Significantly reducing the CPA of Champ Code Academy’s Google Ads campaigns by 60x

Overview

Champ Code Academy is an online coding school that teaches kids ages 7-15 how to code on Roblox Studios and Minecraft Education.

Established during the COVID-19 era, they experienced a surge in new customers as parents were worried about their kids’ newfound boredom as they couldn’t go out of the house.

Goals

Generate inbound leads

The primary goal for Champ Code Academy was to use their monthly marketing budget to generate inbound leads at a specified CPA and CPL.

Champ Code wanted to test new ways of acquiring customers. As their marketing agency, we proposed using Google Ads as one channel and Meta Ads as another.

Maintain a Cost Per Lead (CPL) of $50

A healthy Cost Per Lead for Champ Code would be $50. By maintaining this CPL, it ensures that their marketing ROI is profitable, and that they can continue scaling their budget to increase lead volume and the rate where they acquire new customers.

Maintain a CPA of $150

$150 is the healthy Cost Per Acquisition for Champ Code. This would mean a 33% Sales Conversion Rate. Therefore, we had to make sure that the leads being generated through Google had high intent to sign up for their services. Lucky for us, Google Ads Search Engine Marketing is known to generate extremely high quality and high intent leads.

Challenges

Outdated website

Champ Code’s website was relatively old and had yet to be renewed. It had a simple design but did not contain enough information to persuade users to convert into an inbound lead.

As their marketing agency, we proposed to design a campaign-specific landing page for them.

Low Search Volume

Typically, a healthy search volume to conduct Search Engine Marketing would be at least 100. However, in the “online coding class” niche, there were only a handful of keywords that meet this criteria.

Take a look at the keyword ideas list below. How many relevant keywords with sufficient search volume for Google Ads can you see?

Three. The keywords are: “kids coding classes”, “online class for coding”, and “online coding courses”. Hence, we had to leverage broad match and phrase match keywords to show our ads to as many people as we can while maintaining ad relevance.

Strategies

Aesthetic Landing Page Design

We made use of the best elements Champ Code already had on their website, and combined it all into one page while focusing on one simple call to action. Enquire.

We included their 4.7/5 star Google Reviews for social proof and tried to maximize conversion rates by asking for the lowest commitment possible, submitting an enquiry form.

We believe that using an enquiry form performs better on a landing page instead of a immediate service sign up. The service sign up consists of a much higher level of commitment, which qualified leads may abandon because they were not able to get their questions answered by customer service.

360 Campaign Restructuring

Champ Code’s previous Google Ads campaigns were unsuccessful mostly due to the poor setup and lack of proper conversion tracking.

We conducted an in-depth audit and turned their account around by setting up proper conversion tracking on Google Tag Manager, conducting and implementing precise keyword research, as well as using best practices to set up their new Google Ads Search campaigns.

Landing Page A/B Testing

To improve conversion rates even further, we tested 2 landing pages against each other in Google Ads to see which page performs better in terms of conversion rate. We specifically tested headlines, descriptions, and call to actions on the landing page.

Meta Advertising

We helped Champ Code craft some creative video ideas and implemented them into Meta Ads, targeting parents ages 35-65+ with kids for relevance, higher engagement, and optimal Cost Per Result (CPL).

Results

We were able to significantly lower CPAs in Google Ads from a whopping $5810 to a very profitable $96 (6000%!)

In Meta Ads, the videos we created saw a 3x-4x increase in CTRs (engagement) but unfortunately was not successful in overtaking the performance of static image ads. The results of our test shows that static image ads perform better for Champ Code Academy, and we stopped using videos for Meta Advertising.

We were successful in achieving Champ Code Academy’s CPA goals because of the meticulous campaign and Google Ads restructuring we implemented.

See below for a snapshot of our campaign setup, ad group segmentations, ad copywriting, keyword targeting, landing page design, and Meta Ads creatives for Champ Code Academy.