Gradeup engages aspiring test takers across their user journey

Gradeup, India’s leading exam preparation platform, has partnered with global AdTech player, Criteo, to create relevant digital display advertising. Gradeup has empowered more than 23 million registered students to improve their exam scores, with a success rate of over 68%.

Through its live structured courses, interactive quizzes and study material, it helps students prepare for government jobs, college entrances and other competitive exams, such as GATE, UPSC, Bank, SSC, Defence amongst others. While Gradeup’s audience may be diverse, one thing they have in common is their aspiration.

Speaking about the partnership, Ankit Gautam, who is Gradeup’s Associate Vice President of Marketing says, “A student’s ambition to clear a competitive exam is an important aspect of their lives along with their families. With intense competition they look for preparatory guidance that can help them get ahead of others. To help more students achieve their goals, Gradeup partnered with Criteo to create relevant digital display advertising.”

Converting aspiring students and test takers into subscribed users

Gradeup’s user journey spans from user registration to engagement with both free and paid content, offering multiple touchpoints to provide maximum value to users on both their website and app. Gautam says, “Since it is an online business, digital users are a natural first choice for acquisition and AdTech is the perfect technology to reach these users.”

To help Gradeup attract, engage, and convert their optimal students, Criteo identifies users who are deeper in their journey, and then engages them with intent-based, lower-funnel retargeting campaigns. These campaigns evolved from static to dynamic to provide the most relevant messages and creative to engage users.

Gautam cites the biggest strength of Gradeup’s partnership with Criteo as, “The focus on performance and the ability to customize the campaigns and build the right segments for conversions. Also, the support the team provides is exceptional.”

The campaign was a runaway success. According to Gautam, “Criteo has helped us increase revenues from ad campaigns by 25% within two months of starting to work with them, thereby scaling up the business faster than ever before!”

Expanding across the multi-device user journey

After achieving favorable results from their web and app conversion campaign, Gradeup expanded their work with Criteo to include acquisition-focused campaigns on their app. Driving app installs in this way helps strengthen Gradeup’s marketing strategy by reaching their entire user base across the devices where they spend the most time.

Regarding their strategy, Gautam says, “As the scale is increasing, we look to partner with Criteo not just to re-engage with existing users, which it does so well, but also acquire
new users through its unique solutions. He elaborates, “App acquisition helps us reach its 1.9 billion+ shopper graph and get good quality users at scale.”

When looking towards the future, Gautam says, “App engagement will remain a very important aspect for Criteo campaigns. Apart from ROAS-oriented campaigns, we will also try to achieve more mid-funnel events to drive better engagement among users!”