How Mildred Elley Drove Enrollment Growth Through a Full-Funnel Marketing Strategy with PX
When PX began working with Mildred Elley in 2020, the focus was straightforward: help generate prospective student demand. Over time, the partnership expanded far beyond lead generation.
+13%
Net enrollments from PPC and Paid Social
Full-funnel strategy
YouTube & Demand Gen
Enrollment tracking
“It is awesome to see that since launching YouTube campaigns for Mildred Elley that our performance across the campuses have seen the CPL as a whole drop and gain more clicks to our site. We are looking forward to what else we can do on YouTube moving forward.”
Digital Marketing Director
Mildred Elley
Challenges
Mildred Elley needed a steady flow of qualified prospective students across every campus, starting with four challenges:
Consistent demand across campuses
Consistently generate sufficient qualified prospective student demand across multiple campuses to support enrollment and start goals.
More leads for Pittsfield
Increase lead volume for the Pittsfield, MA campus, where additional demand was particularly important.
Scale without losing quality
Scale lead generation while maintaining lead quality.
The right channel mix
Identify the optimal mix of channels, audiences, programs, and geographies to drive stronger enrollment outcomes.
Goals
Build a student acquisition engine where every lead is measured against the enrollments it produces.
Build a full-funnel student acquisition strategy that connects lead generation with admissions engagement, enrollment, and new student starts.
Grow qualified lead volume by campus and program, with a particular focus on supporting Pittsfield’s enrollment goals.
Introduce a more innovative test-and-learn approach by exploring new channels, audiences, campaign formats, and lead sources to unlock incremental demand.
Use downstream performance data to create a continuous feedback loop, refining acquisition efforts toward the sources and strategies that drive the strongest enrollment outcomes.
How PX built Mildred Elley's full-funnel strategy
Connecting marketing data to enrollment outcomes
PX connected campaign and lead data with Mildred Elley’s downstream performance data across Google and Meta, giving both teams a shared view of lead performance beyond the initial acquisition.
Goals were tracked by campus and program rather than as one blended number, so problems and wins surfaced the same week they happened instead of the following quarter.
Measuring success by enrolled students, not just leads
Campaigns are now judged on enrollments rather than lead volume, and that changed how every campaign gets built.
PX and Mildred Elley began evaluating channel performance against applications, enrollments, and program starts, creating a feedback loop that shifted investment toward the campaigns, audiences, programs, and lead sources driving stronger outcomes.
Testing new ways to create demand
Video wasn't new territory. A 2022 YouTube pilot using Video Action and Custom Intent audiences delivered a 73% lift in CTR, a 6% lower cost per conversion, and 14% more conversions, reaching campuses like Pittsfield that search and display struggled to cover.
That signal is why PX brought YouTube fully into the full-funnel strategy, moving it to Demand Gen in Q1 2025 alongside expanded OTT targeting (see Campaign Evolution, below).
Campaign evolution
That full-funnel strategy sharpened quarter by quarter, tightening targeting, closing consent and tracking gaps, and expanding into new formats as the partnership matured.
Mildred Elley campaign timeline, 2022 to June 2025
Key metrics, 2025, through PX
Results
44%
increase in PPC lead volume, Spring 2024 to Spring 2025
50%+
lower cost per PPC lead, year over year
63%
contact rate on inbound leads
-48% / -11%
cost per enrollment year over year, Albany / NYC
45%
drop in digital invalid rate, Summer 1 to Summer 2
+13%
net enrollments from PPC and Paid Social, year over year
Full-funnel. Measured by enrollments.
PX connects lead generation to admissions, enrollment, and starts, so every campaign is judged on the students it brings in, not just the leads it creates.