Key outcomes:

• Over 40 hrs saved weekly thanks to the automated data integration from marketing apps, CRMs, and web analytics into BigQuery and Looker Studio, removing the need to manually generate multiple platform reports.
• Student applications more than doubled in key regions (Singapore and Hong Kong) after unlocking clear performance visibility.
• Lead quality improved by 21–28%, based on CRM qualification criteria, helping marketing teams prioritize campaigns that deliver higher-value prospects.
• Cross-channel ROI insights enabled, allowing Cognita to shift spend from low-performing campaigns to those driving actual enrollments.
• Full-funnel customer journey tracking implemented across website and CRM touchpoints—giving visibility from first click to enrollment.

About the client

Cognita is a global network of more than 70 independent schools across Europe, Latin America, and Asia, educating over 40,000 students from 94 nationalities.

Each school operates independently while aligning with Cognita’s shared mission of delivering high-quality education and holistic student development.

Challenges

As Cognita scaled its digital marketing efforts across Asia, especially in Singapore and Hong Kong, the regional marketing team struggled to understand which campaigns were truly influencing student enrollments.

Michelle Wong, Regional Brand and Marketing Lead at Cognita Asia, recognised the need for the schools to better understand the customer journey as well as how parents interact with various marketing channels; ultimately, quantifying the most effective allocation of the marketing budgets.

Some key obstacles included:

• Marketing data was spread across 6+ platforms, making cross-channel reporting highly manual and time-consuming.
• Attribution modeling relied on assumptions or last-click reporting from ad platforms.
• CRM, website, and media performance data were siloed, limiting the ability to tie budget spend to actual outcomes.
• Regional teams lacked a central reporting environment to evaluate campaign effectiveness consistently across countries and schools.

Cognita needed a media-agnostic, centralized solution to integrate all marketing and enrollment data in one place and power smarter, data-driven campaign decisions.

Solutions

Cognita partnered with Windsor.ai to deploy a fully automated data integration stack, purpose-built for the complexity of education marketing.

To centralize fragmented campaign and CRM data, the team selected Google BigQuery as the cloud data warehouse and Looker Studio as the real-time reporting layer for accessible, region-level performance dashboards.

Modernized architecture with Windsor.ai

Cognita’s new data stack allows the regional marketing team to track performance across the full funnel—from ad click to CRM-qualified lead to enrollment.

Here’s how their modernized data architecture looks now:

Data sources:

• Google Ads
• GA4
• LinkedIn Ads
• Meta Ads
• Instagram Organic
• HubSpot CRM

Windsor.ai integration:

• No-code connectors extract data and unify schemas, and automatically send it to the destination with scheduled refreshes

Destinations:

• BigQuery (real-time sync with structured campaign + CRM data)
• SQL-based attribution modeling in BigQuery
• Looker Studio for visual real-time dashboards (downstream tool)

Results

Thanks to Windsor.ai data integration, Cognita shifted from manual volume-based reporting to a fully automated ELT pipeline providing a clear understanding of which channels, audiences, and keywords truly contributed to student enrollment growth.

As a result:

• Student online applications more than doubled YoY in Singapore and Hong Kong.
• All Cognita’s marketing and CRM data was unified in a centralized BigQuery warehouse with schema stability.
• Saved 40+ hours per week by automating data flows from marketing platforms, CRMs, and analytics tools into BigQuery and Looker.
• Lead quality increased by 21–28%, as CRM-based scoring helped the team focus on campaigns generating more qualified prospects.
• Cross-platform ROI clarity enabled the company to reallocate budget away from low-impact channels toward those delivering measurable enrollments.

Download the Cognita Schools Case Study as a PDF.

Final takeaway

Thanks to the Windsor.ai data integration and attribution insights, Cognita schools in Singapore and Hong Kong can now see the value that each marketing campaign is having on their overall business revenue and growth.

As a result, they have grown online applications while reducing the cost per lead acquisition, along with saving time on manual reporting tasks.

Curious what Windsor.ai can do for your team?

Start your free 30-day trial: https://onboard.windsor.ai/.

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