Google Ads for a First Aid School: From 1 to Over 70 Tracked Course Registrations Per Month
Project Goal
The first aid school needed strategic expertise to restructure its campaigns and to implement accurate tracking that would reliably show course enrollments. The new structure was designed to focus specifically on the different types of courses and locations, stop losses due to incorrect segmentation, and enable the first aid school to once again achieve predictable course enrollment, without relying on any ongoing agency support.
Challenge
The company had already invested a considerable amount in Google Ads, but still had to cancel courses due to a lack of participants. The figures were contradictory: according to the tracking, hardly any sign-ups were coming into the Ads account, while an estimate indicated about 30 per month. The reason: the ads were being published globally instead of locally, some clicks cost up to 49 CHF, and there was a complete lack of a well-maintained exclusion list.
Project Details
Tracking came first. The relevant goal actions were defined, and course enrollment was clearly linked to GA4 as the primary goal. At the same time, keyword research was carried out completely from scratch, individually for each course type — from BLS/AED to ACLS, first aid courses, courses for young children, and corporate courses — and cleaned up in the process. Expensive, barely relevant search terms were removed, and a proper negative keyword list was built instead.
The campaign structure was also redesigned. Instead of one combined campaign, there are now dedicated ad groups for each course type and location — Lucerne, Sursee, and Stans. It turned out that ads were being shown practically worldwide, since “interest in a location at some point” was enough to qualify. That was changed to “actually present at the location,” and the radius per location was tightened.
As for the budget, it was first cut significantly to stop the wasted spend, then reinvested specifically into the campaigns that proved to work. Over the first few weeks, bids, ad copy, and exclusions were continuously fine-tuned based on real-time data, until the account ran smoothly.
Results
The click-through rate rose from 1.1% to 10.8%, even though monthly impressions dropped by roughly 80%. Less waste, far more relevance. Cost per enrollment now sits at around CHF 61, on a lower monthly budget than before.
In the first twelve full months after the relaunch, the account averaged 42 course enrollments a month, with more than 70 in the best month. That’s roughly 505 enrollments over the year — and that’s only what can be tracked technically through the GA4 event. Phone calls aren’t even counted in that, so the real number is likely higher.
