Executive summary
Client:
Cluey Learning
Industry:
Education
Specialisation:
Online tutoring service
Channel:
Paid & Organic
Company
Cluey Learning is a national online tutoring service offering personalised, one-on-one sessions for students in years 2-12.
Currently offering English, Maths, Chemistry, Biology and Physics, Cluey Learning gives students access to high-quality learning sessions at a time and in an environment that suits them.
All lessons align with the Australian National Curriculum and are tailored to meet the specific needs of individual students. They’re recorded so they can be revisited by students and reviewed by parents to monitor their child’s progress.
In 2019, the company received $20AUD million in Series A funding, bringing its total investment to $31AUD million. In 2020, the company was listed on the Australian Stock Exchange in the hope of making an impact on the learning of more and more kids.
Challenge
Limited platform capabilities and resources provided a suboptimal UX, ultimately hindering conversions
Cluey Learning’s tech team were focused on improving customer experience, so didn’t have time or resources to create an optimal user experience on landing pages for both their Google Ads and organic search results. These limitations were affecting their paid search and SEO performance considerably.
Suboptimal platform capabilities and stretched internal resources meant:
- Lack of scalability: the tech team were busy focused on improving the student and tutor learning experiences, so weren’t able to build landing pages at scale that targeted long tail search terms or provide UX on its landing pages that reflected how users searched. Ultimately, it meant the company wasn’t able to reach new users at scale and acquire the desired number of new students per month.
- Ads leading to irrelevant pages: if Cluey’s team was bidding on “tutor bondi” those ads were taking users to the homepage and not a listing page that displayed all relevant results for the user’s search term.
- Not being able to target location-based keywords at scale: even though Cluey Learning offers virtual lessons, and not on-site, face-to-face lessons, it still wished to target location-based keywords in the hope of attracting traffic from users who aren’t aware a virtual equivalent exists.
It was the promise of alleviating stress on internal resources, expanding UX capabilities and significantly improving SEO performance that initially excited Cluey Learning about Longtail UX. But when they explored the Customer Acquisition Platform further, they were equally as motivated by how the platform also had conversion optimisation capabilities that delivered personalised landing pages at scale for their Google ad campaigns. Implementing a service that spanned both paid and organic ensured their core channels would deliver users to landing pages with optimal UX.
Solution
- Cluey Learning’s primary objective was to build hyper-relevant pages at scale without burdening their internal tech team. This would ultimately improve the UX on their landing pages, boost SEO performance, increase conversion rate and decrease CPA for paid search. To achieve this, Longtail UX recommended launching thousands of LUX Paid Smart Pages for Cluey Learning in July 2019, with hundreds launched for LUX Organic in July 2020. Longtail UX also proposed to embed Cluey Learning reviews on Smart Pages to drive conversions further.
Results
Since implementing LUX Smart Pages, Cluey Learning has launched thousands of multi-product Smart Pages with optimal UX and without burdening its internal tech teams. This has resulted in a significant boost in SEO performance, increased conversion rate and decreased CPA.
Overall, Cluey has seen a significant increase in enrolments since launch, which has been helped by the new ability to target local search terms at scale. The company has seen its cost per student decrease dramatically from $1,371 a student before LUX to $429 a student today. At the same time scaling revenues from $0.9m in FY19 to $34.4m in FY22.
Impact on Cluey Learning’s marketing and tech teams:
Cluey’s internal marketing team is now able to launch, test and replace thousands of Smart Pages and Smart Links without burning through technical resources instead of only building a handful of pages.
Cluey’s marketing team can now:
- Test functionality on the fly without holding up product roadmap/ticket queue in a highly agile environment
- Reduce the total number of requests sent to the internal tech team
- Decouple SEO optimisation from the tech team
- Launch landing pages for paid search without interfering with organic search
Impact on Cluey Learning’s marketing strategy
The LUX Customer Acquisition Platform now allows Cluey Learning to appear in Google search results for a wide range of tutoring, schooling and education search terms in Australia.
They can now explore ideas they would have otherwise shut down due to capability and resource limitations. For example, they now target every single school in Australia with special offers (based on locations, school names etc.) Each ad includes metadata specific to individual school names, for example, “Special offer for <insert school name>”, and are so highly targeted they drive a higher than average conversion rate – with limited competition on the search terms.
They can also determine what regions get the most search volume. With this information, its marketing team can build more dedicated landing pages in-house that target these high-interest locations at the top of the funnel, while Smart Pages cover the bottom of the funnel. This process ensures Cluey Learning is catering to all stages of the funnel.
Paid ads
Cluey Learning can now dominate niches it otherwise couldn’t have on its paid ads, with high-intent, low search volume keywords. Smart Pages have been a critical driver in helping to bring its cost per click down.
As Google advertising prices continue to increase, Cluey has been able to reduce its cost per customer significantly by improving the relevance of its ad landing pages and increasing its spend in organic.
Organic
Cluey Learning has launched thousands of hyper-relevant new landing pages with minimal set-up time required from its developer team. They’re now able to launch, test, measure and optimise these pages in a highly agile environment.
Before LUX, it wasn’t realistic for the tech team to duplicate thousands of their live landing pages and update metadata according to target search terms for the sake of having unique pages. With LUX, Cluey can take the various feeds they have and automate the process so that all pages are optimised to the keywords they want to target.
Optimisations
With each lead that Cluey feeds through the system, including the ones generated by LUX, ait can identify the last page the users were on. From there, they can determine which specific Smart Pages convert the most effectively, and at what price per lead. If a lead is low cost, but the quality of the lead is low, it can deactivate this page. Similarly, if a lead on another page is high cost, but the lead is high quality, it can choose to keep this page activated.
Proving the worth of SEO
Smart Pages have consistently ranked and generated leads, with conversion rates hovering around 9-10%.
“It’s definitely a challenge on the organic side to prove to management that a strategy is working, but because Smart Pages are so measurable, it’s definitely made my job easier to prove the worth of SEO.” – James Stewardson, Growth Marketing Manager, Cluey Learning
12-month plan
- Cluey Learning acquired Code Camp – a multi-location holiday camp that encourages kids to get creative with technology – in 2022. It currently has plans to implement Smart Pages into Code Camp’s marketing mix.
- Steady growth since implementing Smart Pages has opened up potential opportunities to expand internationally, where the market size is considerably larger.
- LUX’s Client Growth team has plans to expand into new regions by targeting new location-based search terms.
- The ability to test categories quickly has opened up opportunities to expand into new subject offerings. For example, not long ago, Cluey Learning launched biology and physics as new subject offerings.
- With Cluey’s LUX Smart Pages now generating substantial volumes of organic and paid search traffic each month – optimising and improving the conversion rate of these pages to maximise the results from every click is a key focus going forward.
“Not only does Longtail UX have the tools, but the people and support to help us use them - LUX’s people and their expertise are the key to our success in expanding our search marketing. It’s evident that they genuinely care about our results and work with us throughout to ensure we’re constantly optimising and improving.”