It’s been said that the best customers are the ones that keep coming back. Sure, repeat business is bedrock for businesses like restaurants and retail shops. But there are only so many times you can send your high-schooler on a month long service trip to Fiji.

That was the issue for Rustic Pathways, a youth travel operator that runs service and adventure programs in seventeen countries around the world. They were getting decent mileage out of their alumni CRM lists, enticing parents to sign their teens up for their second or third Rustic program. But, eventually, these same kids head off to college or grab a summer job or internship closer to home. Rustic needed a new path to generating leads and enrollment, and we knew exactly where to find it: Facebook.

For our initial campaigns, we leveraged look-alike (LAL) audiences that would immediately expand Rustic’s reach, and deployed ads across Facebook, Instagram and Instagram Stories. As parents and teens engaged with the ads and clicked around Rustic’s website, we built the audiences for retargeting and conversion. Also, by using Facebook’s Campaign Budget Optimization, we let the algorithm move budget to the highest performing audiences, creating even more efficiency.

We quickly found KPIs trending in our favor, and our approach became repeatable: serve multiple versions of templated, campaign-specific ad creative to prospecting audiences, retarget based on engagement, then drive to conversion.

Over the span of the campaigns, which included over 60 unique ad creatives during the most critical months of Rustic’s year—November thru March—we outperformed CPA and enrollment goals by 23%, and generated 6% more leads than projected. For the global travel company, those weren’t just good results, they were world-changing.