GPN Tech Challenge — recruiting hackathon participants via Instagram

The task

Recruit participants for the GPN Tech Challenge hackathon. The task has two stages: not just collect registrations, but bring people to a confirmed participant application — that is, cut off “dead” registrations and calculate the economics on those who will actually make it to the hackathon.

What we did

Ran all traffic on Instagram: drove to registration with a subsequent application confirmation. The campaign was judged on two levels of the funnel — cost per registration and cost per confirmed application, not on top-level clicks.

Results

• Ad platform — Instagram
• Ad budget — $644
• Funnel: 772 registrations → 445 confirmed applications
• Cost per registration — $0.83 (intermediate figure)
• Cost per confirmed application — $1.45 — the campaign’s target metric

Insights

A hackathon lead is usually expensive — the audience is narrow and professional. Here the $0.83 CPL is closer to mass niches than to typical hackathon numbers. But the second figure matters more: 58% of registrations (445 out of 772) reached a confirmed application — the ads brought motivated participants, not random people, and the traffic quality did not have to be paid for with a higher price. The bottom line: 445 confirmed participants at $1.45 on a budget under $678 — one channel fully covered the hackathon recruitment task.