International Fair Marketing Platform.
Not just a registration website: a marketing engine. Universities pay to meet students at BMI Global Ed's education fairs, so every fair lives or dies by how many students register and turn up. One platform runs the fair sites in 18 countries, each localised for its market, measured from the first ad click to the scan at the door, and fed back into the next campaign.
A registration form sits in the middle, not at the end
Every fair runs the same loop. An ad brings a student to a page written for their market. A short, stepped form turns the visit into a registration. A unique QR code becomes their ticket. The scan at the fair confirms they came. And every step reports back to the ad platforms that paid for the visit.
One template, localised for every market
Each country's marketing team adapts the same site to its students' culture and ambitions, without waiting for an engineer. What a student sees in Dubai, São Paulo or Monterrey is written for them.
Brand and colours
Each market runs under its own fair brand, logo and accent colours.
Language and tone
Copy in the market's language, with a headline angle chosen for its students: global ambition, scale and free entry, or postgraduate study as an investment.
Hero imagery
Imagery chosen for each market's audience.
Cities, dates and venues
Every fair's cities, dates and venues, set by the event team.
Sections on and off
Exhibitors, seminars, FAQ and testimonials, switched on and ordered per market.
Registration fields
Form fields tuned to each audience, such as study level for a postgraduate fair.
Tracking per market
Each market keeps its own tag container, pixels and ad accounts.
Exhibitors from the CRM
Exhibiting universities' marketing information arrives automatically from the bespoke exhibitor CRM, so the directory is never retyped.
From one long page to a stepped form
The original registration asked for everything on one long page. I redesigned it for students registering on their phones: a short sequence of steps with a progress bar, A/B tested against the long form. The pattern carried into both later generations of the platform. It was one of the changes in the A/B testing programme that lifted event sign-ups by 67%.
A unique QR code is the student's ticket
Every completed registration generates a QR code unique to that student, shown on their confirmation and ready to add to Apple Wallet. At the fair it is their entry ticket, and exhibitors, the universities and schools at the stands, scan the same code with BMI Smart Scan, our lead-capture app, to see who they met.
Every step reports back to the ads that paid for it
Every step is tracked, so the team knows which ad filled which fair. Each market's site fires custom conversion events into Google Tag Manager, which passes them to GA4, Google Ads, the Meta Pixel and the TikTok Pixel, and follows the student across to the virtual-fair platform, where the online fairs run. The scan at the door closes the loop: attendance goes back to the ad platforms too, so campaigns are judged on students who came, not only students who signed up.
| Student action | Event | Sent to |
|---|---|---|
| Lands on the page | Page view | GA4 · the ad pixels |
| Starts registering | Registration started | The ad pixels, for retargeting |
| Completes registration | registration-complete-<fair> | GA4 · Google Ads · Meta Pixel · TikTok Pixel |
| Is scanned at the fair | Attendance, from the door scan | The ad platforms |
What the team does with it
Budget by city
Moves ad spend between cities and markets by cost per registration.
Retargeting
Reaches students who started registering but did not finish.
Lookalike audiences
Built from students who completed registration.
Exhibitor reporting
Shows exhibitors and sales each fair's reach.
Who turned up
Turn-up in Vietnam roughly doubled while registrations held flat or fell slightly, so the gain is in students who came. Show-up rate is attendance divided by registrations, and it varies widely between markets, so these figures stand for Vietnam alone. The 2018 seasons ran on the earlier platforms; which generation served the 2025 seasons is not recorded.
Designed the funnel, built the measurement, directed three platforms
I led this product line from 2015 across three generations of platform. I coded the first stepped registration, the first mobile ticket and the conversion measurement myself; the WordPress and Next.js builds were delivered by the offshore team I managed.
Built, hands-on · 2015 to 2026
- Redesigned registration from one long page into a multi-step mobile form on the original PHP platform, and A/B tested it against the long form (December 2015 to July 2016).
- Built the first mobile ticket: an Apple Wallet event pass carrying the student's code, on the original PHP platform.
- Built the conversion measurement on the WordPress fair sites, from Google Tag Manager to GA4, Google Ads and the Meta and TikTok pixels, all under GDPR consent control (2020 to 2023).
- Diagnosed and fixed a two-outage production incident on the Next.js front end, and wrote the incident report within 24 hours of the second outage (September 2025).
- Added a city, several countries and a cross-market feature to the Next.js sites' live route list, which serves 18 countries (January 2026).
Led, team-delivered · 2020 to 2026
- Directed the rebuild of the stepped registration on WordPress Multisite, built by the offshore team I managed (April 2020).
- Decided and directed the move from the legacy PHP API to the central platform API: the WordPress sites moved onto it in 2024, and the Next.js front end was built on it from the start (2024 to 2026).
- Specified and commissioned the third-party vendor rebuild (2022) of BMI Smart Scan, the exhibitors' lead-capture app I first built in 2017.
Tech stack
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