From Clicks to Enrolments: How a Dubai Nursery Group Generated 127 Enrolments with a 12.85x ROI

• TDS Admin
• December 23, 2025
• Uncategorized
• 0 Comments

Let’s talk about results. Not likes. Not traffic. Real-world leads. Real customers. Real revenue.

Because for most small to mid-sized businesses, marketing isn’t just a line item. It’s the lever between staying stagnant and actually growing.

This case study breaks down how we helped a multi-location nursery group in Dubai generate 127 new student enrolments with a 12.85x ROI — while working with a modest monthly ad budget.

It’s also a story of how performance and expectations can clash, and what business owners need to understand if they want to scale efficiently.

The Client: A Premium Nursery Brand with 4 Locations

Our client is a well-established nursery group in Dubai, with four separate branches catering to premium early years education. Average annual fees sit around AED 45,000 per child, so this is not your average budget school.

We’ve worked with them for over two years, but 2025 was the first year where everything came together: clean tracking, structured campaign attribution, and full access to performance data.

Scope of Work? We are the full marketing partner. This includes:

• Paid ads (Google & Meta)
  
• CRM setup and management
  
• Website management
  
• SEO
  
• Email marketing
  
• Video content creation
  
• Social media management
  

But for this case study, we’ve focused purely on paid ads — to clearly isolate performance.

The Challenge: Split Budgets, High Expectations

The group had a total ad budget of AED 10,000/month, split evenly across the four venues — that’s AED 2,500 per branch per month.

Each location needed individual attention. Equal visibility. Equal priority. So our challenge was to design a high-performing campaign strategy that worked within tight location-specific budgets, without sacrificing quality or results.

The Strategy: Quality Over Quantity

With limited budget per venue, our approach was to focus on conversion quality rather than vanity metrics like clicks or low-cost leads.

Here’s what we implemented:

🔍 Google Search (Bottom-of-Funnel)

Targeting high-intent keywords like “nursery near me” with location-based ads and dedicated landing pages. Campaigns were optimised long term to deliver a YoY decrease in CPL, whilst delivering 12+% conversion rates from lead to enrolment.

📲 Meta Ads to Landing Pages

We ditched in-platform lead forms and instead directed traffic to a custom-built page with a 7-question form to filter out low-intent users. Yes, this increased CPL — but it also dramatically increased conversion rates. Primary campaigns around admissions or Book a tour were created, creative and copy aligned to showcase USPs and drive clicks, and a simple landing page with headline, CTA & form.

📈 Segmentation & Tracking

We ran four separate sets of campaigns per platform, tracked per location, with weekly performance reviews and adaptive bidding strategies. Controlled spend across locations allowed us to prioritise locations evenly, but reattribute if there was a short term concern over a specific location.

The Numbers: What Did We Achieve?

✅ Google Ads

• Leads Generated: 488
  
• Confirmed Registrations: 62
  
• Lead-to-Enrollment Conversion: 12.7%
  
• Average Cost/Lead: A$48.76 (↓ from A$64.24 in 2024)

✅ Meta Ads

• Leads Generated: 522
  
• Confirmed Registrations: 65
  
• Lead-to-Enrollment Conversion: 12.45%
  
• Average Cost/Lead: AED 79
  
• Major Campaign CPL: AED 98
  

These are exceptional numbers for a service-based business with a high-ticket product like early education.

The Financial Return: Let’s Talk ROI

We’ve kept things ultra-conservative here. Even though we handle every part of their marketing ecosystem, we’re only calculating ROI from leads directly attributable to paid ads. This means 100% of our service charge is attributed to cost, and ONLY direct sales from Google and META Paid leads is allocated as conversions. The additional 194 conversions from Website forms, phone calls, WhatsApp & Walk-Ins have not been attributed to TDS Group, even though for sure a significant portion will have come from our services.

Here’s the financial summary:

The Challenges: Where It Got Tough

Even with strong data and great returns, we faced some very real hurdles — and they’re worth highlighting because these are common in many service-based businesses.

1. Volume vs. Quality Tug of War

Despite consistently outperforming industry standards, feedback from the client often came back to:

“We’re not getting enough leads.”

That’s understandable… if leads = revenue. But here’s the truth: we were driving better ROI with fewer, higher-quality leads.

Switching to a strategy focused on higher friction forms led to a 12%+ enrolment rate — that’s almost 3x what you’d expect from general Meta leads.

More leads would’ve required sacrificing quality and ROI. We were clear about that. Still, pressure continued for “volume.”

2. Dismissing ROI

In our latest quarterly call, we presented all the metrics: CPL down, conversion rate up, ROI at 12.85x.

The response?

“The ROI doesn’t matter to me — we just need more leads.”

