Sarah Brody

Overview

Kajabi is a subscription-based platform that offers all the tools you need to create and sell an online course.

When Jonathan and Joe, the President and VP of Marketing at Kajabi, first reached out to me, they had just begun testing advertising campaigns, and were looking to quickly and massively scale their investment in advertising in order to drive significantly more leads and customers for the business.

The Strategy

Kajabi's marketing team already had in place a well-oiled conversion machine, complete with optimized landing pages, a wealth of top of the funnel content offers, and several conversion flows we could test. (I can't tell you how refreshing it is to have all the other conversion elements already in place so that the ads have their best shot at performing well right out of the gate -- spoiler: this is what we saw!)

We decided to tackle Facebook ads first, then get some AdWords campaigns running, and lastly, focus on leveraging AdRoll for retargeting purposes.

Facebook Ads

On Facebook, I decided to test a wide variety of audiences, so we could both maximize our reach and also collect data to determine which audiences converted the best.

I built out several lookalike audiences, interests-based audiences, and a retargeting audience of all Kajabi website visitors, and to these groups we promoted 6 different top-of-funnel offers, such as ebooks and free guides.

I also targeted a handful of high-intent retargeting audiences, including:

• Visited Pricing Page
• Top 10% of Time Spent on Site (30 days)
• Visited Website >2x in Last 7 Days

These audiences were all composed of folks who had taken an action that indicated a high likelihood to convert. For these audiences, we ran ads promoting an educational webinar and a 28 day free trial.

We also split out targeting by country, and A/B tested not only the content we were promoting but also short vs. long copy in the ads.

Across all of our top-of-funnel campaigns, the top performing offer was an ebook called "The Top 10 Most Profitable Online Course Niches," to which our ads drove a whopping 3,800 downloads at a very low CPA over the course of 7 weeks.

The following ads were our most successful by far, and you can see how we tested long vs. short copy (results varied by geography and campaign):

While we were able to drive the highest volume of conversions from a lookalike audience that was built based on a list of Kajabi customers who had generated over $1,000 in revenue from using the platform, our Website Visitors retargeting audience maintained the lowest cost-per-acquisition of all the top-of-funnel campaigns by far.

Between strong targeting criteria, clear and attention-grabbing ad copy, an image that resonated with our audience, and a strong, highly relevant, and enticing content offer, we set ourselves up for a quick road to success with these Facebook ad campaigns.

AdWords

When I did an initial audit of the AdWords campaigns that Kajabi had been testing previously, it was clear that there was a lot of opportunity to improve by implementing keyword match types, grouping relevant keywords, leveraging negative keywords, writing stronger ad copy, and A/B testing ads.

I started by creating a brand name campaign (since you should always be bidding on your own brand name keywords, to avoid letting your competitors win the bid and steal your search traffic!), then set up a few campaigns targeted at Kajabi's top competitors and a couple of broader campaigns with keywords around creating online courses.

Below are our top performing AdWords ads, from both the brand name campaign and one competitor campaign:

Over the course of 6 weeks, we were able to generate 212 new customers at a cost-per-acquisition 2.5x lower than Kajabi's average monthly revenue per user and 75x lower than Kajabi's average customer LTV. Now that is an excellent way to scale!

AdRoll

With AdRoll, we started out running display retargeting to all website visitors, promoting the 28 day free trial to everyone. Then, we decided to get more granular, and split it out into 3 unique audiences with different content offers:

• All website visitors except the high intent group were targeted with top-of-funnel content offers, such as "Under the Radar Niches".
• High intent website visitors were targeted with the 28 day free trial.
• Canceled customers were targeted with a new feature announcement in an attempt to reconvert them.

Throughout 6 weeks, we were able to drive over 300 conversions from AdRoll at an extremely low CPA.

Summary

By starting with a strong conversion process already in place, and designing several ad campaigns with high-reaching but highly relevant audience targeting, paired with strong content offers, enticing images, and convincing ad copy, we were able to scale extremely quickly and drive a ton of revenue for Kajabi, with some of the highest ROI campaigns I've ever built.

A huge thank you to the Kajabi team, who have impressed me from the start with their sharp marketing tactics, and who've been an absolute pleasure to work with on their ad campaigns. Wishing Kajabi much success as they continue to scale!