How Red & Yellow identified top-performing ad campaigns and reallocated spend, resulting in a 26% increase in enrolment

Red & Yellow, a business school focused on educating the next generation of business-minded creatives, used Heeet’s marketing intelligence platform to precisely identify which paid campaigns influenced each enrollment. The platform tracked and mapped the specific interactions that shaped student decisions, with all campaign touchpoints and data displayed directly within Salesforce.

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The Challenge

Without a full-funnel tracking solution and multi-touch attribution, Carl Kiessig, Senior Marketing Automations Specialist at Red & Yellow, constantly struggled to pinpoint which paid campaigns actually drove new customers.

Red & Yellow’s higher-education programs have sales cycles that can range from 6 months to 5 years, spanning multiple channels and 30+ interactions before close. The last-touch attribution system the team had inherited couldn’t outline the prolonged buyer journey before a prospective student signed an enrollment form.

“When you’re dealing with students who are taking six months—sometimes people take five years, and then they eventually study something with us—there are so many touchpoints along the way that just saying 100% goes to this channel because that’s what the website picked up and threw into Salesforce just didn’t give the full picture.”

The legacy system’s only function was to record the source URL when a form was completed, extract UTM parameters, and insert this information into Salesforce. Any interactions that occurred before the first form fill or between that form and the final enrollment step were not captured or visible.

“The attribution model we were using was very basic, just plugged in via web dev. Nowadays, I just refer to it as the legacy tracking.”

Most of the paid budget sat in Google Ads, with the remainder split between Meta (Facebook/Instagram) and the occasional LinkedIn campaign. So the biggest gap was on the Google Ads side: campaigns weren’t only failing to get the right credit, they couldn’t be tracked through to a closed enrollment at all. Without that line of sight, Carl couldn’t shift budget toward what was actually generating revenue rather than just leads.

The lack of mid-funnel visibility was just as painful. Social ads, email, on-campus events, and webinars were nurturing students toward enrollment, and none of them showed up. Spend would compound, and so would the doubt.

“They run like mad. They eat up your money. And you get to the end of the financial year, and you go, " Cool, we made money, it looks good, but there’s still so much waste in there.”

Carl had looked at fixing the problem in-house. Building inside Salesforce required senior Java engineering and a lot of complexity he wasn’t set up to take on alone. He’d also evaluated other tools, but they couldn’t provide the native experience Red & Yellow was after, and ruled them out.

“Why try to invent it yourself when somebody has already pre-packaged the solution?”

The Solution

Red & Yellow integrated Heeet with both Salesforce and Pardot (Account Engagement) form handlers. The onboarding process was smooth and efficient, with the Heeet support team guiding the Red & Yellow team through setup, integration, and best practices to ensure data accuracy from day one. This setup replaced their last-click attribution model with a multi-touch approach, enabling tracking of each marketing touchpoint from the top of the funnel through to closed enrollments, rather than missing touchpoints between UTM capture and completion.

Because Heeet sits inside Salesforce, leadership, sales, and finance see the same numbers without learning a new tool. This unified view means every team is working from a single source of truth, reducing data silos and eliminating confusion about performance metrics. As a result, collaboration between teams has improved, with marketing, sales, and finance aligning quickly on campaign performance and budget reallocations. Key decisions are now made faster and with greater confidence, helping drive enrollment growth across the business.

“Everyone is on Salesforce. All the main stakeholders are on Salesforce, so they’re ready.

Day to day, the return-on-ad-spend report is the team’s anchor. About three months in, the data was reliable enough to start cutting campaigns and reallocating budget to it.

“The data had to pick up first. It took about three months until I could really trust the results and start fully tweaking things.”

How the data flipped Red & Yellow’s view on Performance Max

Performance Max was the campaign type Carl trusted least. The legacy tracking couldn’t tie it back to enrollments, and it ran like a black box. Three months in, the new attribution data flipped the picture: in Heeet’s view, Performance Max was the highest-returning campaign type in the Google Ads stack. Budget moved into it. Underperforming campaigns were dropped. Bidding strategies shifted on the back of ROAS, Carl could now explain to leadership.

“I used to hate Performance Max and think it was terrible until I really saw it was getting the best returns out of all the campaign types. Now I trust it a lot more and invest a lot more into it.”

Carl Kiessig, Senior Marketing Automations Specialist, Red & Yellow

A single Heeet return-on-ad-spend report informs every decision Carl makes regarding paid channels. As he expands the program, Carl is adding dashboards for specific channel attribution, cost analysis, and SEO insights. The platform allows users to fully customize dashboards and reports to match different marketing needs, such as tracking channel-specific metrics, adjusting attribution models, or building tailored views for various stakeholders. This flexibility ensures that each team can focus on the data that matters most to them while keeping insights easily accessible within Salesforce. However, the return-on-ad-spend report remains the primary, most frequently used view for day-to-day decisions.

“Having a reliable return on ad spend view is really the most valuable thing to me. That alone, there’s a lot of untapped potential we haven’t unlocked yet.”

The Results

• +26% paid-advertising enrollments in the current financial year (started September), versus the same period the year before
• Conversion rate up from 2.8% to 4.1% on paid leads
• Roughly 2x paid-advertising enrollments versus two years ago, on only ~8% annual budget growth
• Hit business targets two years running, with paid advertising exceeding its share of the growth plan.
• Budget reallocated from underperforming campaigns into Performance Max on the back of Heeet ROAS data.
• AI search attribution now identifies and tracks visits and interactions driven by AI-powered search, displaying this data alongside paid and organic channels. The previous tracking system could not capture this channel at all, making it a new layer of visibility for the team.

The shift in scale stands out as much as the year-over-year jump:

“Two years ago, we were bringing in half as many enrollments from paid advertising as we are now. It’s been a huge swing, and the budget has only gone up by about 8% a year.”

Key Takeaway

“If we didn’t have this tracking in place, the results on the paid-advertising side would have been worse. We probably wouldn’t have hit targets as a business.”
- Carl Kiessig, Senior Marketing Automations Specialist, Red & Yellow

“Why try to invent it yourself when somebody else has already pre-packaged the solution? It was a quick, easy win. Support has been above and beyond what I’d expect.”
- Carl Kiessig, Senior Marketing Automations Specialist, Red & Yellow

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