Wednesday 23 November 2011

It's time to target our content!

With the launch of the new homepage design on beds.ac.uk we also rolled in a new banner management system (Google AdManager) at the same time. This runs the four banner buttons underneath the Course Finder search. The idea initially was to look at running UK & International variants of banner content using the geographic filtering options available within the system. For example, if you are coming in from China you would see a different banner to someone visiting from London. Clever stuff, especially as the creatives can be totally different and draw on local preferences on colour, tone of voice, etc.

But, the option we didn't initially think about was far closer to home! We know from our analytics that the externally facing website receives traffic from our internal audience, current students, staff, etc. So why not target banners for them! AdManager allows us to target on IP address or domain name, so our first trial is to put up a banner, targeted at our internal domain, that points students to their Gmail account.

It's simple to put in place and will allow us to highlight events, services and information to our current students without it interfering with our marketing message to prospective students. A win win situation for all and incredibly easy to implement!

2 comments:

  1. Really interesting to see this approach being floated for real (I took a related idea for a dog walk but was never really in a position to try it out: http://blog.ouseful.info/2010/07/20/contextual-content-delivery/ ).

    If you do trial a campaign, can you blog a couple of screenshots of the banners in place and maybe give a few stats/an idea about whether it provoked any response?:-)

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  2. Hi Tony,

    Initial set-up appears to be working rather well and is getting some clicks. I'm going to expand it out to cover all four banner slots so once this is done and has collected some traffic i'll add some screenshots and stats to the blog!

    Cheers,

    Kris

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