Digital Marketing Series: Commencement 2015

Maximizing reach So much of advertising depends on reach. It doesn’t matter what medium or channel you are considering. Before you can drive engagement and deliver conversions you have to start by reaching your audience. Sometimes reach at a university ebbs and flows outside of our control. During the summer months reach is diminished. Students […]

July 16, 2015


The digital marketing series is a behind the scenes look at projects, campaigns, tools, tricks and other marketing machinations happening at Oregon State University.

Maximizing reach

So much of advertising depends on reach. It doesn’t matter what medium or channel you are considering. Before you can drive engagement and deliver conversions you have to start by reaching your audience.

Sometimes reach at a university ebbs and flows outside of our control. During the summer months reach is diminished. Students leave, faculty go on vacation and our physical touch points start to dry up. The same goes for our digital space, during these months some of our audiences have fewer reasons to go to our home page. The natural (unpaid) forces that provide motivation for people to enter our funnel temporarily dry up.

EndofYear
Commencement 2015

There are also a few times each year where our natural reach is maximized. During commencement our touch points increase. Parents, siblings, alumni, current students, etc. all coming to campus, some for the first time in years. Web traffic analysis shows that this is also a peak time for the university home page and core sites.

As bargain hunting marketers we make an effort to pounce on the opportunity. Every year our department composes features about our graduates often including stories and videos detailing their exploits and possible career options. This allows us to celebrate the university through the stories about some really interesting people. These are particularly useful in targeting our prospective parent demographic. Parents want to imagine their students getting a degree and moving on with the job of their dreams and we happily share examples with them. Callie our storytelling guru and Darryl, the lord commander of video production, usually pair up to make excellent content.

Here is one student from this year’s graduating class.

Normally these profiles would be inserted into our carousel towards the top of the Oregon State home page. Without going on a rant I’ll just say I’m not much of a carousel fan. Typically this feature of our site has a 1.3% click through rate. You can spin that number however you want, but to me it isn’t good enough. This year we decided to try something new.

Going outside of the box

It is unrealistic to consider completely redesigning our home page for this one use and the current design was never constructed to be very flexible in terms of layout. We decided that there might be a way to augment it with some small CSS tricks in order to take advantage of this temporarily increased reach. Oliver (one of our graphic designers — which is oversimplifying his amazing talents, but I digress) came up with the concept of adding functionality that allowed the home page to essentially slide away revealing bonus content. The thought would be to make it feel like you were finding a secret or something hidden. Making an emotional connection rather than the expected experience with the carousel. The simple act of changing the background to an image, instead of a color, might register with the users that something has changed.

Screenshot of our home page with a background image for the first time. You can also see the button that was added.

Screenshot of our home page with a background image for the first time. You can also see the button that was added.

After talking it through we came up with a fairly simple solution. We inserted a new graphic that when clicked slid the main content area of the home page to the right revealing our special commencement feature. This was done with one line of jQuery and absolutely positioning the commencement feature underneath the main container with CSS. We played around with all sorts of ideas, but this seemed like the best compromise. We didn’t want to impede the user experience by forcing people to go through this feature, but we also wanted it to be interruptive enough that it would be noticeable.

After clicking the button in the left corner of the page the main content area slides to the right exposing our hidden content.

After clicking the button, in the left corner of the page, the main content area slides to the right exposing our commencement feature.

The results are in

By attaching event tracking to the button, that activated the animation, we were able to track how many times users interacted with our marketing Frankenstein feature. During the 14 days that this feature was on the home page it was “opened” 3,956 times by 2,652 unique users. Those numbers in isolation tell me that at least some people figured out how to interact with this new feature and absorbed some of our storytelling goodness. A few of which probably clicked on it a few times for the fun of it.

A more complete pictures comes into play when you know that there were 101,906 unique users that visited the home page over that same 14 day window. Giving us a usage rate of 2.6% (amount of unique people who interacted out of the total unique people who possibly could have). That is almost double our standard CTR of the carousel, so in some sense you could consider this a smashing success. I also heard anecdotally that people enjoyed the hidden content and generally thought it was a pretty cool feature.

However, I can’t help but feel a little pessimistic. Capturing less than 3% of our users just doesn’t feel good enough. There are all sorts of reasons why I could explain it away. Maybe the button was not very noticeable. Maybe people saw it, but there were no visual queues for them to know that it was clickable. Most likely people saw it and didn’t care. Those users show up wanting to fulfill whatever task they came for and have little interest in being caught our web.

I suppose the takeaway here is understanding that these natural cycles exist and that they can be a valuable tool for maximizing reach. It is also important to explore new techniques and creative ways to capture your extended reach. We proved that it can have a positive impact, but we also found we have plenty to learn when it comes to understanding our audience and the best way to connect with them.

