The project came to us in 2022 with the goal of launching lead generation through Instagram & Facebook.
Over time, we were also handed management of an already running Google Ads account to improve the channel's performance.
What's special about this project is the number of parallel areas for enrolling students. We recruit for 10 languages in parallel, flexibly managing budgets depending on which area needs more students or, on the contrary, is overloaded. Two main ad channels are used: Meta Ads and Google Ads.
Working with Meta Ads
Our collaboration with the client began with launching the ad channel from absolute zero. Over 4 years of collaboration, as of 2025, we have spent more than $100,000 in ad budget on Meta alone:
- $9,000 in 2022
- $29,000 in 2023
- $50,000 in 2024
- $27,000 in 2025 (for the first 8 months at the time of writing)
The project tested different approaches, from lead generation on the website and landing pages for individual languages to lead generation through Instagram conversations.
In fact, every approach works. It doesn't matter so much how you attract leads as what exactly you attract them to: product packaging, the offer and the lead-handling process.
In our case, the main approach to lead generation on Meta remains campaigns that start conversations on Instagram. This approach works when there's high-quality, consistent content and well-thought-out lead handling in the conversation.
But besides that, we continue to work with lead generation through the website. It's important to give the audience the opportunity to get to know the product and the brand from different angles. Some people really prefer to send a message, while others prefer to submit a request through the website, which also contains information that's much harder to find on the Instagram account. So we work with the target audience from different angles and provide different information to warm them up and help them make a decision.
Growing the Google Ads channel
We started working with Google Ads at the client's request to carry out an audit and optimization, because results in this channel had started to drop sharply. The channel had been launched before us, no one had managed it on an ongoing basis, and things got to the point where it stopped paying off.
During the audit, we realized that the old optimization settings for certain events were no longer relevant, because the website had gone through several iterations of changes and the way inquiries were submitted had changed. Accordingly, new event tracking settings were needed for campaign optimization to start working again and see results.
We updated event tracking and relaunched the old campaigns, shifted the focus from Search campaigns to PMax, refreshed ad creatives and changed the bidding strategy from manual to automated to remove limits on buying traffic.
Such drastic changes in an ad account usually lead to a dip in results, because campaigns go back into the learning phase. In our case, this wasn't so important, since results before the audit were already poor. After 2 months of these optimization efforts (July–August 2024) and going through the learning period, the campaigns began to break out of stagnation and show growth.
Passing data from the CRM to ad accounts for additional optimization
Another challenge on the project was implementing the transfer of conversion events from the CRM system to the Meta and Google ad platforms. This transfer is needed to improve the optimization model, so that the ad system understands not only who becomes a lead, but also which users convert into a sale.
Since we work with lead generation rather than classic sales as in e-commerce, all optimization is based on the lead received, not the sale, because the ad system doesn't know which leads will later convert into sales. It doesn't know until you implement passing this information from the CRM at the moment a lead moves to customer status (i.e., a sale has occurred).
This transfer is implemented through API tools available in both Meta (CAPI) and Google (Google API, or Measurement Protocol for Google Analytics). It's important that the CRM system also supports sending data on its side.
Working together with the client's developer, we were able to set up this data transfer and pass information to the ad accounts about actual purchases by users who came from ads.
Of course, many other details of the project remain uncovered — a lot has accumulated over 4 years of collaboration. But we've tried to outline the most key factors that allowed the project to keep growing and delivering results:
- Consistent publishing of quality content on social media — this is very important for lead generation through conversations;
- High-quality event tracking that ensures correct ad campaign optimization — without it, ads won't work;
- A diverse traffic system that works with the target audience through different ad formats and channels, providing complete information about the product and brand, warming up users and bringing them to purchase;
- A well-established lead-handling system — unfortunately, we see that companies often pay too little attention to this aspect, but it's a big growth opportunity for everyone.
