Multi-Channel Targeting Improves Engagement Rate by 52% for University of Manchester

Challenge

The University of Manchester is one of the UK’s most prestigious universities with a rich heritage dating back to 1824. In addition to attracting students from around the world, their beautiful university buildings attract many private rentals - a significant area of business for them.

The well-renowned university relied on word-of-mouth to generate new business for lesser-known services such as this - but felt that this alone was limiting growth, and so wanted to expand into new channels, starting with paid advertising.

The main objectives were to expand the current audience and generate larger levels of engagement. However, they faced lots of challenges when trying to accomplish these objectives, including difficulties in targeting and prioritisation of their offering.

Solution

Utilising our portfolio of previous success stories, our experts identified that a combination of paid search and paid social would be optimal to generate results. The team created and managed extensive campaigns across these channels, carrying out a plethora of optimisation work - but with some key areas of focus.

With targeting being such a key challenge for The University of Manchester, this was the first port of call for our experts. By utilising negative keywords within Google Ads, we were able to remove less relevant searches to save wasted spend and focus budget on higher intent keywords that would have a better chance of converting.

Due to the vast amount of services available, it was also very important to allocate the budget available to the correct areas on each channel to get the best possible results. By carrying out in-depth analyses of previous data, we were able to identify and prioritise the most popular services to increase the engagement and traffic that the campaign generated.

Then, to allow the paid social ads to stand out and be more appealing to users, we decided to take advantage of their 3D tour feature within the site. This allowed us to provide users with a better understanding of the offering and was a great consideration tool that played a big part in the decision-making process for potential customers.

Results

The improved accuracy of targeting worked in perfect unison with budget optimisation to help deliver a higher volume of new, relevant traffic to the site, which in turn took engagement to the next level.

The results impressed the University of Manchester greatly and illustrated the value that paid advertising could bring to their services - so much so that they decided to invest further.