A Sky Designers performance case study — May to June 2026
When an education brand asks whether Meta ads can genuinely fill classrooms — not just generate likes — the only honest answer is data. Over an eight-week flight from 1 May to 28 June 2026, we ran a full-funnel Meta campaign for SITC Campus promoting its English Diploma programme. The result: LKR 21.16 million in tracked revenue from LKR 2.33 million in ad spend — a 9.09x return on ad spend, with 1,628 confirmed student bookings.
Here's how the numbers break down, and what actually drove them.
The Headline Numbers
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Ad spend | LKR 2,328,534 |
| Tracked revenue | LKR 21,164,000 |
| ROAS | 9.09x |
| Confirmed bookings | 1,628 |
| Cost per booking | LKR 1,430 |
| Average revenue per booking | LKR 13,000 |
For every rupee invested in Meta ads, the campaign returned just over nine rupees in enrolment revenue. At an average course value of LKR 13,000 per student and an acquisition cost of roughly LKR 1,430, the campaign paid for each new student more than nine times over.
Reach and Efficiency
The campaign delivered 22.9 million impressions across 6.49 million unique people — a frequency of 3.53, meaning the average prospect saw the message about three and a half times over the flight. That is squarely in the sweet spot for education offers: enough repetition to build familiarity and trust, without tipping into creative fatigue.
Efficiency held up at scale. Cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM) came in around LKR 102, and cost per 1,000 people reached at roughly LKR 359 — strong numbers for the Sri Lankan market, achieved while running 18 concurrent ad campaigns segmented by audience, creative format, and funnel stage.
The Funnel: From Scroll to Seat
A 9x ROAS is never one metric doing the work. It's a chain of conversions, each one compounding:
- Attention. A mix of static posts and a dedicated video series generated 2.84 million 3-second video views — a 12.4% hook rate. Of those hooked, 694,525 watched through (a 24.4% hold rate), proof the video content was doing real persuasion work, not just interrupting feeds.
- Intent. The campaign drove 35,317 link clicks and 99,126 total engagements, at a cost of roughly LKR 66 per click.
- Conversation. 10,903 people started a message conversation — a 30.9% click-to-message ratio. Nearly one in three people who clicked took the next step and spoke to the campus directly. This is where a click-to-message strategy earns its keep: conversations convert far better than cold form fills.
- Enrolment. 1,628 of those conversations became confirmed bookings — a 14.9% message-to-booking conversion rate. That final step is a joint achievement between ad targeting quality and the client's response team; ads deliver warm prospects, but fast, helpful replies close them.
What Made the Difference
Creative variety with a video backbone. The blend of post creatives and a structured video series meant we could hook cold audiences with short-form video while retargeting engaged viewers with direct-response creatives.
Message-first conversion path. For a considered purchase like a diploma, prospective students have questions. Routing traffic into conversations rather than a checkout page respected that buying behaviour — and the 14.9% booking rate from messages validated it.
Disciplined frequency management. Holding frequency near 3.5 across an eight-week flight kept the campaign persuasive without burning the audience, protecting both CPM and engagement rate through the full duration.
Granular campaign structure. Eighteen active campaigns allowed budget to flow toward the audiences and creatives that were converting, rather than averaging spend across winners and losers.
The Takeaway
Education marketing on Meta works when the full funnel is engineered deliberately — hook-driven video for attention, conversation-based conversion for trust, and rigorous tracking from click to confirmed booking. A 9.09x ROAS isn't a fluke of a good month; it's the output of a measured system.
Sky Designers is a Colombo-based digital marketing agency specialising in performance advertising across Meta, TikTok, and Google. Want results like these for your institution? Get in touch.