Where a college's PPC budget actually leaks.

Paid search looks like the simplest thing a college can do. Set a budget, bid on your programme, count the leads. In practice it is where the most money leaks, because the platform is happy to spend every rupee whether or not the click was ever going to enrol.

After nine years running these accounts, the leaks are predictable. Here is where a college's PPC budget usually goes, and what to fix first.

Broad keywords are where the money goes to die

Left on broad match, Google will show your ad for searches you would never choose to pay for. A campaign meant for "BBA admission" ends up buying clicks on "free online business courses" and "BBA full form". The fix is unglamorous and it works: read the search terms report every week, add negative keywords aggressively, and keep match types tight. When we took over Rishihood University, cutting the keywords and search terms that were quietly wasting budget was one of the first things that moved the number.

A click is not intent

The keyword you bid on and the search someone actually typed are two different things, and only the second one tells you whether the person is a real applicant. "Colleges in Delhi NCR" and "apply BBA Rishihood last date" can cost about the same and convert nothing alike. Good paid search is mostly the discipline of paying for the second kind and refusing the first.

The landing page decides whether the click was worth it

A large share of wasted PPC spend is not the ad, it is where the ad sends people. A click that lands on a generic homepage, or on a page that loads slowly on a phone, is a click you paid for and threw away. The page has to match the ad, ask for one clear action, and load fast on mobile, because that is where nearly all of these searches happen. Rebuilding Rishihood's landing pages, so the message matched the ad and the form was the obvious next step, did as much as any change we made to the ads themselves.

Measure to an admission, not a form fill

If your conversion tracking stops at the lead form, you are optimising for the wrong thing, and so is Google's algorithm. Feed enrolments and qualified calls back into the account so the platform learns which clicks become students, not just which become forms. The number that matters is cost per admission, not cost per click. For Rishihood that came down from roughly ₹4 to ₹5 lakh to about ₹2.10 lakh over two years, at a blended ₹1,500 per lead across Google, Meta and phone. Across our partners the same discipline has run about ₹1.5 crore in spend and generated more than 10,000 qualified leads.

What good PPC management actually looks like

• Search terms reviewed every week, with negatives added each time, not once a quarter.
• Budgets that ramp toward your intake deadlines, instead of running flat all year.
• Landing pages tested as seriously as the ads, on mobile first.
• Conversion tracking that reaches admissions, so you optimise for enrolments and not clicks.

None of this is exotic. It is attention, applied every week, by people who only do this. That is why we cap our roster at five partners and never take a competing institution in the same city. You can see the numbers behind the work, read why the cap exists, or check the FAQ for how a partnership begins.