. Some standout results included:

• Automated personalisation: Customisation based on location and course information allowed for more relevant, engaging ads.
• Improved lead quality and campaign attribution: The advanced analytics setup facilitated a clear view of lead quality and conversion paths, empowering better campaign adjustments.
• Optimized keyword and bidding management: Automated systems reduced wasted ad spend and focused campaigns on relevant audiences.

UP Education’s key performance indicators reflected the power of the solution, with:

• 64% Increase in Online Leads
• 28% Decrease in Cost Per Lead (CPL)
• 24% Increase in Click-Through Rate (CTR)

By centralizing its data and elevating its marketing capabilities, UP Education has set a new standard for data-driven engagement in vocational education. Its story shows how the right technology and strategic approach can transform marketing for education providers in a competitive landscape.