Case Study: University of St. Thomas achieves 3x PPC, advertising and email conversion rates with Ion Interactive

Tripling PPC, Advertising and Email Conversion Rates with Microsites

The University of St. Thomas, a private 124‑year‑old university in Minneapolis–St. Paul, relied on PPC, banner ads and email to drive leads for 200+ executive education and professional development programs. A three‑person digital team found their front‑end web experiences didn’t reflect program quality and their patchwork CRM + optimizer setup was too slow and inflexible for program‑specific testing, analytics and seamless lead capture.

They adopted ion’s no‑code microsite platform to rapidly build, test and manage tailored post‑click experiences and link form data to their CRM. In five months they ran 12–15 variants per program (15+ experiences across 20+ campaigns), achieving a 3x conversion improvement, higher‑quality leads, better forecasting, more efficient ad spend allocation, and dramatic wins from tactics like video testimonials, which more than doubled conversions on tested pages.

University of St. Thomas

Mykola Sarazhynsky

Director of Marketing System