TECMILENIO

Every Peso, more potential. Paid media strategy increases leads by +59.6% with a +2.6% increase in investment.

Rather than relying on additional investment to generate more leads, we focused on making the existing media mix work harder. Search would capture high-intent demand, Performance Max would become the engine for efficient scale, Meta would concentrate investment around the audiences and moments with the greatest conversion opportunity, and TikTok would open a controlled path to incremental growth.

THE COMPANY

Tecmilenio is a university within the Tec de Monterrey ecosystem, founded in 2002.

It operates 32 campuses across more than 30 cities in Mexico, plus an online campus, and serves 66,000 students in formal education, of whom roughly 22,000 are in high school. This scale creates a complex enrollment environment, requiring the institution to generate demand efficiently across multiple markets, audiences and stages of the decision journey.

THE CHALLENGE

Tecmilenio came to us with the challenge of growing high school lead volume without growing the budget at the same rate.

The account had inherited a Search structure that grouped very different intents inside AON campaigns, limiting control over bidding, messaging and budget allocation. Performance Max was running on residual budget, while the overall media mix had developed a heavy dependence on Meta to sustain volume.

The goal was to increase high-value leads to the site to feed enrollment for the cycle, improving the efficiency of every peso invested without losing volume during the peak enrollment season, when most of the year’s demand concentrates. This required a more strategic allocation model—one capable of capturing existing demand, identifying incremental opportunities and shifting investment toward the channels, audiences and moments producing the strongest marginal returns.

THE SOLUTION

We rethought the role of every peso in the media mix, giving each channel a specific job in driving growth and creating a clearer relationship between investment, audience intent and enrollment opportunity.

Building on that strategy, we migrated the AON Search campaigns into a structure segmented by Brand, Category and Competitor, letting us manage investment, bidding and messaging according to actual search intent. The new structure also provided greater visibility into which demand segments were driving performance, enabling faster optimization and more precise budget decisions throughout the enrollment cycle.

Performance Max went from running on residual budget to becoming a central piece of the Google mix, allowing automation to identify conversion opportunities across Google’s inventory while supporting efficient incremental reach. On Meta, we reallocated investment away from lower-performing campaigns toward parent audiences and higher-urgency moments such as Open House and Last Spots. This aligned the platform more closely with the enrollment journey and concentrated spend where motivation and conversion propensity were highest.

Finally, we introduced TikTok as a controlled test, dedicating less than 1% of the budget to explore new lead opportunities without compromising overall efficiency. The test-and-learn framework gave Tecmilenio a disciplined way to evaluate emerging inventory while protecting the performance of the core media plan.

The result was not simply a more optimized media plan, but a more productive and strategically balanced one: a mix designed to generate more growth from every peso invested, respond more effectively to shifts in demand and create a stronger foundation for future enrollment cycles.

THE RESULTS

The cycle closed with 26,840 leads, a +59.6% increase over the prior period’s 16,812, on just +2.6% more investment. Cost per lead fell from MXN 436 to MXN 280, a 35.8% improvement, demonstrating that growth came from greater media productivity, not increased spending.

The strategy generated +9,597 incremental leads and MXN 4.2 million in implied savings compared with what that volume would have cost at the previous CPL. Reach also expanded, with +77% more impressions and +74% more clicks, strengthening Tecmilenio’s market presence while maintaining conversion efficiency.

Google delivered the sharpest improvement: investment decreased -8.3% while leads increased +59.7%, reducing CPL by -42.6%. Performance Max was the decisive lever, delivering 42.8% of Google’s leads on just 18.8% of its budget, at a CPL of MXN 117. It became one of the account’s strongest drivers of incremental volume and efficiency. On Meta, reallocating toward parents and urgency moments brought CPL down -29.5%, with Open House closing the cycle as the most efficient campaign in the account.

RECOGNITION

2026 OMMA winner, Best Hispanic Campaign.

★★★★★

“Seeing our efforts reflected in results is incredible. Thank you for your commitment to every initiative, every campaign we launch, and every optimization aimed at improving performance. Our work never stops, and I am very happy to be able to work with a group of experts like you.”

Hazel Martinez PeñaDirector of Marketing & Communications, Tecmilenio

WORK

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Success Stories