Ads, Tracking & Analytics since 2021: steady growth despite an ever-tightening legal and acquisition landscape.

The training market was booming when we started working together: France’s CPF scheme was driving strong demand, and a lot of training providers, not always high-quality, were popping up. Gradually, the CPF and the ecosystem around it drew negative press, and the legal framework tightened. That’s a good thing: it lets serious providers like Clic Campus put down roots, unlike the ones built on shaky foundations.

On the operational side, and especially in Ads, the challenge intensified. The introduction and then increase of a learner co-payment (raising the entry price) plus fierce competition from established players and learning apps like Duolingo meant the acquisition effort had to keep rising just to hit the same results.

The democratisation of AI is a double-edged sword, but the net effect is that every offer evolves, and Clic Campus launched an upgrade to its e-learning platform.

Three pillars to stay competitive

To hold the course over these years, we leaned on three pillars:

• Rational Ads management, built on constant testing but solid foundations: campaigns optimised per language taught.
• Continuously evolving tracking, aligned with the market’s best standards: GDPR compliance handled via abconsent, server-side under continuous improvement, and offline conversion activation based on the lead lifecycle in HubSpot, but custom-built (far better than HubSpot’s native integration) and driven straight from the Addingwell sGTM.
• Constant A/B testing of the funnels (onboarding and acquisition) with custom events and explorations on Ads + Microsoft Clarity.

Campaigns that learn from sales

At Clic Campus, sales close in HubSpot, after several conversations, far from the ad click that brought them in. I first connected the CRM to the ad platforms, then built a server-to-server chain between HubSpot, Addingwell and GTM that sends every appointment and every sale back to Google Ads, Meta and Microsoft Ads. Ad identifiers flow into the CRM, and the e-learning platform is measured too.

The campaigns stopped learning from form fills: they optimise on appointments and sales actually closed, and each new CRM stage can be sent back to the ad platforms.

The result

Clic Campus kept growing and stabilised as one of the leaders in language training in France, while still relying on its paid web acquisition channels.