A Sky Designers performance case study — Lanka Business Corporation, Executive Diploma in Insurance Practice, 5 May to 15 August 2026
Most education campaigns are judged on impressions. This one was judged on enrolments.
Over 103 days, Sky Designers ran nine Meta campaigns for Lanka Business Corporation's Executive Diploma in Insurance Practice. The result: LKR 230,533 in ad spend produced 155 paid registrations at LKR 55,000 each — LKR 8,525,000 in course revenue, a 37.0x return on ad spend against a KPI target of 8.
Here is what worked, what didn't, and the one bottleneck that still cost the campaign more than anything else.
The Scorecard
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Ad spend | LKR 230,533 |
| WhatsApp conversations | 1,216 |
| Paid registrations | 155 |
| Course revenue | LKR 8,525,000 |
| Return on ad spend | 37.0x |
| Cost per registration | LKR 1,487 |
| Cost per conversation | LKR 190 |
| Conversation → registration | 12.7% |
The campaign reached 244,458 people from 812,223 impressions. Including the agency fee, acquisition cost per student was LKR 2,261 — 4.1% of the course price.
Finding 1: Two Video Creatives Carried Everything
Across all clearly identifiable ads, video delivered conversations at LKR 156 against LKR 277 for static — 1.8x more efficient.
But the average hides the real story. A single video from the 19 June campaign generated 380 conversations — 31% of the entire campaign total — from just 10% of the spend, at LKR 58 per conversation. Combined with one other video, two creatives produced 76% of all conversations across 103 days.
This is the reality of modern Meta advertising that most reporting hides: performance is not evenly distributed. It is concentrated in one or two assets, and your job is to find them fast and pour budget into them.
Finding 2: Not All Video Works
"Use more video" is lazy advice. In this account, three versions of one video series cost LKR 674 per conversation — 11x the June winner — despite similar production quality and identical placements.
The lesson isn't format. It's the specific creative. Two videos shot the same way, running in the same account, to the same audience, can differ by an order of magnitude in cost per outcome. Only testing reveals which is which.
Finding 3: High CTR Does Not Mean High Performance
The two campaigns with the highest click-through rates in the entire account — 7.91% and 6.25% — also had the highest cost per conversation, at LKR 435 and LKR 394.
Together they took 19% of the budget and returned 8% of the conversations.
Clicks were plentiful. Chats were not. This is exactly why CTR is a diagnostic metric, never a primary KPI. A creative can be brilliant at earning the click and poor at earning the conversation — and if you optimise toward CTR, you will scale precisely the wrong ad.
Finding 4: The Account Got Cheaper Every Month
CPM fell 65% across the campaign: LKR 657 in May, then 385 in June, 282 in July, and 232 in August.
Delivery got cheaper every month as the account accumulated conversion history. July carried 58% of all spend at the strongest efficiency of any month, and August delivered the cheapest impressions of the campaign right as enrolment closed.
This is a strong argument against stop-start campaign management. Accounts that run continuously build signal; accounts that switch on and off pay the learning tax repeatedly.
Finding 5: The Real Leak Was After the Click
The most important number in this report is not the 37x. It's the 12.7%.
Only 155 of 1,216 WhatsApp conversations became paid registrations. 87.3% of conversations did not convert.
Advertising delivered 1,216 people who raised their hand and asked about the course, at LKR 190 each. What happened next — response speed, follow-up discipline, how the offer was explained in chat — determined whether that conversation became LKR 55,000 or nothing.
Here's the arithmetic that matters: lifting chat conversion from 12.7% to just 18% would have produced roughly 64 additional registrations, worth around LKR 3.5 million — with zero additional ad spend.
At a 37x ROAS, the cheapest growth available is never more budget. It is a better sales process at the other end of the ad.
Performance Against the Brief
Four of six KPI targets were met, including the commercial one:
- ROAS: target ≥ 8, actual 37.0x — 4.6x the target
- Hold rate: target ≥ 20%, actual 30.4% — met
- Engagement rate: target ≥ 3%, actual 7.4% — met
- Click → WhatsApp: target ≥ 30%, actual 28.1% — just short
- Hook rate: target ≥ 50%, actual 12.8% — not met
Hook rate was the clearest shortfall — only 12.8% of impressions became 3-second views. But viewers who did stay held well, comfortably passing the hold target. The diagnosis is precise: the first three seconds were the weak point, not the story. That is a fixable, well-defined creative brief for the next intake rather than a vague instruction to "improve the videos."
One target was measured against the wrong benchmark. Cost per 1,000 reach came in at LKR 943 against a LKR 350 target — but these were conversation campaigns buying WhatsApp chats, not reach campaigns buying impressions. Measured on their own objective, cost per conversation was LKR 190. Setting a reach-efficiency target on a conversation campaign guarantees a red mark on a campaign that actually worked.
The Takeaway
A 37x return sounds like a story about advertising. It isn't. It's a story about three things working together: a course priced high enough that acquisition cost barely registers, a creative testing process that found the winning video and scaled it, and an account left running long enough to get cheap.
And the biggest remaining opportunity in this campaign has nothing to do with Meta at all. It sits in the 87.3% of conversations that ended in a chat window instead of a classroom.
Sky Designers is a Colombo-based digital marketing agency specialising in performance advertising across Meta, TikTok, and Google. Want a campaign measured on enrolments rather than impressions? Get in touch.