About Packt
Packt is a leading technology publisher with a vast library of books, courses, and learning resources for software developers and IT professionals. With several hundred staff in Birmingham, UK, it serves millions of learners — but was struggling to scale its subscription product cost-effectively through paid channels.
The challenge
Packt’s paid acquisition was underperforming. Cost per acquisition was too high to scale, campaigns were fragmented across multiple ad accounts with no unified strategy, and creative had gone stale. Dozens of campaigns ran at once with no clear funnel structure, so it was impossible to tell what was driving conversions versus burning budget. The subscription had strong unit economics once a user converted, but the path from ad click to paid plan had too much friction: landing pages didn’t match the ads pointing at them, and there was no retargeting.
The approach
I restructured the entire operation around a full-funnel approach. At the top, content-driven campaigns used free chapter downloads, skill assessments, and curated learning paths as lead magnets, targeted by technology stack, experience level, and learning intent. In the middle, I retargeted visitors and lead-magnet engagers with social proof and dynamic creative testing hundreds of headline, image, and CTA combinations. At the bottom, conversion campaigns ran time-limited trial offers to the warmest audiences only — and every landing page was rebuilt to match the specific creative driving traffic to it.
Tool stack
The lesson
The fix was structure, not spend. Once each stage of the funnel had its own job — and its own creative — the same budget did an order of magnitude more.
The result
The restructured strategy delivered dramatic gains within the first 90 days.
