Improving the quality of applicants and reducing acquisition cost per student for the London-based university

The mission

Our work with City involves many aspects of digital marketing; SEO, social media advertising, search advertising and display. All of this is accompanied by ongoing strategic support and knowledge transfer.

• Drive more organic traffic to City, University of London’s websites
• Provide SEO experts and PPC consultancy
• Develop plans for undergraduate, postgraduate and short courses
• Improve conversion rate for organic and paid traffic

Our work with City involves many aspects of digital marketing; SEO, social media advertising, search advertising and display. All of this is accompanied by ongoing strategic support and knowledge transfer.

What we did

Working with the in-house digital marketing team, we created an SEO strategy and plan to tackle these issues, and improve the conversion tracking. The work included:

• Rewriting duplicate content to avoid Panda penalties
• Implementing structured data to improve rankings
• Setting up goals in Google Analytics to measure engagement and leads more effectively

PPC clearing campaign

Our original audit showed that City University was potentially wasting over 60% of their PPC budget due to misspent clicks and poor structure.

For the 2014 clearing campaign, we restructured it, rewrote the ads and only focused on core subjects to minimise misspend and improve the conversion rate and quality of student. This work paid off with a CTR up 166%, a better average position and a reduction in total spend by 21%.

This was also complemented with a Facebook campaign with sponsored posts on “Success starts here”. The CTR rose by 658% and attracted almost 300% more engagements compared to the previous year. The campaign also saved 68% of the budget.

The results

For the PPC Clearing campaign, it was overall a success with improved quality of applicants and reduced costs: