British Council Test Day Promotion Campaign

Background: Availability of the preferred exam “test date" is very important for an IELTS candidates. But the registration journey allows the prospective candidates to see the available test dates on the 4th stage. As a result, many candidates return from the test day page after not finding their desired exam dates.

Objectives: British Council wanted to reduce the user journey by promoting the available IELTS exam test days to their prospective users so that they know the available dates ahead and plan & book accordingly.

Idea: Idea of this campaign was to create an automated/dynamic test day-focused ad so that we can have full control over the campaign dates promotion and adapt the ads whenever required without affecting the campaign performance. Since the availability of the exam dates highly depends on the booking volume and it frequently changes so using a static ad campaign was not effective and efficient because each time editing the campaign will drive the campaign to the review process again. Considering all these challenges, the way catalog ad usually used has been reimagined to promote the test dates effectively and efficiently.

Execution: Facebook shop or catalog ad mainly made for businesses who sell physical products. British Council is a service provider and doesn’t have any physical products. However, to automate the test day focused ad, the dates has been transformed into a product by creating a shop catalog, and promoted it using Facebook catalog ad. 3 different sets of assets for all the available dates based on 3 test centers - Dhaka, Sylhet & Chittagong has been created. Google sheet as data feed or source has been used to automate the creative from where Facebook could automatically fetch and updates the creative along with other information for the catalog ads. Whenever a date gets fully booked or the date passed that line item removed from the Google sheet and the ads got automatically updated without any manual edits. This way we creatively used Facebook to effectively and efficiently promote test dates.

Result/Impact: The goal British Council wanted to achieve through this campaign was highly successful as they to promote the test days in an automated way, and we have been able to do that very effectively and efficiently. This innovative campaign strategy has been highly appreciated by British Council team, and this was actually replicated by British Council global team. Apart from this aspect, the campaign generated 64,907 link clicks, 24,356 landing page views and 101 IELTS registration.