Find the Breakdown That Sounds Like Your School
Ad dependency, invisible program pages, no funnel behind the form. Each case study below starts from a specific problem. Read the one that matches yours, with the full data behind what we changed.
Full transparency on timelines including the one that took twelve months, not ninety days.
Different Starting Points. Identical Diagnostic.
Some schools come to us spending $60,000 a month on ads with a CAC above 20% of program tuition. Others have real institutional brand authority that never reaches their online program pages. Others have organic efforts running in parallel to paid, with no coordination between the two. The starting point changes. What we do first doesn’t. We model which keywords represent real enrollment intent, what top-3 positioning is worth in leads and revenue, and what each channel actually costs you per enrolled student. That model is what we’re held to afterward.
Which One Sounds Like You?
Pick the problem. The case study behind it shows the full data.
70% of our growth depends on ads, and our CAC keeps climbing
$60,000+ per month across Meta and Google. Customer acquisition cost above 20% of program tuition. No funnel, no automation, no nurturing, a landing page, a form, and hope. Some organic presence, completely disconnected from everything else.
Results
Organic leads
2,000
6,000+
Monthly revenue
$250K
$750K+
Ad dependency
Eliminated
Timeline
18 months
We have brand authority. Our program pages don’t
Healthy brand traffic on the main domain. Near-zero visibility on the subdomain carrying the highest-value programs. 70% of keywords ranking beyond position 21. “Online computer science degree”, 9,900 monthly searches and sitting at position 73.
Results
Organic lead volume
4X increase
Lead (Enrollment)
10%+
Modeled from 3 keywords
116+ leads/month
Timeline
12 months
We don’t know what organic would actually return versus our ad spend
Paid search running profitably at 1.95x. No clean comparison against what the same budget returns organically. Four months of CRM data. Every lead, every cent, every closed deal, split by channel.
Results
CAC paid vs organic
$1,462
$760
Full ecosystem ROI
3.75x
Leads tracked
79
Timeline
4 months
Not Sure Which One Is You?
Most schools recognize pieces of all three. The audit tells you which breakdown is actually costing you enrollments and which one to fix first.
Free 30-minute session · No commitment · Education sector only
What We’re Not Going to Tell You
That It Happens in 90 Days
None of this happens in 90 days. Rebuilding technical foundations comes before rankings, and every timeline above is stated exactly as it happened. Four months, twelve months, eighteen.
That You Should Cut Your Ad Budget
We also don’t cut anyone’s ad budget. Paid search stayed profitable at Discernys and we left it running. Organic isn’t a replacement for ads, it’s the margin layer underneath them.
That Marketing Closes the Deal
And one number worth being honest about: at the end of the Discernys engagement, 69 opportunities were still sitting open in their pipeline. Meetings booked, quotes sent, not closed. Marketing had done its job. What determined the next quarter wasn’t more traffic.
None of These Sound Like You?
Then let’s run the diagnostic on your numbers. Your current CAC by channel, which program keywords represent real revenue opportunity, and what top-3 positioning would be worth in leads and enrollment revenue. Same analysis we ran on all three, no generic audit template.
Free 30-minute session · No commitment · Education sector only