Targeting Prospective Students Where They Live: Online

Prospective students are notoriously difficult to reach through advertising. However, student awareness of WPI is an important part of the overall marketing campaign. Today's students begin their search for colleges online and research has shown that colleges can effectively reach students through the Web. While the WPI Web site is an important recruitment tool, driving students to visit us on the Web is the first step. After researching use of college search sites online, we chose to run banner advertising and enhanced search placements on the top two college search Web sites: USNews.com and Princetonreview.com. In addition, keyword placements will continue to run on the Google search engine, as they have for nearly two years.

With the U.S. News & World Report "Best Colleges" rankings released in September, fall is the prime time for the US.News.com Web site, which features an extensive searchable college database in addition to its rankings. USNews.com banner advertisements will run from July 21 through October 21 in the College Ranking section. These ads will net 6.2 million impressions, or views, throughout the fall campaign.

The Princetonreview.com, a top college search Web site, features college profile and college search advice. Its most innovative feature is the "Counselor-O-Matic" tool, which matches student's academic profile with criteria they are seeking in a school (e.g. major, social life, location). An enhanced WPI listing on the "Counselor-O-Matic," which began July 2004 and will run to June 2005, will ensure that students who search for colleges with engineering, science and math programs will see WPI at the top of the results list.

In addition, Princetonreview.com banner advertisements ran as a trial between August 15 and September 15, the month that the site received the highest amount of traffic. The initial campaign was to yield 600,000 impressions. Based on the success of the fall campaign, which resulted in over 17,500 clicks to the WPI undergraduate admissions site, another campaign may be run in the spring.

The Google keyword placement enables us to bid on words related to search terms that a prospective student might enter during their college search; the words we bid on relate to many of our academic programs. These words could be searched by prospective graduate and undergraduate students as well as others using the Google search engine. The text-based Google advertisements display at the top or along the right-hand side of the search results in a colored box or bar, which distinguishes them from the other results. The advertisements also appear on Google partner sites, such as The New York Times, National Geographic and The Economist, next to contextually relevant articles. These advertisements have been running since November 2002 and have resulted in about 60,000 impressions per month. Traffic from the ads comprises approximately 1.5 percent of the external monthly traffic to the WPI home page.

The Ads

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Last modified: Mar 22, 2005, 15:55 EST