An AI Powered Search Engine Marketing Campaign

Summary

Cape Breton University’s (CBU) Search Engine Marketing campaign had been performing consistently for several years. The team at CBU had been using Google AdWords to recruit students for their undergraduate programs.

Challenge

CBU needed help increasing enrollment so they approached Time & Space to seek additional insights and performance from their media investments.

Solution

Time & Space was engaged to conduct a thorough review of CBU’s AdWords account, and to evaluate their keyword targeting, landing pages, bid amounts, and geo-targeting. We also completely re-wrote their ad copy to ensure additional performance had the opportunity to be realized.

Through a strategic partnership, Time & Space Media provided access to a set of 30 high-frequency predictive algorithms which work together to ingest campaign data. Data such as seasonality, times of day, times of the week, location, positioning and more allow our machine learning (AI) algorithms to self-learn and make smarter bid and budget decisions all day long, in real-time.

We paired this AI approach with our internal team of Google Certified professionals who began to review the campaign daily, providing strategic oversight which was tied to the core business objectives vs. vanity metrics.

Results

Within the first two weeks of the campaign, all core performance indicators saw a dramatic spike with no adjustment to the media investment being made by CBU. After the first four months, the traffic via the SEM campaign saw a 109% increase in users, a 72% increase in new users, and a 218% increase in sessions.

In addition to the increase in users, there has been a significant increase in engagement. The average webpage session duration increased by 53%, with the pages per session increasing by 7%.

During this period user conversions saw a massive spike, improving by 769% (Goal Completions). This spike delivered an incremental 7,000+ conversions to CBU.