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Paid search & lead funnel

How do you sell a commercial edition of free software?

Open-source education ERP · Users in 90+ countries

At a glance

Client: OpenEduCat
Sector: Open-source education ERP · Users in 90+ countries
Scope: Managed PPC · Lead funnel design · Qualification

The situation

OpenEduCat is an open-source education ERP built on Odoo, used by institutions in more than ninety countries. Open source is excellent distribution and a difficult commercial funnel.

Downloads are not leads. Community users are not buyers. The traffic was there; what was missing was a path from someone evaluating a free product to an institution ready to pay for implementation and support.

Paid search compounds the problem — bid on generic education ERP terms and you spend the budget on people who will never pay for anything.

The work

What I actually did

01

Intent-first keyword strategy

Separated evaluation traffic from buying traffic, and bid only where the search implied budget and a decision-maker.

02

Managed PPC

Took over campaign management with a structure built around commercial intent rather than volume, and tight negative-keyword control.

03

A real lead funnel

Designed the path from first click to qualified enquiry — landing pages matched to ad intent, a qualification step that filtered community users from institutional buyers, and follow-up sequences that respected where someone was in the decision.

04

Measurement that means something

Reporting on qualified enquiries rather than clicks, so spend decisions could be made on the number that mattered.

What changed

  • A repeatable path from paid traffic to qualified institutional enquiry.
  • Spend concentrated on commercial-intent search instead of general volume.
  • Reporting the team could act on.
Confidentiality

Campaign spend, cost per lead and conversion figures are confidential.

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