FA20 Spring Travel Ads
Christine Iyer
May 31, 2019
Basic Description
The University of Southern Maine’s Office of Marketing and Brand Management has run a digital advertising campaign to support spring travel events offered by the Office of Admissions for the past three years. Rinck Advertising is able to geo-target the ads based on the Admissions’s counselors travel schedule. Typically, ads preceed events by and follow events for a week in the general geograpgic location.
Overall project objective
Microtargeting Ads by location based on the Admission’s calendar of off-site events.
Evaluate performance of last Spring’s ads.
Findings
1. Does this schedule differ significantly from last Spring?
The answer to this question is simple. No, the travel schedule has not changed significantly.
2. Ad performance:
How did the ads do in terms of CTR?
We have run digital display ads through Doubleclick Bid Manager and Facebook to support Admissions’ spring travel activities for the past three years.
We have seen good growth within the Doubleclick platform.
Facebook saw a big drop in CTR performance. This was not unique to USM, FB Newsfeed CTR overall experienced a 24% drop from July, 2017 - July, 2018.
| Source | FiscalYear | CTR |
|---|---|---|
| DBM | 2017 | 0.11% |
| DBM | 2018 | 0.02% |
| DBM | 2019 | 0.16% |
| FB | 2017 | 0.95% |
| FB | 2018 | 0.44% |
| FB | 2019 | 0.33% |
With Rinck advertising, we decreased our total spend on Facebook display.
| Source | FiscalYear | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| FB | 2017 | $4998.94 |
| FB | 2018 | $4999.59 |
| FB | 2019 | $1004.92 |
The remaining 2019 spring travel budget was reallocated to expand into Instagram with display, video, and carousel ads, as well as add video and carousel to Facebook. The results are shown below.
- Note that Instagram display ads performed above the national benchmark of 0.16%
| FiscalYear | Source | Medium | CTR | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | FB | Disp | 0.33% | $1004.92 |
| 2019 | IG | Disp | 0.18% | $1309.65 |
| 2019 | FB | Vid | 0.59% | $2104.77 |
| 2019 | IG | Vid | 0.14% | $1812.02 |
| 2019 | FB | Car | 0.36% | $252.39 |
| 2019 | IG | Car | 0.18% | $383.09 |
Web visits from out of state to HS landing page
- It is difficult to get an apples to apples comparison because in previous years, we did not apply naming conventions and therefore are unable to isolate the “Travel Ads”.
| FiscalYear | UPV |
|---|---|
| 2017 | 3250 |
| 2018 | 3395 |
| 2019 | 1821 |
Traffic to the current landing page since March 1, 2017
We are directing of out-of-state ad viewers to a new landing page with content pertinent to them. Until 3/1/2019, all traffic to this page came from organic traffic. Previously we did not see such robust activity to this page with valuable tuition information. The following three plots track differences in web metrics.
The first plot shows the difference in the number of unique page views. These have increased exponentially
The second plot shows the the average time on page (among those who have not bounced), is has essentially remained the same since the ads have been driving traffic here.
The bounce rate prior to the campaign was munch lower. This is not unusual, bounce rates are much lower when the viewer is self-referred, as oppposed to the viewer who is referred by an ad.
| adTiming | UniquePageviews | Avg_Time_On_Page | BounceRate |
|---|---|---|---|
| In-Market | 3829 | 00:01:25 | 89% |
| Out-of-Market | 1102 | 00:01:30 | 53% |
Lead to Inquiry conversions in Salesforce
The Lead column indicates how many lead names were purchased from the New England area, excluding Maine. Not all inquiries came from leads. I have begun tracking conversions accurately and have counted 309 inquiries of the lead names we purchased in Feb 2019, accounting for nearly 25% of inquiries from this spring.
| Year | Inquiry | Applicant |
|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 1608 | 253 |
| 2018 | 1908 | 408 |
| 2019 | 1302 | 198 |
Conclusions
High School audiences are not responding to Facebook display ads as they have done in the past.
We are pleased with the results in traffic to the 2019 landing page. Although it appears that there is less traffic, we can not be completely sure of the 2017 and 2018 traffic because ad naming conventions were not in place.