How Sundance College Cut Cost Per Lead 68% While Scaling Spend 50%

Education lead generation is Google Ads at industrial scale. A career college competes for prospective students across many programs and many provinces at once, and every structural weakness in the account gets multiplied by the size of the spend. Our work with Sundance College is a story about what structure is worth when the numbers get big.

The challenge

Scale the budget meaningfully without the usual penalty, because in most accounts, pushing spend up pushes cost per lead up with it. Doing the opposite, scaling spend while cost per lead falls, takes more than budget changes. It takes a rebuild.

What we did

The centrepiece was restructuring more than 100,000 keywords into intent-based, course-specific structures. In a sprawling account, the silent killer is mixed intent: when someone researching a career path and someone ready to enrol in a specific course trigger the same ads from the same ad group, the data turns to mush and the bidding can no longer tell them apart. Rebuilding around intent and around individual courses meant every search met an ad about exactly that program, relevance and quality improved, and budgets could be steered program by program instead of being poured into one pot.

Tracking had to carry the same weight. We improved conversion tracking accuracy and reporting reliability, because at six-figure keyword scale, even small measurement errors compound into bad decisions. Reliable data was the precondition for everything else.

With the structure and measurement in place, we opened campaigns in Saskatchewan, a province the account had not been capturing, and scaled them as they proved themselves.

The results

Cost per lead was cut by 68% even as ad spend scaled up by 50%, the reverse of what scaling normally does to an account. The Saskatchewan expansion went from a standing start to becoming the top-performing province. And the rebuilt structure left the college with reporting it can trust at the program level.

The takeaway

At scale, structure is strategy. You cannot buy your way past an account where intents are mixed and tracking is shaky; you can only fix it, and then the budget finally works as hard as it should. If your account has grown large and your cost per lead grows every time the budget does, the structure is where we would look first. PPC Sorted has done it at six-figure keyword scale. Get in touch.