The client
Eden School Fees Planning helps families plan for one of the biggest costs they’ll ever face — and since VAT landed on private school fees, one that’s only grown heavier. Founder Robin Baker later launched Newmorro, an FCA-regulated financial planning firm, and brought Russell in for digital advice there too. Working across a founder’s second business is the kind of testimonial you can’t write — only earn.
The problem
School fees planning is a genuinely niche audience: a specific kind of family, at a specific moment, searching in a specific way. And financial services carries a constraint most advertisers never face — strict rules on how you’re allowed to talk to people. Ad copy that would be fine for a shoe shop can be a compliance breach for an advice firm.
Run generic PPC at that audience and you get what the dashboard calls success: clicks, traffic, even “conversions.” What you don’t get is qualified families — the ones whose enquiry is actually worth something to the business. The account was optimising toward volume when the whole game is value.
What we did
Not more clicks. Better questions.
- Started with what an enquiry is worth. Before touching a keyword: what does a qualified planning enquiry actually make the business, once it’s been through the process? Until that number is agreed, optimisation is aiming at a target nobody’s defined.
- Wrote copy that survives a compliance review. Campaigns built inside the rules on financial promotions — speaking to the right families honestly, without a line a regulator would blink at.
- Optimised toward qualified, not toward volume. Conversion definitions rebuilt around enquiry quality, so the machine chased families genuinely planning for fees — not anyone who’d fill in a form.
- Told the truth monthly. A standing conversation every month — including, when the numbers said so, the advice nobody selling media ever gives: spend less.
The results
Cost per qualified enquiry down 57%. Enquiry quality noticeably improved — fewer forms, more families. And the founder trusted the approach enough to bring Russell across to his next venture, Newmorro, for digital advice from day one.
"Russell has looked after our paid search for Eden School Fees Planning and provided digital advice on Newmorro, and the difference between him and everyone else we’ve dealt with is simple: he starts with what an enquiry is actually worth to us, not what the dashboard says. School fees planning is a niche audience with strict rules on how you’re allowed to talk to them — Russell understands both, and writes campaigns that bring in qualified families rather than clicks. Since he took over, our cost per qualified enquiry has dropped by 57% and our enquiry quality has noticeably improved. I speak to him every month, and he tells me the truth even when it’s ‘spend less’."
Robin Baker · Founder, NewmorroThe point
In lead generation, a cheap enquiry isn’t the goal — a valuable one is. The dashboard can’t tell a curious click from a family three months from engaging a planner. The business can. So the business’s numbers, not the platform’s, set the target.
That’s the whole method. Money in the till, applied to financial services.
Robin Baker founded Eden School Fees Planning and Newmorro, a modern FCA-regulated financial planning firm — newmorro.com. Compulsion is Russell Anson’s independent paid-search consultancy — 18 years in, pointed at the only metric that matters. compulsion.agency