A little about Open Universities Australia
Open Universities Australia (OUA) provides students with the opportunity to study a wide range of online units and courses and achieve nationally recognised tertiary qualifications. Unlike traditional on-campus study, its students can study online anytime and from anywhere. OUA offers over 180 courses and 1700 units from over 20 leading Australian universities and TAFEs. Students have the added bonus of choosing their electives from any of OUA’s partner institutions to create a truly customised learning experience.
CHALLENGE
A key business objective for OUA is to drive traffic to its courses via a combination of digital marketing channels to attract enrolments and new students. However, the manual optimisation and monitoring of OUA’s cache of approximately one million keywords across Google, Yahoo & Bing search engines, as well as other channels including Facebook and Criteo, was costing OUA a great deal of time and resources – the equivalent of 5,000 hours per year.
In addition, the company’s monthly reporting was taking in excess of 40 hours to complete. The task of manually monitoring and optimising one million keywords was making it difficult for OUA to effectively ascertain the value of each of its campaigns; ultimately hindering its conversion rate. In effect, OUA had very low visibility into the effectiveness of its digital marketing campaigns and little understanding of how online marketing activities were converting into offline sales leads.
The strain on OUA’s marketing resources also meant OUA was paying high costs per acquisition (CPA).
SOLUTION
OUA decided to work with Marin Software, the world’s leading digital ad management provider for advertisers and agencies in order to achieve greater success in its online (and consequently offline) marketing efforts. For Marin Software the digital marketing challenge was clear, it needed to implement a highly successful revenue-based optimisation solution that would complement OUA’s overall marketing efforts, save the OUA marketing team significant time on reporting and optimisation, and provide OUA with the visibility it needed to improve its level of audience engagement, conversion rates, CPA and offline conversations.
Marin and OUA began working together in April 2012 and Marin provided ongoing support during the planning and implementation phases, as well as during the crucial deployment phase in August of the same year. Working in collaboration, Marin and OUA successfully aligned all of the data from the various digital marketing channels to OUA’s online goals, and ensured the solution would be able to capture call tracking conversions, with the help of call tracking provider Jet Interactive.
RESULTS
Marin Software provided OUA with a single unified view of all of its performance marketing activities; enabling OUA to manage, report and optimise its campaigns across publishers and channels whilst saving them significant time and money. OUA is now in the position to quickly and easily make changes to campaigns based on meaningful data.
It now takes OUA just minutes to deliver the same monthly reporting that previously took staff 40 hours to complete. The hours previously spent collating the data are now used for optimisation. By implementing Marin software, OUA has significantly decreased its cost per acquisition (CPA) and has experienced a sizable 227% uplift in its online enrolments and enquiry conversion rates.
Across the board, Marin software has had a significant impact on the way OUA engages with its audience. Prior to Marin, the weighting given to generic keywords was much lower. By implementing an effective generic keyword strategy, Marin has helped OUA realise the assisted value that generic keywords have in driving the sales funnel. Marin’s integration with offline conversion data through their integration with Jet Interactive has allowed OUA to have complete visibility into the inter-relationship between online and offline conversions putting OUA in a unique position to have full transparency into the value of its activities.
