A year of full-funnel Meta advertising for one of the largest language-school networks in Poland and Ukraine. We reached 786,488 people, pulled qualified leads at $7 to $12 in one of the region's toughest auctions, and built the kind of honest funnel that wins students who actually stay.
The company
Raccoon School is one of the largest language-school networks across Ukraine and Poland, with branches in both countries. They teach eight languages through their own neuro-method built around real conversation, and more than 20,000 students have come through the school.
Tatyana, the manager and owner of Raccoon School, came to us with a precise brief: build proper ad funnels and run campaigns with strict metric tracking. The goals were clear — find an advertising approach that works, test it, and scale it. Bring the cost per lead down while raising lead quality. And fill both online and offline classes, with students and teachers, across every location.
The deeper point was what to measure in the first place. Most language schools judge a campaign by first-time payments alone — how many people paid right now. But that is the wrong yardstick: it says nothing about the real return on the advertising or on the agency's work. A school does not live on one-off payments like an info-product — it lives on lifetime value, on students who stay for months and years. So we measured the performance of the ads and of our own decisions against that long-term value, not against the first payment, and built the funnel around it.
The market made it hard. This is a brutally competitive category. Warsaw alone is targeted every day by hundreds of schools from across Europe and the CIS. In Ukraine, with a full-scale war underway, language learning is not an in-the-moment necessity. The people leaving want English to talk to locals, but immediate demand for courses is thin. So every student is a fight on the ad auction, and the off-season is the hardest stretch of all — exactly when the other schools push even harder.
Our approach
We built the funnels and wrapped strict tracking around everything we ran.
On the creative side we combined two elements: viral, native Instagram content on one end, and a serious, credible message in the paid ads on the other. The aim was reach that did not feel like advertising, attached to an offer people could trust.
That last word matters. In this niche the offer is everything, and plenty of competitors win cheap leads with promises they cannot keep — the kind that say 75 złoty and three months will make you fluent in Polish. It does not work that way, and those false promises leave people with a bad taste for language schools in general. We went the other direction and built honest offers, which costs a little more per lead but wins the most loyal future students. On an average budget of around $950 a month, that approach produced steady growth month after month.
Results
Across these campaigns we reached 786,488 people and spent $7,965.59.
The relationship speaks for itself. By the school's own account, four well-known agencies had worked with them over three to four months and brought no results — and we delivered those results inside the first month. We then worked together for about a year. At that point we agreed with the owner to step back from the targeting seat for a while, on purpose, to let other marketers bring a fresh angle. We still support Raccoon School through various local consultations and keep improving their results month to month.
| People reached | 786,488 |
|---|---|
| Total spent | $7,965.59 |
| Funnels tested | 9 |
| Average monthly budget | ~$950 |
| Average cost per click | $0.80 |
| Cost per lead | $7–$12 |
| Traffic & follower campaigns | from $0.27 |
| Student-base growth, reported | +30% |
Proof
What the school said about the work
Why it worked
What made this work was not a single tactic. It was the team effort, flexible creative formats, and an accelerated testing rhythm that found winners faster than the competition could.
In this niche the real battle is the offer, and the discipline to track the right thing. The temptation is to chase the cheapest possible lead with a promise that sounds too good. We did the opposite, and it built a base of loyal students instead of disappointed ones — which is what actually compounds for a school that lives on lifetime value.
This transfers to any considered-purchase category in a crowded market: education, clinics, coaching — anything where the customer commits over time rather than on impulse. The cheapest lead is rarely the best lead. Build the funnel, sharpen the offer, test relentlessly, and measure against the value a customer brings over their whole life with you, not just the first payment. In a market where everyone else is racing to the bottom, honesty and rigor are the edge.
