Case Study · Education Marketing
Aakash · ANTHE
Powering India's biggest scholarship exam ANTHE at machine speed.
ANTHE, the Aakash National Talent Hunt Exam, is one of India's largest scholarship examinations. Aakash Institute needed verified student enrollments at a sustained 600 to 700 every single day, right up to the exam. MarkAge360 built a programmatic-first acquisition engine that delivered 100% of committed targets at a run rate of 20,000+ enrollments a month, and returned $7 for every $1 spent.
A hard daily number, and a fixed deadline.
600 to 700 verified enrollments a day, every day, until registrations closed. No slow weeks, no extending the flight.
ANTHE, the Aakash National Talent Hunt Exam, offers students from Class 7 to 12 up to 100% scholarships on NEET, JEE and Foundation courses, plus a once-in-a-lifetime chance to visit NASA. An exam of that scale runs on one thing: enrollment velocity. Aakash Institute did not need a monthly total to be back-loaded. The mandate was 600 to 700 verified enrollments per day, sustained across the entire registration window, right up to the exam dates in early November. Every day of underdelivery was volume lost forever, because the deadline never moved.
- A hard daily run rate: 600 to 700 verified enrollments per day, every day, with no slow weeks.
- A three-stage quality bar: Lead → Enrollment → Test Taker, proven at the exam hall itself.
- A wide but precise audience: six academic stages from Class 7 to 12-pass, plus the parents who decide.
- A fixed, unmovable deadline: registrations closed end of October, with no extending the flight.
When the target is measured per day, media strategy changes. You do not buy reach and hope. You engineer a channel mix for a compressed timeline and let the data pick the winners.
Growth desk
MarkAge360 · ANTHE acquisition planning
Built for velocity.
Programmatic media buying at the core
Extensive programmatic buying carried the volume load. Real-time bidding bought student and parent audiences across thousands of placements at once, throttling spend up or down against a daily run-rate dashboard, so the channel that could scale to the daily number carried it.
Google Ads for high-intent capture
Search intercepted students and parents already looking for scholarship tests, NEET and JEE coaching, and ANTHE itself, converting existing demand at the moment of highest intent.
Meta retargeting to seal the funnel
Every lead who did not complete enrollment entered a Meta retargeting pool, with dynamic audiences rebuilt daily. No prospect fell through the crack between interest and enrollment, the stage where most education funnels leak hardest.
SMS with multi-variant copy testing
Seven SMS variants ran in rotation, each built around a distinct trigger: aspiration (the NASA trip and 100% scholarship), social proof (live registration counters), urgency (limited slots against the hard deadline), and name-level personalisation for warm audiences. Tested, measured, and reweighted by response.
A funnel measured to the test centre
Reporting did not stop at the click or even the enrollment. Performance was tracked through to actual test takers, so every optimisation decision bought students who would show up, not just sign up.
Every target hit. Seven to one.
The client measured success daily, not monthly, and MarkAge360 delivered 100% of committed enrollment targets, holding a sustained 600 to 700 enrollments per day across the full registration window. The equivalent of filling a large school, every single day.
Volume never came at the cost of quality: 20,000+ enrollments a month, tracked through a three-stage funnel that ended at the exam hall, not the click. And the economics matched the ambition. For every $1 Aakash put into the campaign, it saw $7 come back.
100% of targets · 20,000+ enrollments a month · 7x return on ad spend
What we ran.
ProgrammaticGoogle AdsMetaSMSRetargetingData & Analytics
- Programmatic media strategy & DSP buying
- Real-time run-rate dashboard & spend throttling
- Google Ads search capture
- Meta retargeting with daily dynamic audiences
- SMS marketing, 7-variant rotation & testing
- Six audience tracks: Class 7 to 12-pass, plus parents
- Landing-page & enrollment funnel
- Lead → Enrollment → Test Taker tracking
- Full-funnel attribution to the exam hall
- Daily performance reallocation
Have a number to hit every day?
If your growth is measured on a hard daily target rather than a vanity total, we would love to show you what a purpose-built acquisition engine could do for your brand.
