Early-Education Client · Full-Year Digital Advertising Report

01 The headline

A smaller budget that worked harder.

Total spend fell 12% year over year — $40,000 pulled mid-season. Yet the campaign didn’t just hold the line against its lowered forecast; it beat it. Clicks came in 40% above the post-cut projection, and every dollar bought more.

Clicks delivered

▼ 2% vs 2024 +40% vs 128,500 projected

Impressions

▼ 10% YoY vs 37.5M forecast

Cost per click

▲ 11% more efficient

Cost per thousand

▲ 2% more efficient

Unique users tracked

▲ 98% brand-new

Monthly cadence

impressions / mo · 15,050 clicks / mo

02Forecast vs. delivered

Beating a budget that had already been cut.

After the mid-year reduction, the plan was re-forecast down. Delivery cleared both marks — and clicks cleared theirs by a wide margin.

Post-cut forecast vs. actual delivery

Each pair indexes the re-forecast (after the $40K cut) against what shipped. Bars are to scale within each metric.

Re-forecast Actual delivered

Metric	Re-forecast	Delivered	Δ
Impressions	37,500,000	37,988,837	+1.3%
Clicks	128,500	180,597	+40.5%

03What actually happened

The $40,000 pivot.

The original 2025 plan leaned into awareness: custom local video and a co-branded social push meant to lift Brand Media and Content Sponsorship. Then the budget dropped $40,000 mid-year. The social plan was scrapped; the video never cleared production. Because spend had already been shifted toward those bets, the pullback cost momentum elsewhere.

So in Q4 we stopped buying awareness and started buying intent. The consideration pivot

The response was to re-point the back half of the year from awareness to consideration — the tactics that drive inquiries, not just impressions. New retargeting went live. Employer geofencing was added. Budget concentrated behind the highest-clicking creative. The result is the efficiency story on this page.

↓ Leaving in 2026

—Content Sponsorship & publisher takeovers
—Streaming Audio
—Streaming Video (OTT/CTV)
—Q4 Retargeting (pilot, not renewed)

↑ Keeping & growing in 2026

✓Responsive / Native display — prioritize high-click content
✓Addressable & Competitor / Employer geofencing
✓One email / month + a resend-to-openers drip
✓State Fair sponsorship

04Where the work came from

Reach is not response.

Inside Brand Media, the tactic that ate the most impressions delivered the fewest clicks — and the leanest tactic delivered the most. This gap is the whole argument for how 2026 gets allocated.

Share of impressions vs. share of clicks

Within Brand Media (18.1M impressions · 126,535 clicks). Each tactic’s slice of total reach (left dot) connected to its slice of total response (right dot). When the line slopes up to the right, the tactic punches above its weight.

% of impressions % of clicks

Tactic	Impressions	% impr.	Clicks	% clicks

05The engine of the year

Parenting content did the heavy lifting.

Native ads dressed as blog stories drove 76,059 clicks at a $0.38 cost-per-click and a 2.83% CTR — nearly 2× the 1.50% benchmark. The subjects families clicked tell you what to make more of.

A student writing a lesson on a classroom chalkboard — Content that teaches earns the click.

Native / blog clicks by topic

Bar length = clicks. Every topic beat the 1.50% CTR benchmark; the label shows each topic’s CTR. Emotional-development stories out-pulled everything.

Blog topic	Impressions	Clicks	CTR

06Against the yardstick

Every channel beat its benchmark.

Not one tactic came in under its industry reference line — several cleared it by a wide margin.

Actual vs. benchmark, by tactic

Each row is scaled to its own metric. The │ tick is the benchmark; the bar is what the campaign delivered. All green — every tactic ▲ beat its mark.

Tactic	Metric	Benchmark	Actual	vs.

07The year in email

A list that opened all year.

Fifteen Brand sends averaged a 18.97% open rate and 2.37% CTR — both comfortably over benchmark. Engagement peaked mid-summer and around back-to-school.

Brand email open rate over 2025

Open rate per send. The dashed line is the 15% benchmark — every send but two cleared it. Hover for the send.

Send date	Open rate

08 Model the next move

Now plan 2026.

Reallocate next year’s digital budget across the tactics you’re keeping. Projections use each tactic’s actual 2025 efficiency — its real cost-per-click and cost-per-thousand. Drag a slider and watch the year re-forecast.

Budget allocation

Start from a preset, then fine-tune each tactic.

State Fair sponsorship Committed $31,540

Your conversion assumptions

Click → inquiry rate

3.5%

Inquiry → enrollment rate

10%

Efficiency coefficients are locked to the 2025 report. Conversion rates are planning assumptions you set — adjust them to your own funnel history.

Projected 2026

Digital budget $130,110

Incl. $31,540 committed State Fair · $161,650 all-in

Impressions

—

vs 2025

Clicks

—

vs 2025

Inquiries

—

at your rate

Enrollments

—

projected

Show 2025 baseline as an overlay

Where the digital budget goes