Centralising paid search to support cross-faculty student recruitment
Cranfield welcomes students from over 100 countries to study master’s degrees, research programmes and professional development short courses across sector-aligned specialisms, including aerospace, defence, water, manufacturing, energy and business.
The Challenge
When we began working with Cranfield in 2019, the responsibility for paid search activity sat with individual faculties. Each team worked with different external agencies, resulting in fragmented data, inconsistent approaches and limited visibility across the wider university.
As the university evolved, so did the challenge. In 2025, Cranfield entered a transitional period, moving from school-level advertising to a centralised, cross-faculty marketing model. This required a fundamental shift in how budgets were managed, how priorities were set, and how performance was measured.
“Moving to one centralised strategy involved a lot of logistics, and a solid understanding of overall organisational goals and budgets. More important than that, though, was ensuring that every stakeholder was aligned on what success looked like.”
- Chloe Waight, Paid Media Lead, Aira
The Solution
Aira brought paid search activity under one unified strategy and budget across faculties. By consolidating campaigns and data, we were able to use performance insights from each course and country to allocate budget in the most effective way for the whole university.
As Cranfield moved towards a consolidated marketing model, we supported the transition by:
- Combining previously siloed school-level campaigns into a unified cross-faculty approach.
- Working with the Cranfield team to establish a single shared budget aligned to priority courses.
- Mapping regional and international seasonality across the academic year to ensure spend was allocated at the most impactful times.
- Reviewing organic search performance to identify where paid activity could provide the greatest incremental value.
Alongside consolidating campaign management, we collaborated closely with Cranfield’s digital team. This included making recommendations to improve landing page conversion rates and ensuring robust Google Tag Manager implementation so PPC performance could be accurately tracked in GA4.
“Consolidating our activity has been transformative. We now have total oversight of our digital performance, allowing us to make smarter, more strategic decisions across the entire university.”
- David Fryer, Head of Web and Digital Experience, Cranfield University
The Results
By centralising paid search activity and aligning it with wider marketing and analytics efforts, Cranfield gained clearer visibility of performance across faculties and greater confidence in how budgets were being invested.
The new cross-faculty approach enabled more strategic decision-making, improved consistency across campaigns and ensured that priority courses received the support they needed at key points in the recruitment cycle.
“The collaboration was seamless from start to finish. Their expertise, communication, and commitment made all the difference in delivering a successful outcome.”
- Liz Hunter, Marketing Partner, Cranfield University