See you around

This is usually the time of year that we can experiment a bit with our marketing activities to get some customer insight on what generates the best return on investment (and what doesn't!) Usually this means we trial a few small online campaigns to allow us develop a really robust plan for our clearing activity. However, we've just hit upon something which not only could teach us a lot but also allows us an even better way to reach our target demographic.

We've all seen examples of bad
re-marketing that can literally
take hours to remove or rectify!

Re-marketing is something we've been using on a small scale for a while. This is basically where a potential customer visits a website and is then targeted with their adverts forever on any site they subsequently visit. I know from experience that this can definitely get pretty annoying. The user feels like they're being stalked and in many cases it does more harm, to the brand using it, than good. I've definitely seen lots of bad examples of this in the past (mentioning no names!) where one innocent Google search destroys your browsing experience forever.

This is why, up until now, we've been cautious with our approach. However, a recent UI Refresh from Google has made it a lot easier to target meaningful adverts and track them in Google Analytics. As usual, we've been working with Ranjit at Statistics Into Decisions to get this up and running on our site and by just adding a bit of code we're now good to go.

One day's worth of data showing the
common interests of our site visitors

After spending a few days looking at this there's very little we can't do all from our analytics account. For example, we now get really good data on the sites our visitors go to after they go to ours. this can show us anything from their common interests to which of our competitors they are looking at for which courses. One thing I was very pleased to see was the amount of 'Movie lovers' we have who visit us - meaning our cinema advert was money well spent!

The segmentation options are always very simple to use and we can either import our existing lists or create new ones. The one option we definitely will use is targeting only people who visit key areas of the site (i.e 'Open days') and we'll ensure that there's a clear cap on the length of time they see our adverts with useful information.

We already learning a great deal about the type of person who is interested in coming to Bedfordshire to compliment our current data set and with the ability to add a myriad of filters can ensure we don't do more harm than good and oversell with blanket advertising across the internet!

In other news the team has been monitoring and tweaking our pre-clearing campaign which seems to be performing pretty well and I've been continuing to champion the cause for the right usage of social media. In particular I've been working on a report for our International Centre who are investigating a strategy to engage and highlight further their great research. The report looks at mentions, sentiment and common themes in order for them to see how they are currently perceived and how they can keep up the momentum that culminated in their recent Queen's award.

Portsmouth spinnaker - I remember
voting for this design way back in 1999!

Last of all, this week will see a couple of interesting new initiatives within the team, as on Tuesday we're meeting with Spectrecom to discuss an exciting new video project (more on that in the next post). I'm also off to 'Pompey' on Thursday and Friday to do my bit in assisting with staffing a stall for a recruitment fair. In our department we're obliged to do one of these a year and the reason I chose this one is that I studied in Portsmouth for my degree. I'm intending to take a bit of time to also see how much it's changed down south and re-visit some of my old haunts. I hope Kingfisher is still there as they used to serve the best fish and chips on the south coast!