Clients: Case Studies

Overview
Seeking an alternative approach to the standard marketing tactics used by universities throughout the nation, OSU turned to PPC efforts in order to gain a stronger online presence and promote their new admissions blog. OSU aimed to generate branding and awareness as well as qualified leads outside of the major educational portals and saw PPC as a viable opportunity to do so.

Objective
Initially OSU turned to their first full service marketing agency for daily PPC management and, as quoted in their Year End Admissions eMarketing Report for 2006 "witnessed just how fast an unfocused campaign could eliminate an entire budget with hardly any appreciable result". Highly unsatisfied with the results, OSU hired Anvil to assess the situation and create a more focused PPC campaign that would work with a smaller budget, yet generate highly targeted traffic to the site.

Challenge
OSU was working with a smaller, fixed media budget and had been unhappy with results from the previous full service marketing agency. The challenge was to launch an exposure based PPC campaign with strained budgets.

Strategy
Anvil developed a more focused strategy to promote OSU's new blog with cheaper, more targeted keywords and landing pages as well as constant budget adjustment towards top performing campaigns, ads and keywords and away from those that weren't performing. Adversely, the initial full service marketing agency's main objective was based on driving clicks. At the time of Anvil's takeover of management, they did not yet have conversion tracking in place to manage bids to top performing keywords based on the generation of qualified leads.

Results
Over the 5 week period that the agency managed OSU's PPC, a significant amount of resources were spent, conversion tracking was not implemented and very broad and expensive keywords were purchased. Keyword bidding was to position, not performance. Anvil decreased the average cost per click by 52% and approximately the same amount of budget was spent by Anvil over a four month period as opposed to a five week period by the previous agency. Although the main objective was to drive traffic and increase visibility of the blog, OSU was surprised with conversion rates that compete with other industry portals.

URL
Oregon State University