BACKGROUND

INSEAD is a global leader in delivering impactful learning experiences for business executives and students around the world. Consistently top-ranked, the institution fosters digital transformation, innovation, and global perspectives through its Executive Education programmes and Master Programmes.​

As one of the largest business schools globally, INSEAD enrolls over 1,000 participants annually in their master’s programmes. The school is equally committed to executive education, with over 10,000 executives participating in their open and online programmes each year. This exposure to rich global perspectives and diverse cultures equips graduates for successful careers across the globe.

Since 2017, INSEAD has partnered with us to leverage our paid media expertise, enhancing lead generation for their Executive Education and Master Programmes, including renowned courses such as the MBA, Executive MBA, Executive Master in Finance, Executive Master in Change, Master in Management, and the dual-degree Tsinghua-INSEAD Executive MBA.

Challenges + Goals

INSEAD Executive Education programme relied on Google Search as its main driver for leads, but there were concerns that best practices were not being implemented, leading to challenges such as low-quality leads, inefficient budget use, and a lack of actionable insights.

To address these challenges, INSEAD approached us to restructure their global accounts, make improvements across all campaign entities, and expand to historically challenging markets, such as the USA.

We were asked to work with one key point of contact but also regularly communicate with several stakeholders responsible for over 50 Executive Education programmes — all with varying keyword themes and audience profiles.

This initial phase was crucial in demonstrating our ability to enhance lead generation efforts via Google Search, a channel whose effectiveness was under scrutiny. Our key challenges were to increase leads and participants, expand new programme campaigns, and target new markets all within the budget as the previous year.

Building on our success with Executive Education, INSEAD extended our collaboration to their Masters Programmes to facilitate school level synergies in search, reflecting trust in our ability to drive significant improvements across both areas.

While the key objectives of the Master Programmes were similar to those of the Executive Education, there was an added focus on improving reporting accuracy by integrating CRM data with Google Search insights. This approach aimed to provide a clearer picture of the search campaigns’ performance, facilitate synergies across different programmes, and ensure effective communication among stakeholders.

strategy + execution

To foster a partnership where all stakeholders were committed to continuous improvement, our strategy was comprehensive and included:

• Establishing regular communication with programme marketing managers and directors through weekly calls and quarterly reviews to deeply understand programme dynamics across the portfolio before and after restructuring.
• Conducting an extensive audit to identify and rectify technical and structural deficiencies in existing campaigns and accounts.
• Creating a consistent campaign management framework to streamline optimization, expansion, execution, and reporting on a large scale. Setup account structure that supports campaign management and expansion across multiple regions around the globe
• Performing in-depth keyword research to uncover new themes, landing page opportunities, and develop new ad creatives.
• Setting up comprehensive negative keyword lists to prevent spending on irrelevant searches or incorrectly triggering keywords in the wrong campaign.
• Helping INSEAD better understand the true value of search as an acquisition channel, we blended CRM data with ad campaign data. This integration provided accurate monthly reports and an interactive dashboard, optimizing lead management and nurturing processes and increasing high-quality leads.

Due to the ongoing expansion of the account, we could not afford to let it outgrow our capabilities. We had to be proactive and think ahead of the client’s needs and requirements. This necessity drove us to develop bespoke code and processes to innovate how we manage large-scale accounts with complex structures and data sets while retaining our agility to provide granular insights for optimization and reporting.

This proactive approach for the Executive Education programme enabled the account size to more than double, achieved a 13% growth in participants with the same budget, and led to a 35% increase in share of voice on Google.

In the Master Programmes campaign, our focus on iteration and continuous improvement was key. By prioritizing the right tasks, we exceeded our initial qualified leads target by 19% and increased average monthly unique leads by 55%.

We continued to expand beyond search and display to cover other paid media channels, reflecting our commitment to INSEAD. We value our strong relationship with them and look forward to supporting their continued success.