Aeroflot hackathon

The task

Drive registrations for the Aeroflot hackathon through targeted Instagram advertising. Hackathons are a tough lead-gen segment: the audience is narrow (developers and IT specialists), and the target action is not a click but a completed participant application. That is why registrations for IT events usually cost noticeably more than leads in mass-market niches, and the main risk is collecting “raw” sign-ups that never make it to participation.

What we did

An Instagram ad campaign with “registration” as the target action. We tracked the funnel past the first touch — down to the confirmed participant application — and measured performance by that, not by the number of registrations.

Results

• Platform — Instagram
• Ad budget — $751
• Funnel: 534 registrations → 398 confirmed applications
• Cost per registration — $1.41 (intermediate metric)
• Cost per confirmed application — $1.89 — the campaign’s target metric

Insights

• Conversion from registration to confirmed application is about 75% (398 of 534). For a narrow IT audience this is a traffic-quality indicator: a random audience would have dropped off at the application stage several times harder.
• $1.89 per confirmed participant makes hackathon recruitment predictable: the final number of applications is limited only by budget.
• One channel closed the task — Instagram; there was no need to split the $751 budget across several platforms.