Oxford Summer Courses use AI-driven attribution to optimize ROAS and attract more students

About the client

Oxford Summer Courses offers short educational programs for students aged 9 to 24 in Oxford and Cambridge colleges or at a boarding school.

The challenges:

Oxford Summer Courses offering high-end educational programs, struggled with accurately tracking their advertising effectiveness.

Their clients, often families, take time to decide, using different devices and browsers over weeks or months.

As a result, with modern-day cookie tracking restrictions, traditional attribution models that rely on tracking the whole customer journey, can’t adequately measure the incremental impact of each paid channel.

That’s why Oxford Summer Courses partnered with SegmentStream in January 2023 to:

• Overcome modern tracking restrictions and cookie regulations.
• Enhance digital marketing measurement.
• Gain a new perspective on how paid channels perform.
• Find a solution for data-driven marketing mix optimization.

SegmentStream — solution overview:

SegmentStream — is an AI-powered, cookieless solution for marketing measurement and optimization.

The solution is designed to achieve accurate attribution & ROAS measurement, by offering:

• Cross-channel marketing reporting to analyze the performance of all traffic sources in one place. Fully automatically.

• AI-driven attribution that measures ad performance beyond just clicks. Designed to give upper-funnel campaigns like Social and Video the credit they deserve.

  

• Marketing Mix Optimization — a new revolutionary solution for budget allocation with AI-powered recommendations.

  

Solution for Oxford Summer Courses

To address their challenges, SegmentStream provided Oxford Summer Courses with:

• A unified, highly customizable marketing analytics report combining costs from all ad platforms, website behavioural events & conversions, and Salesforce CRM data.
• Two custom AI-driven attribution models for primary conversion events: Applications (digital) and Students (Salesforce CRM) events, enabling OxSC to understand the incremental impact of each performance channel.
• Budget reallocation insights for channels and campaigns and a fresh perspective on upper-funnel performance to improve strategic decision-making.
• Over 15 hours of consultative service, including bi-weekly meetings with the customer service team.
• General analytics data clean-up: The SegmentStream team resolved several GA4 and Google Ads data tracking issues in collaboration with Clicky, Enway, and internal OxSC teams.

The results

SegmentStream has given Oxford Summer Courses a better understanding of their paid media spending, making it easier to manage budgets and evaluate marketing channels effectively.

Example: increased visibility on user behaviour across different country tiers.

In 2023, OxSC increased its advertising budget by 150% while keeping CPA stable.

However, despite high application rates, conversions from applications to students declined. Using SegmentStream’s AI-driven attribution, they discovered that countries like India had a high number of last-non-direct conversions, even on upper-funnel channels such as Meta.

Yet in terms of engagement analyzed by the ML model, these regions were less engaged and conducted minimal research on the website.

This insight helped the team to restructure their campaigns, isolating such countries into Tier 1B to have more control over ad spend and achieve better results across the board.

The next step — AI-driven Marketing Mix Optimization

The Oxford Summer Courses team is currently planning to test the new Optimization module from SegmentStream.

This module offers specific recommendations for budget allocation, suggesting how much to increase or decrease spending for each campaign and predicting the potential outcomes of these adjustments.

Learn more here.

Customer testimonial:

Due to the nature of our business, customer journeys are long and complex. Because of this, traditional attribution tools could not confidently measure which marketing activities truly contribute to new student applications and enrollments.

SegmentStream provided the clarity we needed. Their innovative measurement approach allowed us to accurately identify which channels and campaigns have a positive incremental impact on overall conversions.

We are now able to make more informed budget allocation decisions and have discovered many new opportunities for our ad spend optimization and ROI growth.

I would like to mention the professionalism and expertise of the SegmentStream team, which helped us along the way and enabled us to gain the most value out of the solution.

Sophie Langer, Head of Marketing at Oxford Summer Courses