Brief Description

From mid-February through, the end of April, 2019, the Office of Marketing and Brand Management ran digital display ads promoting the Muskie graduate programs Public Policy and Public Health through LinkedIn, Facebook, and Doubleclick.

• $5000 was allocated for ads to promote these 2 Muskie programs. The breakdown is shown below.

FY19 Spring Muskie budget

	MPH	POL
Total Cost of Campaign	$1945.93	$3111.29

⊕LinkedIn Sponsored Content CTR national benchmark = 0.15%

• Click-thru-Rates (CTR) for LinkedIn Sponsored content ads were above benchmarks; we averaged 0.52%.

⊕Programmatic CTR USM average FY19 Umbrella Campaigns = 0.06%

• CTR for Doubleclick ads were higher than we typically see with other campaigns; we averaged 0.085%.

⊕Facebook CTR USM cutoff for all FY19 Campaigns = 0.45%

• Facebook CTR for Facebook ads was lower than our cutoff; we averaged 0.30%. However Facebook drove the majority of traffic to the landing pages and the average time on page for non-bounce traffic was ~1 minute, a reassuring number.

⊕Recall that the landing pages are program pages, not exclusively campaign landing pages.

• From FY19 Q2 (no ad campaign) and FY19 Q3 (ad campaign started Feb, 2109), there was a 42% increase in web traffic to the Muskie pages.

Conclusion

• We are pleased with LinkedIn and Doubleclick ad performance, the click-through-rates are above benchmark.

• Because of a “back to school” mindset in the Fall, we showed about 35% more Impressions. The 75% fewer unique pageviews in the Spring could be due to this viewer behavior.

• The strong CTR from LinkedIn Sponsored content in the Fall is very encouraging and, despite a drop in the Spring , the metric remains well above benchmark. The percentage of web visits out of impressions shown remained consistent into the spring.

• Facebook CTR dropped from Fall to Spring. While we antipate lower values, it demands close consideration as it is below USM cutoff of 0.45%.