Transparent Marketing Budget Allocation for Investment ROI Assessment: JustSchool Case

The Challenge

JustSchool, an online English-language school at the cutting edge of EdTech, was investing heavily in paid marketing to acquire students. However, their lead management system (AmoCRM) — while effective for CRM operations — offered minimal analytical capabilities. The team couldn’t efficiently evaluate the ROI of their marketing spend across different channels, making it impossible to determine which acquisition sources were profitable and which were wasting budget.

The lack of analytical infrastructure meant that key decisions about marketing budget allocation were made on intuition rather than data. Leadership needed a system that could automatically extract CRM data, connect it to marketing spend, and present clear dashboards showing the true cost and value of each acquisition channel.

JustSchool’s marketing team was investing across multiple channels — Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, referral programs, and content marketing — but had no way to compare performance across these channels on an apples-to-apples basis. Each platform reported its own metrics in its own format, and combining them required hours of manual spreadsheet work that was both slow and error-prone. The inability to quickly identify underperforming channels meant marketing budget continued flowing to sources that were delivering low-quality leads — students who signed up for trials but never converted to paying enrollments.

Our Approach

We designed and built an end-to-end analytics system from scratch, structured in three layers:

• Data Extraction Layer: We developed automated Python scripts to extract lead, enrollment, and revenue data from AmoCRM’s API on a scheduled basis. This replaced manual exports and ensured data freshness for daily decision-making.
• Data Warehouse: Raw CRM data was loaded into a structured database where we built transformation logic to connect marketing channel attribution (UTM parameters) with downstream conversion events — from lead to trial to paid enrollment.
• Visualization & Reporting: We built interactive dashboards providing transparent budget allocation visibility. Key views included: cost per lead by channel, lead-to-enrollment conversion rates, ROAS by marketing initiative, and cohort-based retention analysis.

A critical design decision was building the attribution logic at the database level rather than relying on AmoCRM’s built-in reports. This gave JustSchool a single source of truth for marketing efficiency that couldn’t be disputed across teams.

We also built an early warning system: automated alerts that triggered when key metrics (like cost-per-lead or trial-to-paid conversion rate) deviated significantly from historical norms. This allowed the marketing team to respond to performance changes within days rather than discovering issues at the end of the month during manual reporting. The entire system was designed with JustSchool’s growth trajectory in mind — the architecture could accommodate 10x growth in lead volume without requiring a redesign.

Results

• Fully automated data pipeline from AmoCRM to analytical dashboards, eliminating manual data processing.
• Transparent marketing budget allocation enabling leadership to see true ROI by channel in real-time.
• Identification of underperforming channels that were consuming 30%+ of budget with below-average conversion rates.
• Cohort analysis revealing student retention patterns that informed product improvements.
• Scalable infrastructure that grows with the business — designed to accommodate new marketing channels without rearchitecting.

Technologies Used

Python, AmoCRM API, PostgreSQL, Tableau, automated ETL pipelines.

Project Screenshots