An online education (skill-course) lead gen offer run into India via a mix of native and Facebook traffic over three weeks — 720 qualified leads at $1.60 average CPA, $1,152 total spend.
The task
By the start, the advertiser had confirmed demand but no controllable volume. The task was to generate qualified leads for online skill courses in India, not just cheap raw application volume.
We worked the "Education" vertical in the India market. Payment model — CPA per qualified lead, main sources — native advertising, Facebook Ads.
How we did it
We built the buy around four decisions.
- Bet on creatives with a concrete outcome ("get a job in 6 months") instead of a generic "learn a new skill" message.
- Launched targeting by regional language — Hindi and English separately, rather than English only.
- Added a short pre-qualification questionnaire (current employment status, target field) before the full contact form to qualify the lead.
What went wrong
Not everything went according to plan. The common assumption that English-only targeting reaches the "serious" audience segment wasn't confirmed by the data — and without pre-filtering, the sales team wasted calls on unqualified leads.
Launched Hindi and English separately instead of defaulting to English — this noticeably expanded the addressable audience without losing lead quality. Added a short questionnaire before the contact form — the longer, more tightly filtered funnel consistently outperformed the short, unfiltered one on final lead value.
The result
Once stabilized, the campaign held the following numbers. Over the three weeks: leads — 720, cpa — $1.60, spend — $1,152.
720 qualified leads at an average CPA of $1.60 and $1,152 in spend over three weeks.
What we took away
- A creative with a concrete career outcome performs stronger in this market than a generic message about learning.
- A slightly longer funnel with a filtering question can deliver higher final lead value than a short, unfiltered one.
These numbers belong to one specific setup, geo, and buying period. Economics will differ on another offer or in another season — we always recalculate them before launch.