King's College London — Hong Kong Programme Enquiries

Overview

King’s College London is a Russell Group university ranked in the global top 40, home to some of the world’s leading research in law, political science, neuroscience, and the digital economy. In 2025, their Hong Kong recruitment team needed to generate enquiries for a portfolio of online postgraduate programmes — master’s degrees designed for working professionals across the city.

There was no prior campaign, no benchmark, and no data. Just a brief, a budget, and an intake deadline.

Tell Your Friends was brought in by Madder Consulting to build the full paid search programme from scratch. Over five months, what started as a single-programme trial became a ten-programme, multi-campaign operation — and the campaign’s most productive period came right at the end.

The Starting Point

The brief was straightforward on the surface: drive enquiries for KCL’s online programmes in Hong Kong. In practice, it meant answering a harder question first — how do you reach someone who doesn’t know yet that this programme exists?

These weren’t household names. Digital Economies MSc. Global Political Economy MA. Global HRM MSc. Rigorous, credible degrees from one of the world’s great universities — but niche enough that the audience isn’t already searching for them by name. The work had to reach people at the edges of their own awareness: someone searching broadly for career development, or a move into policy, or a way to formalise what they already know about HR.

That meant building keyword architecture that could hold both ends of the intent spectrum — the person who knows exactly what they want, and the person who doesn’t know the right words for it yet. And doing it bilingually, for English, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese speakers, each with their own search patterns.

The Work

Before any ads ran, we built detailed audience profiles for each programme — mapping the career context, the motivation, the adjacent search terms that someone might use before they find the right language. A prospective HR student in Hong Kong doesn’t necessarily search for “global HRM MSc.” They might search for CIPD accreditation, people analytics, or organisational psychology. The profile determines which of those terms you welcome and which you block.

Those profiles became the operating document for every keyword and ad copy decision across the campaign. Not a set-it-and-forget-it brief — a living reference that got updated with real search term data week by week.

The campaign grew in scope faster than expected. Within six weeks, a single-programme search campaign had expanded to cover MA International Affairs, a Macau market test, and a flagship multi-programme account running ten postgraduate degrees simultaneously. Each programme needed its own ad group, its own copy drawing on specific modules, accreditations, and entry requirements, its own section of the measurement framework.

Every week: pull search term reports, identify waste, cross-reference against the programme profiles before making any changes, check what the data is actually saying about who’s responding. The job isn’t adding keywords — it’s building a progressively sharper model of who converts and concentrating spend there.

The Result

The first campaign — Psychology & Neuroscience — generated 48 enquiries in its first tracked month. No prior data, no benchmarks, no historical performance to model against.

The ten-programme campaign took longer to find its rhythm, but when it did, it accelerated. A focused optimisation push in early March — pausing underperforming ad groups, concentrating budget on the five programmes that were converting, sharpening bid strategy — improved cost per acquisition by 39% in 72 hours. The campaign’s final weeks were its best: 15 conversions in its strongest week, five programmes converting simultaneously, and a best single day of five enquiries at £29 each.

~£26,000 in ad spend managed across three active campaigns. Ten postgraduate programmes. A market entered from zero. And a campaign that kept getting better right up to the end.

That’s what happens when paid search is treated as a research discipline — when every decision is made against a documented model of the audience, challenged before it’s executed, and tested against what the data actually says.