Your Fall Advertising Campaign: Analytics & Insights

- 2 min read -

Your fall advertising campaign: Analytics & insights

The fall has wrapped up. The school applications are in. The admissions have been made.

Your seasonal campaign has come to an end. Now it’s time to look back on your results and assess your success. To do this accurately, and shed insight on what to do for your 2019 ad campaigns, you’ll need to make sense of your results by diving into data analytics. Here are a few campaign elements worth analyzing in order to craft successful campaigns in the new year.

Uncover the meaning of different data sets

There are a few types of data sets you can review to help you shape upcoming marketing campaigns.

One set of data is gathered by having students directly answer questions about how they heard about your post-secondary school (micro-influencer, Facebook ad, poster in their high school, etc.), what they are looking for in a post-secondary school, and what they see as the pros and cons of your school.

This kind of data will give you an indication of what caught your audience’s attention. In essence, their responses will indicate your most memorable marketing elements, which you can use in future campaigns. They also provide valuable information that can’t be as easily quantified.

This brings us to another set of data, one which relies on results gathered instantly from your fall digital campaign. These data can be gathered from a content resource management (CRM) platform like HubSpot.

Depending on the type of media you used, you can see which micro-influencer videos, banner ads or blog posts earned views and/or led to engagement. These engagements could take the form of newsletter subscriptions, messaging micro-influencers, or click through rates on your school’s emails. Each of these data analytics provide valuable insight into which of your school’s marketing messages resonated with potential students.

 So, how can these insights set up your upcoming campaigns for success?

Know which content is working

Based on the data gathered from your CRM platform, you can find the hard numbers that indicate which digital media are working the hardest for you. From seeing how many unique views a blog post or banner ad received, you can also see which post or advertisement had the highest engagement rates. That is, you can see what percentage responded to a call to action, whether it was signing up for news updates or clicking on the banner ad.

This will shine a light not only on what content and topics attracted a big response, but what posting time is most effective for getting a strong response. Morning, afternoon, or evening? Tuesday or Thursday?

From here, your marketing department can get even more granular on which elements worked best. Did banner ads with images work better than ads that just had big, bold copy? Did one CTA button colour  get more clicks than another? Small details like these can make a big difference in the success of your digital ads, so pay attention to which details are associated with higher click-through and engagements rates, then adjust accordingly.

Identify your receptive audiences

Another kind of data that can be studied for future campaigns regards how your target audiences responded. Getting students to sign up to newsletters or admission updates is an effective way to gather information about where prospective students are coming from and what academic programs they’re interested in.

What trends are you noticing? If you’re not meeting specific targets, take a closer look at the corresponding marketing and plan corrective actions. If you find a surge of responses from an audience you hadn’t planned on, take note of what media were used and when material was published. There might be unexpected solutions that could be applied to your other audiences. 

Analyzing these types of data and their success rates will give your marketing department clear ideas of how to move forward in future campaigns. Just be sure to maintain good data for every marketing effort you make. It’s the foundation for robust analytics and valuable insights.

Contact Glacier and learn more about how your past campaigns can provide useful insights into more effective future campaigns.

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