Crystal Clear

Writing this blog can sometimes be pretty tough (and I don't just mean finding the time to do it!)

Our online dashboard interface (with video!)

Things move very quickly with the web and digital marketing, and this is what I particularly enjoy about the job I do. However, writing about our latest initiatives in such a public forum is something I need to be careful about, in what is becoming an increasingly competitive sector. With that in mind, I wanted to showcase some of the work we've been doing to track our Clearing campaign as it begins to come to an end.

We have been working with Ranjit at Statistics Into Decisions for over a year now and it has been a truly collaborative process. We usually liaise with him when we have any big campaigns to monitor (i.e. our Virtual Open Days) and then he provides daily reports on what is working and how we can better focus our efforts. It's really useful for us to get an 'outsiders' view on things and pull together all of our campaign monitoring in one dashboard. Well, this year for Clearing we're gone one better...

Data for our Bing search campaign.
Bigger bubble = more activity.

Ranjit has built us a bespoke online dashboard based on our campaign activity and requirements - and best of all it contains LIVE data! This makes refining our campaigns much easier as it's all comparable and in one place. We also have the ability to drill down and exclude areas of activity which are dwarfing others (Google - I mean you!)

Two other great features are the daily videos and the competitor analysis (I'm keeping quiet on the latter of these!) All of this has been built to be iPad compatible and is really useful when demonstrating the impact of what is and isn't working to our Vice Chancellor.

This information has helped us change and mold our campaign as we go along and I'm very pleased we had the foresight to write this extra spend into our campaign plan at the beginning! Some of the extra activity we have added includes many revisions to our AdWords campaign (which has been much more competitive than ever), a little Facebook new starters posting and a series of videos on tips for students applying through Clearing (see below).



We'll definitely be taking this new initiative further for all future campaigns to ensure that we are as informed and targeted as possible. Now back to checking more stats to see how we can push the last of our remaining courses...!