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PPC: QA Higher Education

UK higher education provider

“From day one, Luke’s expertise and advice have been invaluable…”

The challenge

QA Higher Education partners with UK universities to help students access degree programmes in popular city-centre locations. Its paid search campaigns needed to connect prospective students with the right course and turn that interest into enquiries.

The inherited Ulster University campaigns had limited keyword segmentation, broad targeting and inconsistent ad relevance. Course searches with very different intentions were grouped together, while weaker Quality Scores and landing-page experience created opportunities to improve efficiency.

Results shown below are for the Ulster University Google Ads account, comparing September 2026 with September 2025. Enquiries mean tracked contact-form submissions.

181.2%

Increase in contact form enquiries

61.5%

Reduction in cost per enquiry

185.2%

Increase in enquiries per ad click

31.4%

Increase in click-through rate

It’s been a pleasure working with Wired Media. We’ve only been working with the team for a few months, but in that span of time Luke has make significant improvements to our Google PPC accounts that are transforming commercial performance. From day one, Luke's expertise and advice have been invaluable – he’s enthusiastically made optimisations to strategy and approach while carefully understanding the nuances of the business and our objectives. He’s proactively made suggestions that have strengthened our paid media performance, and helped to upskill our team. Highly recommend Luke, alongside Joel, Adam and Tom.

Simran Bhogal, QA Higher Education - ★★★★★ Google Review

The solution

We restructured Google Ads campaigns around student intent and individual courses. Generic postgraduate targeting was split into dedicated ad groups for subjects including Marketing, Computer Science, Business and MBA programmes, with purpose-written responsive search ads aligned to each search theme.

Low Quality Score and broad-match keywords were isolated into review ad groups. This gave the team a clearer way to refine weaker terms and improve relevance while protecting the efficient core brand campaigns. Standardised UTM tagging supported more consistent attribution in Salesforce.

Our approach combined practical account changes with close collaboration. We explained the strategy, shared recommendations and helped the in-house team build its understanding of paid media, as Simran describes in her review.

By September 2026, the Ulster account recorded 181.2% more contact-form enquiries year on year, with cost per enquiry down 61.5%. Enquiries per ad click increased by 185.2%, while click-through rate rose by 31.4%.

These results compare the same calendar month in each year and use contact-form submissions consistently, excluding other conversion actions. Explore our PPC for lead generation services to see how we can support your organisation.