NTI Smart City Hackathon: 201 confirmed applications at $8.66, 375 registrations, $1,741 budget

The task

Recruit participants for the NTI Smart City Hackathon. Hackathons are one of the hardest niches for paid traffic: the target audience is narrow (developers and technical specialists willing to spend a weekend on a competition), and a plain registration guarantees nothing — the organizer needs confirmed applications, that is, people who will actually show up. So the KPI was set on two funnel levels: registrations and confirmed applications.

What we did

Launched paid traffic to registration through two platforms — VK and Instagram. Drove participants to the registration form; further down, the funnel cut off “cold” leads with the application confirmation step.

Results

• Platforms — VK, Instagram
• Budget — $1,741
• Funnel: 375 registrations → 201 confirmed applications
• Cost per registration — $4.64 (intermediate metric)
• Cost per confirmed application — $8.66 — the campaign’s target metric

Insights

Of 375 registrations, 201 participants made it to a confirmed application — ~54% conversion, a high figure for an event funnel with an extra step. The key arithmetic of the case: a confirmed participant costs almost twice as much as a registration ($8.66 versus $4.64). Hackathon organizers need to build this gap into the budget in advance — plan the media plan from the cost of a confirmed participant, not from a pretty CPL per registration, otherwise actual attendance turns out twice as expensive as projected.