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Overview
Colorado State University Online wanted to increase student enrollment and shrink their path to conversion timeline. They specifically cater to online and hybrid students which means finding the right student for the right program requires targeting capabilities that go beyond anything they can manage on their own. So they reached out to Genius Monkey’s programmatic platform to help achieve their goals and saw incredible results immediately.
The Challenge
It was very important to CSU Online that they not waste any of their advertising spend so one of the most important objectives was to have the ability to attribute success to the campaigns they were running so it was crucial for them to have the data behind each decision that they made in their digital campaigns. They also wanted to narrow their focus to people who had an interest in furthering their education, particularly military students since they have a veterans’ student affairs office on-campus offering support for both active duty and veterans of the military within their education programs.
CSU Online had these primary campaign goals:
Boost overall sales
Shrink Path to Conversion
Increase Military Student Enrollment
Our Solution
CSU Online started an omnichannel campaign with Genius Monkey to target prospective students with an increased focus on military veterans using video, audio and display. Using Genius Monkey’s programmatic geotargeting, age targeting and many other segmented audiences they’ve been able to run a marketing campaign that allowed them to find program-relevant students living in Colorado where they offered in-person learning. This also gave them a competitive analysis to see how other social efforts were performing.
Since they had just started running a similar programmatic campaign with a different vendor before starting with Genius Monkey, CSU Online was able to run a head-to-head split test. When comparing the engagement and conversions from the two campaigns, it was very clear that Genius Monkey was able to reach a more relevant military audience with far greater precision than the other vendor.
The Results
After working with multiple programmatic vendors at the same time, CSU Online noticed a stark difference in performance results from Genius Monkey even in just the first two weeks of running campaigns. They saw far more time on site from Genius Monkey visitors. They also saw remarkable improvement on their path to conversion timeline, getting prospective students to convert in less days and with less touchpoints–even in just the first few months.
- Boosted overall student enrollment
- Increased military student enrollment
- Shrank path to conversion
- Saw big jump in overall conversions
- Through the use of path to conversion reports, they were able to see and understand how all marketing mediums worked together, which allowed them to make actionable decisions based off those data points.
- Not only was there no wasted ad spend, but they ended up reducing their average costs across the board! Here are the highlights:
- Video
- Cost per conversion: $0.24
- Cost per thousand: $10.25
- Click-through rate: 4.3% -Cost per view: $0.02
- Display - Cost per conversion: $0.70
- Cost per thousand: $2.64
- Click-through rate: 0.4%
- Audio
- Cost per thousand: about $30
- Video
Summary
Using a robust and diversified omnichannel marketing strategy crafted by the Genius Monkey programmatic platform, CSU Online noticed a dramatic difference in performance in just the first two weeks of running campaigns. As a result, CSU has shifted all their programmatic spend to Genius Monkey and now recognize Genius Monkey as their number one source of traffic and conversions.