Social Media Drives +253% Traffic for College

The local community college was struggling to reach the summer transient students – students that are eligible to take classes at the local community college during the summer and have credits transferred back to their original institutions. In addition, the local community college wanted to reach the parents of children that are most likely to participate in summer classes.

Goals

• Engagement with more students, specifically from nearby colleges that would be interested in summer classes
• Engagement with website, specifically program pages for summer transient students
• Engagement with social media

Our team of experts created a strategy focused on three different tactics to reach potential students and their parents in addition to standard display ads on cleveland.com and the extended reach ad network:

• We used the lat/long targeting over six college campuses to reach students while they were on their home campus, encouraging them to save money and get ahead by taking summer classes at the local community college.
• Through social media, we targeted students interested in taking classes while they’re home for the summer.
• Sponsored content was used to raise awareness about the advantages of summer classes at the community college.
• In addition to the traditional “in river” posts on cleveland.com, the sponsored content was promoted through display advertising utilizing the RRM platform. Featuring creative specific to the parent and the student audience, which allowed the tracking of respondents’ engagement with the ad.

• Mobile-targeted campaign around 6 campuses garnered 16,316 clicks and achieved an overall CTR (click-through rate) of .97%.
• The transient student page saw 21,454 page views, a 136% increase from 2015.
• Traffic is driven by social increased 253% year over year.