551 conversions in 37 days at ₹25.20 each, from under ₹14,000 of Google Ads

A study-abroad consultancy earns its living from students who can come in and sit down with a counsellor. Its real market is the area around its office, yet online adverts will happily reach people far beyond it.

We kept the Google Ads spend inside a 30 km radius of the counselling centre, built a landing page designed to turn clicks into enquiries, and kept only the placements that produced results. In 37 days, from 8 October to 13 November 2023, the consultancy recorded 551 conversions at an average of ₹25.20 each, on a total spend of under ₹14,000.

At a glance

The client

The client is an overseas education consultancy that draws its students from within 30 km of its office. The boundary is a practical one. A student living beyond it is unlikely to make the trip for a face-to-face counselling session.

In-person counselling matters in this niche because of how the decision is made. Studying abroad is one of the biggest choices a young person and their family will ever make. It involves money, distance, paperwork and a great deal of uncertainty. The student may start the search on a phone, but the family paying for it often wants to meet a counsellor face to face, ask about courses, visas and scholarships, and judge whether they trust the people giving the advice.

The journey usually runs like this. A student becomes curious and searches for options. They land on a consultancy's page, make an enquiry, and then visit the office for a counselling session. Every step after the search depends on the student being close enough to walk through the door. For this kind of business, the neighbourhood around the office is where the customers are.

The challenge

Left to its default settings, an online campaign has no sense of distance. A study-abroad advert can draw clicks from across the state or further. Each click costs money, and a click from someone who cannot travel to the counselling centre is wasted, however keen that person is.

The second leak was the landing page. A visitor who arrives on a muddled or generic page often leaves without taking any action. Buying the click and then losing the person behind it is a quiet but very common way for ad money to vanish.

The task, then, was twofold. Put the budget only in front of students near enough to visit, and give those who clicked a page good enough to keep them.

What we did

A 30 km perimeter around the office

We set the Google Ads radius targeting to 30 km around the counselling centre. Fewer rupees went on enquiries from people too far away to come in for a session.

It sounds simple, and it is. It is also often skipped, because a wider net looks like more opportunity. For a business that depends on visits, a wider net mostly means more clicks that can never become a counselling session. We have applied the same principle on Meta for an elder care service in Kochi, where the ads stayed inside the areas the care team could reach.

A landing page built to convert

The new landing page led with three things students want to know: help choosing a course, visa success rates and support with scholarships. Those are the reasons people contact a consultancy, so the page answered them straight away instead of making visitors dig.

The enquiry points were low-friction: easy to find and quick to use. A student who is ready to ask a question should not have to hunt for the form, or face a long list of fields, before they can ask it.

Watching where visitors left

A session recording plays back a real visitor's path through the page. A heatmap shows the spots that get clicked and the depth people scroll to. Using the two together, we found where visitors were giving up, and then moved the form and adjusted the layout to fix those points.

This turns guesswork into evidence. Instead of debating what visitors might want, you can see what they actually do, and fix the exact spots where they give up.

Placements judged on results

Display and responsive assets appeared on education placements, meaning the websites and apps where people read about studying. We sorted those placements by how efficiently they converted. The ones that turned visits into conversions stayed, and the rest were cut. That pruning is what pulled the average cost per conversion down to ₹25.20.

The results

Put plainly: over 37 days, a spend of less than ₹14,000 gave the consultancy 551 conversions, each costing ₹25.20 on average, and all from a campaign that never left its 30 km patch.

The location matters as much as the cost. Because the campaign was held to the area the counsellors serve, the budget went on students within reach of the counselling centre: the people the consultancy can actually meet.

Why it worked

The map came before the message

Holding the campaign to 30 km kept the money on students who could realistically sit down with a counsellor. Interest from towns too distant to visit never got the chance to use up the budget.

The landing page counted as part of the campaign

An advert pays for the visit; whether that visit converts is down to the page. Putting course choice, visa success rates and scholarship support first answered the questions students arrive with, and the recordings showed what still needed fixing.

Placements were judged on results, not traffic

Low-cost clicks are simple to buy and frequently worthless. Each placement was kept or dropped on the conversions it produced, not on the traffic it sent, so the budget stayed with the ones that delivered.

Pay only for students who can walk through your door, then make the page worth the click.

How to apply this to your business

• Work out how far your customers will realistically travel to see you, and set your ad targeting to that area.
• Put the answers to your customers' main questions at the top of your landing page.
• Keep enquiry forms short and easy to find, on a phone as well as a computer.
• Watch session recordings or heatmaps to see where visitors give up, and fix those spots first.
• Review display placements regularly and drop the ones that send visits but no enquiries.
• Judge the campaign on cost per conversion, not on clicks or traffic.

Questions business owners ask

How can a study-abroad consultant get more student enquiries from Google Ads?

Limit the spend to the area students can travel from, send clicks to a page that answers their main questions, and keep only the placements that convert. That combination brought this consultancy 551 conversions in 37 days. For a Meta approach in the same niche, see our study-abroad consultancy in Ernakulam.

What radius should a local consultancy target?

Use the distance your clients will realistically travel for a meeting. For this consultancy that was 30 km around the counselling centre, because students further out rarely made the journey for a session.

Why do my Google Ads get clicks but no enquiries?

Often the problem is the page, not the advert. A confusing or generic page loses visitors you have already paid for. Session recordings and heatmaps show where they leave, so you can fix the form placement and the layout.

Are display ads worth it for education businesses?

They can be, if every placement is judged on conversions rather than traffic. In this case the display and responsive assets ran on education sites and apps, and cutting the weaker placements is what brought the average to ₹25.20.

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