Key outcomes:

• –22% cost per enrolment by reallocating budget based on multi-touch attribution insights.
• +25% annual growth in qualified leads through better customer journey visibility and refined targeting.
• Full-funnel attribution from ad click to CRM-enrolled student, eliminating blind spots.
• Seamless data integration between Google Ads, Facebook, email marketing, and CRM.
• Manual reporting has been replaced by real-time dashboards with journey-level performance insights.

About the client

SAE Creative Media Institute is a global leader in creative media education, offering industry-relevant programs in audio, film, animation, design, and more. With campuses across the globe, SAE empowers students with practical, real-world skills. SAE Australia manages the brand’s marketing and recruitment strategy in the region.

Challenges

SAE’s marketing team was running campaigns across multiple digital platforms, but struggled to connect those efforts to final student enrolments due to these pitfalls:

• Data silos across marketing and CRM prevented full visibility into the customer journey and campaign outcomes.
• Marketing success was measured by lead volume, not by quality or actual enrolments—decisions were based on surface-level metrics rather than actual business outcomes.
• Customer journeys were long and complex, with no end-to-end tracking in place.
• Manual, disconnected reporting slowed optimization and limited strategic insights.

Solution

To address these attribution and visibility challenges, SAE implemented Windsor.ai to unify siloed marketing and CRM data, and to move from lead counting to true performance measurement across the entire enrolment funnel.

Here’s how Windsor.ai transformed their data integration and analytics workflow:

✅ Phase 1: Customer journey mapping based on form submissions

SAE previously analyzed customer journeys from digital touchpoints to form submissions.

✅ Phase 2: Cross-platform data integration (Email + CRM + web analytics)

Windsor.ai integrated email platform metrics, CRM records, and on-site journey data into a unified model. This allowed SAE to track not only who submitted a form, but which leads progressed to opportunities and final enrolments.

✅ Phase 3: Strategy shift toward enrolment-quality leads

With unified insights, SAE refocused its campaign targeting on sources that generated leads most likely to convert, not just the highest volume. This prevented wasted spend on low-quality lead sources.

✅ Phase 4: Full-funnel visibility across pages and channels

The marketing team gained real-time visibility into where each lead came from (paid, organic, social, email) and what site content influenced conversion through auto-refreshing Looker Studio dashboards. This helped them surface which touchpoints most contributed to actual enrolments.

Results

By integrating all their data with Windsor.ai, SAE unlocked full-funnel visibility, enabling smarter decisions based on actual enrolments, not just lead volume, achieving the following:

• +25% increase in lead volume year-over-year, by making campaign optimizations based on unified insights.
• –28% reduction in cost per enrolment, as the budget was reallocated away from low-converting sources toward high-quality, high-intent channels.
• Full visibility into touchpoints and outcomes; now SAE can track every step of the student journey—from first interaction to enrolment—across all channels and campaigns.
• Faster, data-driven optimization, as now less time is spent reconciling reports and more time is spent analyzing performance; ultimately, the team improved both agility and ROI.

Download the SAE Case Study as PDF.

Final takeaway

By centralizing marketing, CRM, and web analytics data through Windsor.ai, SAE Creative Media Institute transitioned from volume-based lead reporting to performance-based enrolment optimization.

The integrated architecture enabled full customer journey mapping and attribution modeling across platforms, unlocking visibility into which channels, campaigns, and touchpoints contributed to actual enrolments, not just form fills.

With automated pipelines and real-time insights in Looker Studio, SAE reduced manual reporting overhead, improved media spend efficiency, and empowered their marketing team to make faster, data-driven decisions aligned with business outcomes.

Curious what Windsor.ai can do for your team?

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

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