UP Education Achieves 64% Lead Growth and 28% CPL Reduction with D3 and Wondaris
UP Education, a leading multi-sector education group, was looking for ways to improve the effectiveness and personalisation of their marketing.
Their diverse portfolio of schools and courses across New Zealand created a complex data landscape, hindering their ability to efficiently target and engage students.
Despite having a wealth of data about their students and courses, UP Education struggled due to:
1. Lack of unified first-party data strategy – Most schools within the UP Education group managed data independently, resulting in fragmented data collection and storage systems. Siloed data collection created limited advertising use cases, hindering campaign performance and lead quality measurement.
2. Inefficient paid media spending – Without a clear understanding of their audience across all brands, UP risked showing irrelevant ads to potential students or unnecessarily competing with themselves in the digital advertising space.
3. Limited personalisation in campaign messaging and targeting – UP possessed rich data about their various courses, including start dates, prerequisites, and career outcomes, but lacked the means to effectively integrate this information into their marketing efforts.
Recognising these challenges, UP Education sought a solution that could unify its data, streamline its marketing efforts, and provide the agility needed to thrive in the competitive landscape of vocational education.
The Solution
UP Education partnered with D3, an innovative New Zealand agency, to tackle their data challenges. D3 conducted a data maturity audit, revealing that UP’s customer acquisition costs would rise significantly over time if the challenges weren’t addressed.
Following the audit, D3 partnered with XPON to implement a comprehensive solution centred around Wondaris, a composable Audience, Enrichment and Activation Platform.
The complete solution included four key components:
1. Unifying Customer Data with Wondaris
XPON and Up Education worked collaboratively to implement a daily CRM data push into Wondaris.
To ensure data privacy and security, SHA256 hashing was employed for encrypting personally identifiable information (PII).
2. Automating Audience Creation and Activation
The solution allowed D3 and UP Education to create customer segments, whilst enabling daily syncing of these segmented customer lists to Google Ads and Meta platforms.
These segments were created based on specific criteria such as course, campus, and lead stage for each school within the UP Education group of education providers.
3. Creating a Live Course Information Feed
A custom feed was developed for integration with Search Ads 360 (SA360). This feed enabled automatic ad and keyword generation based on available courses.
It also allowed for dynamic ad content, including information such as the next available start dates for courses. Additionally, the system was set up to automatically pause keywords for courses that were no longer available, to further minimise wasted ad spend.
4. Implementing Advanced Analytics
The solution included the development of a Tableau dashboard for attributing enrollments at a user level.
This dashboard integrated data from multiple sources, including Google Analytics 4 BigQuery export and various ad platforms.
A consistent key (hashed email address) was used throughout the system to ensure accurate data matching across these sources.
“Wondaris has been a game-changer for our marketing team.
The platform’s ability to unify and enrich our data has provided us with a much clearer understanding of our students and their needs. We’ve been able to create highly targeted audiences and deliver personalised messaging that drives engagement and conversions.
The integration of Wondaris with our existing marketing tools has streamlined our workflows and improved our overall efficiency. We’re now able to make data-driven decisions and optimise our campaigns in real-time.
Wondaris has empowered us to deliver more effective and impactful marketing campaigns.
Phil McCracken,
Head of Marketing & Communications, UP Education NZ
The Results
By leveraging D3’s expertise and XPON’s Wondaris platform, UP Education was able to advance its data maturity and achieve remarkable growth in online lead generation and advertising efficiency. They saw long-term digital advertising efficiencies driven by:
- Automated personalisation based on location and course information
- Accurate measurement of lead quality and campaign attribution
- Automated keyword and bidding management
UP Education also saw significant improvements in their marketing KPIs, including:
64%
Increase in online leads
28%
decrease in Cost Per Lead (CPL)
24%
increase in Click-Through Rate (CTR)
“XPON and Wondaris have demonstrated exceptional expertise and innovation,
transforming UP’s complex data landscape into a unified, highly actionable system for precise audience segmentation and real-time optimisation.
This collaboration has driven outstanding growth and efficiency in lead generation for UP, setting a new benchmark for what data-driven, personalised marketing can achieve. Partnerships like this empower us to deliver high-impact results for our clients consistently.
Alex Radford,
Co-Founder, D3
Want to see Wondaris in action?
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