Digital campaign has students on waiting list for classes!

Background: 

A Community College was looking to increase enrollment in numerous areas. Awareness needed to be generated for an in-state scholarship for dual enrolled high school students, and non-traditional adult students. The majority of the recruitment budget needed to be focused on prospective certified nursing students, their equine program, and their expanded agribusiness course work. 

Strategy: 

To generate awareness for the in-state components and reach people who have shown interest in ongoing education, Mobile Conquesting ads were used to target mobile devices that had recently been to college & university placement services, or college admission counselors. Key locations like high schools, career fairs, and job fairs were Geo-fenced to reach people in real-time on their mobile devices. Geo-Retargeting and Geo-Retargeting Lookalike audiences were added so we could continue to advertise to this audience after they left the Geo-fence, and help find more similar users.

Keyword Targeting was used to reach prospective students specifically looking for Agriculture and Equine related degrees. Instead of standard display ad sizes, Native creative was ran. Native Ads have higher CTRs and update in real time to match the look and feel of the website they are running on, which ultimately leads to more conversions. Including Native Retargeting was important to the success of the overall campaign, as these ads ensured the users who have previously visited the website were reminded of the College and the programs.

The nursing and CNA program budget was allocated via a mix of Facebook and Instagram ads. A mix of Carousel and Lead Generation ads were served to Facebook and Instagram users.  The carousel format assisted in telling the client’s story, the bigger picture behind why most people go into a service profession like nursing, and why this college was perfect for prospective nursing students.

Results: 

This campaign served 1.5 million impressions, 11,711 clicks, and generated an average click through rate of 0.76% over a 6-month time period. This click-through rate is over 10x the national average of 0.07%.  Some of the highest click-through rates were from Native ads.  Native Keyword saw an average 0.81% click-through rate, and Native Retargeting had a 1.38% click-through rate.  Facebook Lead ads also saw a very high click-through rate of 0.81%.  

Some highlights throughout the campaign were the amount of visits recorded through Mobile Conquesting. When mobile phones that were previously served one of the client’s ads had GPS enabled and connected, and then visited the community college, it was recorded in their monthly reports. The campaign overall had 110 raw visits recorded and 440 estimated visits total. Another highlight was the amount of Post Engagements on the Facebook Carousel ad – 1,300 post engagements!  Facebook also recorded over 25,000 View-through conversions.  The users shown this ad were clearly very interested in engaging with the content shown.  Native advertising’s shining moment was the large amount of conversions taken throughout the campaign. 5,571 Click Conversions were recorded, and 5,889 View-through conversions.  This is proof that users who were served the ads were interested in learning more about the College’s programs.

Overall, the Community College’s website traffic increased month over month throughout the entirety of the campaign, which is seen in the amount of conversions recorded and the click-through rates.  Some of the college’s key programs had students waitlisted for the upcoming academic semester as a result of the digital campaign.