A Paid Search Strategy that Wins
Reducing Cost-Per-Lead While Increasing Conversions
Background
The University has campuses across the country. They offer degree programs in graduate nursing, physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech-language pathology, as well as continuing education certificate programs.
Challenge
Amidst a highly competitive market where new graduate programs were proliferating at schools across the country, the University wanted to expand their graduate programs to new geographies. They needed a partner to help them increase the number of prospective students interested in their niche graduate programs while reducing their Cost Per Paid Enrollment (CPPE).
Solution
We saw an opportunity to think differently with several core objectives.
Here’s what we did.
- Strategically examined existing campaign structures to improve efficient lead capture. We identified issues with data accuracy and built geo-specific campaign structures to ensure platforms were prioritizing leads that were most likely to convert.
- Analyzed the application data to create a tiered geographical strategy allowing us to focus dollars on geos with the highest conversion rates.
- Optimized paid search by extensively building out keywords and built out over 160 ad groups to mirror user behavior and ensure that ad copy was tailored to each search query.
- Implemented a hybrid tracking strategy. We leveraged a combination of Google Analytics and Salesforce data to track campaign impact.
- Maximizing Reach & Engagement with New Media Mix: There was opportunity for a more impactful and efficient media mix. We leveraged automatic content recognition (ACR) technology to identify households that had viewed the TV spot and suppressed them from our digital video campaign to ensure we were adding incremental reach with our digital video buy. And, to increase engagement we shifted dollars from OOH to geo-targeted social media, giving us the opportunity to serve our audience relevant messages based on either their interests or their location.
- Robust Testing: Split testing multiple ad formats and images for each message ensured that we were able to learn which creative assets resonated with our audience, thus increasing engagement. Using these tactics we were able to continually improve performance.
Results
Our extensive program audit, brand research, and paid search rebuild led to incredible results along with a Silver Drum Award for marketing effectiveness in the “Search” Category!
- A Y/Y increase of 35% in lead volume from Google and Bing paid search campaigns.
- Conversion rate improvement of 153% and a reduced CPPE
Services Included
Media Strategy Planning, & Buying
Content Strategy, Community, & Ads Mgmt
Paid Search
Search Engine Optimization(SEO)
Analytics/ Reporting
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