700+ new student enrolments, in less than six months.

The Challenge

Rowad Al Khaleej had the harder half of the problem solved already. An American curriculum, twenty-five years of reputation in the Kingdom, and parents actively searching for exactly what the group offered.

What it did not have was a way to catch them.

Saudi parents had moved their school research online years before Saudi schools had moved their admissions there. Enquiries were arriving into a process built for walk-ins and word of mouth. The group was competing for 2018 intake with 1990s infrastructure.

Three campuses needed filling: Al Mughrizat and Qurtubah in Riyadh, and Obhur in Jeddah. Each with its own catchment, its own competitive set, and its own admissions team.

The Strategy

We did not start with media. We started by finding out what happened to an enquiry.

Before a single campaign went live, we ran a mystery shopper programme. Our team posed as prospective parents and approached each campus the way a real family would: calling the admissions line, asking about fees, requesting a tour, following up.

What we found changed the entire shape of the engagement. Enquiries were coming in and going nowhere. Calls went unanswered. Follow-up was inconsistent. The schools were not losing to competitors; they were losing to their own switchboard.

That reframed the brief. Buying more traffic into a broken funnel would have burned the budget and proved nothing. So the work split in two: fix the conversion path, then feed it.

The client acted on what we found and stood up a dedicated call centre to handle admissions enquiries. From that point, every riyal of media spend had somewhere to land.

What We Did

Rebuilt the admissions funnel. Mystery shopper audit across all campuses, enquiry-to-enrolment mapping, and a set of recommendations that connected marketing activity to the sales process rather than running it alongside. This was the majority of the engagement and the reason the media worked.

Ran search where the intent was. Google Ads across all three campuses, targeting parents actively researching schools. 802,207 impressions and 51,661 clicks at an average cost per click of SAR 0.96, with a click-through rate of 6.4%.

Built creative in both languages. Arabic and English campaigns running in parallel, not translated but written separately for each audience. The English positioning line, “American School. Global Results,” ran alongside Arabic creative developed for Saudi parents on its own terms.

Drove attendance, not just clicks. Open days were the conversion moment, so we ran them as campaigns in their own right. Open House and School Open Day campaigns on Meta were built and targeted separately for boys’ and girls’ sections, structured for how Saudi families actually attend.

Paced to the admissions calendar. Volume was deliberately built through the year rather than spread evenly. Delivery continued through Ramadan while competitors went quiet, then scaled sharply into August and September as the intake window closed. September carried more than eleven times the click volume of April.

The Results

• More than 700 new enrolments across the three campuses in a single six-month engagement
• SAR 28,000,000 in first-year tuition value, at an average annual fee of SAR 40,000 per student
• SAR 0.96 average cost per click on Google Ads, at a 6.4% click-through rate, across 51,661 clicks
• An admissions funnel the group kept. The call centre and the enquiry handling process outlasted the engagement. We were hired to run campaigns and we left behind infrastructure.

The campaigns were efficient and they worked, but they only worked because the mystery shopper programme found the leak first. Any agency can buy clicks in the education sector. The clicks were never the hard part.

How we calculate the value

More than 700 new enrolments at an average annual tuition of SAR 40,000 gives a first-year tuition value of SAR 28,000,000.

K-12 students remain at a school for several years. At a conservative average of three and a half years, the lifetime value of those enrolments exceeds SAR 98,000,000, or approximately USD 26 million. We have used a deliberately conservative retention figure; students entering at kindergarten may stay for a decade.

In the client’s words

Client testimonial