How Education Brands Are Winning with Paid Search & Social Advertising

Education marketing moves fast—and lately, it’s moving in even more directions at once. Between learner expectations, shifting platforms, and internal pressures to make budgets work harder, it’s a lot to manage. And paid media teams are often the ones caught right in the middle of that tension.

A few forces every education marketer is feeling right now:

• Career-aligned demand is reshaping the funnel. Fields like nursing, teaching, and engineering are seeing sharp enrollment interest—but that demand can spike or shift fast based on job market signals.
• AI-driven personalization is raising the bar. Prospective students want content that speaks to their path, not generic program ads. But evolving privacy rules make delivering that at scale more complicated.
• Search and discovery behaviors are in flux. As students turn to AI chat, video platforms, and social search, it’s getting harder to predict where intent signals will show up—or how long the path to enrollment will take.

In this environment, paid search and social remain some of the most adaptable tools education marketers have. But it takes a more thoughtful, tech-enabled approach to use them well. Budgets need to flex across changing audience behaviors. Targeting needs to adjust in real time. And measurement has to evolve as attribution gets harder.

Which is where the right tools—and the right team—start to make the difference.

Skai’s AI-driven tech that shaped the case studies ahead:

• Campaign Automation: Accelerate campaign setup, optimization, and scaling with fewer manual steps.
• Budget Navigator: Optimize budget allocation across portfolios and campaigns to drive efficiency.
• Search Term Analysis: Surface underperforming search terms to improve paid search performance.
• Cross-Channel Audiences: Extend audience reach across search and social to drive more consistent performance.
• Portfolio Optimizer: Balance budgets and bids across campaigns to hit performance targets more efficiently.

Ogilvy: Driving more leads with smarter paid social

Ogilvy’s team came in to help an education services client already deep into the paid media grind. The client had been manually optimizing their paid social campaigns daily—trying to balance performance with the realities of limited bandwidth. Leads were coming in, but growth was slow, and the team knew they weren’t getting as much out of the channel as they could.

Ogilvy’s cross-channel approach started by connecting the dots between search and social—using Cross-Channel Audiences to retarget prospects on Facebook who had engaged with paid search ads. That gave their campaigns a stronger base of high-intent audiences to work from.

Then they brought in Portfolio Optimizer to drive smarter budget and bid optimization across key program areas: Nursing, Military, and General enrollment campaigns. With Campaign Automation layered in to refresh creative when CPL thresholds were hit, the team could keep pace with shifting performance without constant manual work.

One detail that mattered: moving optimization off of Facebook pixel data and tying it to actual CRM outcomes. That change alone gave the team much clearer visibility into what was really driving enrollments, not just clicks.

The result? A more efficient, more effective program—and a client team that could finally step back from the daily grind and focus on broader strategy.

Final results:

• 40% increase in leads
• 28% decrease in cost per lead
• Significant time savings for the team

WildFi: Scaling conversions and cutting wasted spend with paid search optimization

WildFi faces a common education marketing agency challenge: juggling highly segmented campaigns for multiple programs while keeping acquisition costs under control. For NUC University, the largest private university in Puerto Rico, that balancing act was getting harder. The university needed to increase search conversions while lowering CPA—and do it at scale across multiple schools and programs.

WildFi leaned on Budget Navigator and Portfolio Optimizer to help manage publisher bidding algorithms more effectively. Given that each NUC program required distinct segmentation and bidding strategies, this capability helped the team optimize across complexity, without overspending or missing key opportunities.

Where WildFi really found additional efficiency was with Search Term Analysis. By quickly identifying non-converting terms and eliminating wasted spend, the team saved NUC more than $14,000 in just seven months—a meaningful impact for any education paid search program operating in a competitive vertical.

And because those savings translated directly into more focused, high-quality traffic, conversion performance followed.

Final results:

• 23% increase in paid search conversions
• $14,750 saved by eliminating inefficient search terms

Conclusion: Education marketing is getting more complex by the day

The complexity in education marketing isn’t slowing down. If managing search and social was hard before, it’s about to get even harder. Audience behaviors are shifting faster. Platforms are changing how and where intent signals show up. And the pressure to drive results with leaner budgets is only going to increase.

That’s why AI-driven tools aren’t a nice-to-have anymore—they’re essential. It takes automation, intelligence, and adaptability to manage the complexity and squeeze every last bit of return from your marketing investments. Otherwise? That spend will find its way to other parts of the marketing department that can prove stronger impact.

Curious how AI-powered innovation can help your team stay ahead? Schedule a demo to see what’s possible.