This is the danger when business performance is reviewed by marketing staff instead of owners or finance leads. ROI is how you scale. Volume is just noise.

3. Strategic Rigidity

We suggested:

• Introducing new Meta objectives
  
• Testing short-form versions of the lead form
  
• Updating design and messaging styles
  

All were rejected.

Yet, we were expected to improve results with no control over key drivers of performance. You can’t demand better outcomes while refusing to change the input.

4. Unrealistic Expectations Around Budget

One location outperformed CPL expectations by 32% under the 18-month average during a focus period.

When we presented this as a success?

“Still not enough leads.”

But CPL is only one side of the equation. If CPL is great and you want more leads, the lever is increasing ad spend.

That’s a basic marketing equation:

Leads = Budget ÷ CPL

And the reality is: AED 2,500 per location per month is not a high growth budget.

Lessons for Business Owners

If you’re running a service-based business — particularly one that relies on qualified leads and personal sales — this case study has some important takeaways.

1. It’s Not Just About Lead Volume — It’s About Cost-Effective Conversions

Every business wants more leads. But what most don’t understand is that more leads doesn’t mean more customers. In fact, more leads often results in more waste — more time spent chasing low-intent prospects, more admin pressure, and less focus on closing the ones that matter.

In this campaign, we deliberately chose a strategy that prioritised lead quality over volume. That meant adding friction — a 6-question lead form, no instant-click Meta forms, and deeper qualification before a lead even reached the nursery’s admin team. The outcome? A 12%+ conversion rate from lead to enrolment — a level that far exceeds industry benchmarks.

Would more leads have made this better? Not if they were low intent. In this case, fewer leads led to more students and higher ROI. That’s how real marketing works.

✅ 2. You Can’t Demand Results and Reject Strategy

One of the biggest challenges agencies face is being brought in for expertise, and then being denied the ability to execute it.

We ran high-performing, proven campaigns across platforms. But along the way, key optimisation suggestions were rejected — changes to campaign objectives, reduced form friction, revised messaging, or updated designs. This limits growth. Period.

If you reject what’s being proposed, you own the results. You can’t expect top-tier performance if you block the very changes designed to improve it.

This isn’t a power struggle. It’s about trust. If you’ve hired an agency to deliver, let them do what they do best.

✅ 3. Data Doesn’t Lie. Opinions Do.

When we presented a 3.15x ROI on the first sale alone — not even accounting for lifetime value — and a 16.05x ROAS, the only feedback was:

“We’re still not getting enough leads.”

This is what happens when success is measured emotionally instead of strategically.

The data couldn’t be clearer. The campaigns were profitable, the CPL was 32% lower than our 18-month average, and enrolment rates were high. If that level of performance isn’t “enough,” it’s not a marketing issue—it’s a perception issue.

If you don’t trust the data, you’ll make decisions that sabotage results.

✅ 4. See Ad Spend as a Lever — Not a Cost

This is one of the biggest mindset shifts needed for growth.
Ad spend isn’t a sunk cost — it’s a growth lever. And when the data shows you’re making AED 3.15 back for every AED 1 spent in gross profit, not just revenue, and on the first sale alone, not LTV — why would you cap that?

If you saw those numbers from any other investment, you’d double down. So why not here?

If the system is built, the funnel is clean, the conversions are happening — scale is the logical next step. That means increasing ad budget, not holding it static while demanding more from less.

Don’t treat your marketing like a monthly bill. Treat it like a revenue engine.

✅ 5. Real Growth Needs Collaboration — Not Control

There’s a huge difference between being involved and being controlling.

Great partnerships are built on trust, collaboration, and shared goals. If you want to be hands-off — that’s fine. But then, give your agency the room to execute. If you want to stay involved in every decision — also fine. But then you need to take ownership of performance outcomes.

What doesn’t work is demanding results while overriding strategy, blocking optimisations, and setting unrealistic expectations — then pointing fingers when the numbers don’t meet fantasy.

You either trust the process, or you control it. But you can’t do both.

Final Word

This case study isn’t just about a nursery. It’s about the reality of running paid ads in the real world.

This client had every opportunity to scale. The campaigns worked. The ROI was clear. The system was proven.

But even the best strategy can be capped by misaligned expectations, unrealistic demands, and refusal to trust the process.

Yes, the strategy matters. The copy, the creative, the funnel — all of that counts. But what matters even more is alignment, data-driven decisions, and a long-term perspective.

We’re proud of these results. But we’re even prouder of the clarity they give our clients:

Real growth isn’t found in chasing cheaper clicks.
It’s found in understanding your numbers, your funnel, and your customer.

If you want to work with an agency that treats your budget like it’s their own, and builds marketing systems that are meant to scale — reach out.

We don’t sell dreams. We deliver performance.