Case studiesHigher education
Charles Darwin University
The first paid flight of the Charles Darwin University engagement: a six-week intake campaign across 25 faculty-level Facebook creative variants and a high-intent retargeting display layer. 136 measurable conversions across paid social and retargeting, with the retargeting track holding an 11.52% click-to-conversion rate at A$125.53 per conversion, several times typical retargeting benchmarks of one to two percent.
Outcome
retargeting cost per conversion at an 11.52% click-to-conversion rate· Six-week intake flight
Client
Charles Darwin University
Industry
Higher education
Region
AU + South America
Engagement length
Six-week intake flight
Services touched
- Search
- Social
- Data
01The challenge
A smaller-cohort intake, six weeks of paid window, and the pilot that had to earn the full account.
Charles Darwin University was preparing for its Summer Semester intake, the smaller cohort that runs alongside the main Semester 1 intake.
The brief was a six-week paid social and retargeting flight across the same 17 faculties that would later feature in the full Semester 1 work, each with its own creative requirements, audience segments and budget ring.
For a university running a smaller mid-year intake, the test was whether faculty-level paid social and tight retargeting could deliver measurable applications at a defensible cost in a compressed window. The Summer Semester campaign would set the operational precedent for the much larger Semester 1 engagement that followed.
02The approach
Twenty-five faculty creative variants, A/B-tested weekly, and a retargeting layer split by intent.
The campaign ran across five paid channels with separately reconciled budgets: paid search via Google Ads, paid social on Facebook, retargeting display on AdRoll, brand display on Google Display Network, and YouTube.
Within Facebook, 25 separate faculty-level creatives were produced and run as A/B pairs across IT, Education, Engineering, Law, Design, Health Science, Psychology, Environmental Science, Humanitarian Studies, Business, Science, BESS, Social Work and Business Accounting, plus a corporate brand variant. Each pair was rotated weekly across the campaign window, with budget shifted toward the better-performing variant in each pair.
Retargeting display ran on AdRoll, split between a high-intent retargeting track built from recent CDU site visitors and a lower-intent retargeting audience for upper-funnel re-engagement.
03The result
A$125.53 retargeting cost per conversion at an 11.52% click-to-conversion rate.
Across the paid social and retargeting portion of the Summer Semester campaign, Facebook delivered 70 conversions across 25 faculty creative variants, with 803,510 reach and 9,787 clicks at a A$194.70 average cost per conversion.
AdRoll retargeting delivered 66 conversions across 573 high-intent clicks, an 11.52% click-to-conversion rate and a A$125.53 average cost per conversion. The 11.52% rate sits well above typical retargeting display benchmarks of one to two percent, reflecting both the high-intent audience construction (prior CDU site visitors) and the faculty-specific creative routing applied during retargeting.
Combined, the paid social and retargeting layers delivered 136 verifiable conversions at a blended A$161.13 cost per conversion.
This was the engagement's pilot. Performance against ring-fenced faculty budgets across creative testing at scale and high-intent retargeting earned the agency the larger Semester 1 recruitment programme that followed, which subsequently delivered 9,187 applications at A$27.08 CPA.
The deeper outcomes
Behind the headline metric.
- 25 Facebook creative variants produced, A/B tested and weekly-optimised across the six-week intake window
- 11.52% retargeting click-to-conversion rate against an audience of prior CDU site visitors, several times typical retargeting benchmarks of one to two percent
- A$125.53 retargeting cost per conversion across 66 retargeting conversions via AdRoll
- Pilot performance directly precipitated the full account takeover for the larger Semester 1 intake, which subsequently delivered 9,187 applications at A$27.08 CPA
In the work
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