Digital Marketing Campaign Case Study

Analyzing Data and Pivoting a Campaign Results in Conversion Growth of 600%

A digital advertising campaign’s success hinges on how well it can advance the organization’s goals. In the case of a giveaway contest I ran for one of my national education advocacy clients, our goals were to further our message on the importance of languages. We designed our giveaway around obtaining submissions-user generated content stories-which would be repurposed for the advocacy endeavors on the website and in social media. Metrics and conversions measured focused on:

• Clicks and traffic back to the landing page (micro conversion)
• Form submissions signaling contest entries (our ultimate conversion)

In the case of this specific campaign, the “win” came from the fact that we used a data-driven marketing approach of analyzing the data, drawing meaningful insights, and pivoting  the campaign halfway through its duration in order to increase conversions and reach our contest goals.

3 Key Campaign Findings and Insights

1.     Facebook is a Mobile-Heavy Advertising Platform

Mobile is now a key element of ad campaigns that focus on driving traffic from social media. Conversion rates from mobile optimized landing pages are indicators of how well a brand’s advertising strategy is working. It is a mistake to think that ad creation for mobile platforms is just a matter of making things smaller. In our case, all conversions from Facebook came from mobile and we noticed that contest entries were shorter in nature than their LinkedIn desktop counterparts. Next time we might consider options such as shortening our form field requirements but asking people to give more details to get more comprehensive responses on mobile.

2.     Adhere to Landing Page Best Practices

Don’t think your campaign is going to be the one that proves you can throw all landing page best practices out the window. Landing page best practices are full of science and data and testing that really does show and prove what really works. In our campaign, we did try and buck convention by having not only 1 but 2 landing pages, tons of copy, and multiple links. Through analyzing a landing page tool like Crazy Egg as well as behavior on site patterns from Google Analytics, we were able to reduce our landing page to a single page, drastically shorten the page, and remove large blocks of copy. This resulted in many more conversions and time spent on the page.

3.     LinkedIn: Expensive But Effective

In this instance targeting professionals, LinkedIn was suspected to be the most successful platform for reaching these individuals. However, due to budget constraints and the fact that LinkedIn has an average of $6.50 per click, Facebook was tested and added because of its reach capabilities and significantly lower CPC rates. Although Facebook had over 3x the amount of clicks as LI, it only accounted for 15% of our conversions. Our average LinkedIn CPC came in lower than expected at $3.99 per click as well. When targeting professionals, next time we will dedicate the majority of our budget here to maximize this channel.