Kyra Srisukri is a senior director of app growth and performance marketing at Preply, a global language learning platform. The platform, originally from Ukraine, connects 50,000 tutors with students in more than 180 countries.
The language learning market is booming. Mastering a new language opens career opportunities in today's globalised business landscape and enriches personal connections. The market value is set to exceed $300 billion by 2032, compared to $61.5 billion in 2023.
Today’s learners have an abundance of options, ranging from traditional in-person classes to online materials and even AI-powered learning apps. This variety creates a challenge for language learning platforms like ours that need to navigate a crowded market, acquiring and retaining committed users to generate a stable revenue stream.
To attract more students in this busy and constantly changing landscape, we have invested in extensive international expansion. Our goal: maintain global growth while keeping return on investment high. The secret to our success? Focusing on the most valuable learners.
Prioritising high-value learners
In the past, we focused on getting as many people as possible to try a lesson with a tutor. However, as we expanded, we saw a rise in customer acquisition costs. We realised that our focus on simply increasing the number of learners led us to overlook the business value each learner brings.
To align our strategy with our international expansion and growth objectives, we needed to prioritise value, not volume. To do this, we changed our focus to the acquisition of customers who contribute higher revenue; the committed learners who stay longer on a platform and are willing to pay a higher price per lesson.
Our learners come from all over the world. The revenue generated by each learner is influenced by various factors, such as location, demographics, tutor preference, lesson price, and lesson frequency. For example, some learners take classes only a few times per month, while others study regularly two to three times per week.
To reach these priority users, we focused on the value a user brings rather than simply the number of conversions. This approach optimised our ad spend to align with our objectives; resulting in a faster increase in revenue compared to the number of new learners.
We changed our focus to acquiring high-value customers who contribute higher revenue per lesson and stay on the platform longer.
Through our value-based strategy, our cost per acquisition decreased by 10% compared to the same time the year before, and our global conversion value rose by 25%.
Leveraging unforeseen benefits
One of the unexpected benefits of implementing value-based bidding was the ability to consolidate campaign groups. These are groups of Google Ads campaigns that share a key performance indicator.
Previously, we grouped conversions with similar values — such as markets with comparable subscription values per user. Value-based bidding eliminates the need for this manual grouping, because the algorithm directly optimises for subscription value. This means that we’ve not only gotten better at reaching our most profitable users, but we’re also saving time as we no longer have to do some of the manual work that goes into the bidding process.
We've now implemented value-based bidding across all our campaigns. It tackles the challenge of reaching the most revenue-generating conversions by automatically optimising budgets, helping us focus on acquiring the most valuable learners globally.
