Course businesses live or die on promo weeks, but they can’t survive on them. This account needed both: a baseline that held above 3X ROAS while budget scaled from $10K to $25K a month, and the ability to hit hard during a six-day sale window. Here’s how we built for both.
$46,600
Jul – Oct 2021
$149,000
Google Ads attributed
3.21
Held while spend scaled
$17.14
Across roughly 2,700 conversions
$10K → $25K
With ROAS staying above 3X
USA & Canada
Course businesses have a specific problem. Revenue concentrates into a handful of promotional windows each year, which makes the rest of the calendar feel like it doesn’t matter. So accounts get built for launches and neglected in between, and the baseline never gets strong enough to carry more budget.
This account was spending around $10,000 a month and couldn’t push past it without returns dropping. The goal was to more than double spend while keeping ROAS above 3X, and to be in a position to actually capitalize when a promo window opened.
Keywords with completely different intent were sharing campaigns. Someone searching “how to start freelance proofreading” and someone searching “proofreading course price” are at opposite ends of a decision. Sitting in the same campaign, they shared a budget, a bid strategy, and a message. The high-intent traffic was subsidizing the browsing traffic and neither was optimized properly.
Conversion actions were configured as “Include in” for actions with no revenue attached. This is the one that quietly ruins course accounts. When actions carrying no money are included in the primary conversion goal, Google’s bidding treats a free lead the same as a paid enrollment. The algorithm optimizes toward whatever’s easiest to produce, which is always the free action. The account then looks busy and earns less.
Multiple conversion actions were set up on top of each other, compounding the same problem and making it impossible to tell what was actually driving revenue.
There was no remarketing campaign at all. Courses are a considered purchase. People research for weeks, compare instructors, wait for a sale. With no remarketing running, every visitor who wasn’t ready that day was gone. In a category where almost nobody buys on first visit, that’s the majority of the traffic.
$46,600 in spend produced $149,000 in tracked revenue at a $17.14 cost per sale.
The number worth paying attention to isn’t 3.21. It’s that ROAS stayed above 3X while monthly spend went from $10,000 to $25,000. Efficiency usually pays for scale. You spend more, you reach further into less-qualified demand, and returns slip. Holding above 3X through a 2.5X budget increase means the account was finding new profitable demand at the same rate it was consuming the existing pool.
Promo weeks are a different discipline from steady-state account management. You have six days, no time for a bidding algorithm to learn, and a spend level several times normal. Get it wrong and you burn a month’s budget into an audience that isn’t ready. Get it right and it funds the quarter.
Both promos below ran on audiences the baseline account had already built. That’s the part most people miss about promo performance. A 5X return over six days isn’t a promo-week tactic, it’s the payoff for having a remarketing list and an audience structure in place before the sale started.
This promo ran inside the main campaign period above, and its revenue is included in the $149,000 total.
$4,090.42
$21,083.40
5.15
6 days
USA
5.15X in six days, at roughly four times the account’s normal daily spend. The reason it worked is upstream of the promo itself: the remarketing audiences built during the baseline months meant there was a warm list to sell to on day one, rather than six days spent trying to build awareness and close in the same window.
Separate campaign period, run after the engagement above.
$8,262.76
$28,085
3.40
6 days
USA
Double the Labor Day budget at a lower ROAS, and that trade was deliberate. Black Friday is the most competitive auction of the year in every category, including education. Costs rise for everyone. Protecting a 5X return would have meant leaving volume on the table during the single highest-intent buying window of the year.
3.40X on $8,262 of spend produced $19,822 in net profit over six days, tracked in the client’s own third-party platform rather than reported by Google.
AI can make mistakes. Please verify for accuracy.
