Targeting trial complete!

Three weeks ago I started a trial using the Google DFP system for targeting the banners on our homepage for our internal audience, something of a try it an dsee approach.

Well, the good news is that it has worked rather well! Using the IP check with DFP we targeted anyone within the beds.ac.uk domain. This has reaped some interesting results:

 

Up to a 1.1% CTR on internal banners which has been great for promotion of our internal services!

Below is a screenshot of the external site as seen by an internal viewer:

 

If you compare this to the live external site (beds.ac.uk) then you can see that the messaging is very different!

The only outstanding question now is how much more can we do with the system, text snippets that are changed on IP or country details would work or maybe looking at the idea of selling some spare impressions off...?

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!