– Kegan

-Kegan

TAGS:

CATEGORIES: Multimedia Projects Stats User Experience

625 thoughts on “Digital Marketing Series: Commencement 2015”

  4. Birbirinden lezzetli enfes yemek tarifleri için sitemizi ziyaret etmeniz yeterli. Her türde yemek tarifleri güncel olarak siteye eklenmektedir.

  6. Modayı yakından takip edenler için güncel haberler bu sitede yer almaktadır. Ayrıca kadınlara dair birçok içerik sitede yer almaktadır.

  10. Really great article and good to see the team coming back together. I was able to find some really good digital marketing tips as well as CBD hemp oil at this store – check it out: Bondi Hemp Oil
    For amazing hemp oil in Australia

  13. Gezilip görülebilecek yerlerin tanıtımının yapıldığı harika bir gezenti sitesine mutlaka göz atmanızı tavsiye ederiz.

  14. Tüm elektrik malzeme ihtiyaçlarını bu siteden temin edebilirsiniz.
    AKIM KORUMALI PRİZLER,KABLO KANALLARI,LED AYDINLATMA,Acil Aydınlatma ve Yönlerdirme Armatüleri,Bahçe Led Aydınlatma Armatürler,Havuz Armatüleri,Led Armatürler,Led Floresan…

  16. I want to give my son a diploma of higher education. It’s not that he doesn’t want to study, but the thing is that he’s already gained knowledge online and now works in advertising. What do you think about it? I was advised by the guyshttp://gosznak-diploms.com/attestat-za-9-klass

  21. Webroot.com/safe is antivirus software to resolve your safety issues. It protects your computer from any kind of online threats and provides you with easy solutions to your problems. Sometimes while installing Webroot antivirus software, you may face some difficulties. In the given article below, we will discuss the reasons behind it and also provide you with its solutions. Read the full article and you will be able to fix your troubles while installing Webroot antivirus software

  23. Chemicals: Ask the students what comes to their minds when they hear the word “chemicals”. This term often has a negative connotation. Therefore, I focus on the fact that chemicals are scattered around us everywhere and that humans cannot live without them, and although some of them are harmful, others are useful and necessary.

    Refrigerants: I assign an air-conditioning specialist to speak in front of the class about the existing protection to prevent refrigerants from affecting the atmosphere, and I ask him to explain that refrigerants harmful to the atmosphere are replaced with less harmful refrigerants.

    Chemistry: Ask the students to write a few sentences in their chemistry notebooks describing what they want to learn in chemistry classes and what they expect. Refer to these sentences later to see if their expectations have been fulfilled.

    Thomas Migli, Jr.: Ask the students to find Thomas Migli, Jr. and write a summary of his life

  25. It is great that you do your best to reduce all the plastic bags and waste everyone tries to foist! Every effort counts till we set up a proper global waste management! It is really hard to do something when the society itself you care for, tries to put you down and continue its blissful carelessness, but please, keep up the great work you’ve done so far!Cloud Consulting Services

  32. I regularly visit your channel. You can give me a plus sign. I also like it when some of the content is hidden. I practice this trick on my site too.

  35. I already got my English up to scratch thanks to the online courses. It is true you need a very great desire not to miss and make yourself attend these courses every day at a special link. I realized that you can always buy a diploma with an English education through the guys http://russian-diplomist.com, but you can’t buy knowledge, so you have to learn in any case, first of all for yourself.

  45. Demirdöküm Kombi Servisi
    Kombi kullanımı doğalgazın yaygın olarak taşınabilmesi ile mekanları ısıtma kullanımı için son yıllarda daha popüler hale gelmiştir. Birçok ev sahibi eski ve daha karmaşık merkezi ısıtma sistemlerini daha küçük, daha kullanılabilirliği yüksek bireysel tasarrufu yapılabilen kombi sistemleri ile değiştirmeye karar vermiştir ve değiştirip kullanmaya başlamıştır. Demirdöküm Kombi Servisi kayıt bırakarak hızlı çözüm alabilirsiniz.
    https://www.demirdokum.acilservishizmeti.com/

  47. When it comes to the production of diplomas, most people think that printing this document is not a problem at all. However, will all the necessary data about the higher education obtained be entered into the necessary registers, catalogs, and other university documentation? These doubts are not unfounded. After all, you can not buy a conducted diploma in all firms, because such work should be performed exclusively by experienced professionals. All the details on http://adiplomans.com/kupit-diplom-o-srednem-obrazovanii

Comments are closed.