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Overview
The Advanced Training Institute (ATI) offers students industry-recognized certifications in high-demand, technical careers. They’re dedicated to helping students graduate with advanced skills for success in a variety of fields, and offer both daytime and evening classes to accommodate students from all walks of life. ATI is proud to help students graduate and achieve their career goals for ongoing future success.
With their training programs continuing to expand, ATI and their agency, Magic Marketing (based out of Santa Cruz, CA), reached out to Genius Monkey for help with boosting student enrollment through greater brand awareness. They began running display and video ads with Genius Monkey over a 20-month period, and after establishing a baseline, they then wanted to see if they could get students to convert/enroll faster. They did this by adding over-the-top (OTT) ads to their mix of ads…and saw tremendous results.
The Challenge
Through their agency, Magic Marketing, the Advanced Training Institute (ATI) began running ads with Genius Monkey for just over a year and a half, using display and video to fuel their ad efforts. One challenge they wished to overcome, however, was the length of their conversion cycles. Relatively-long conversion cycles are normal for education marketing, but ATI wanted to see if improving typical cycle lengths was possible.
Most of their prospective students were taking more than 90 days to convert. ATI wanted to figure out a way to create more of an urgency for students to enroll for quicker marketing results.
After establishing a campaign baseline, ATI set three primary campaign goals:
Generate Brand Awareness
Get Students to Enroll Faster
Boost Overall Enrollment
Our Solution
At Genius Monkey’s suggestion, they added over-the-top (OTT) to their mix of ads. OTT is an online delivery system for streaming video content, independent of a cable or satellite subscription, just like Apple TV, Amazon Prime, and more. By incorporating OTT channels into their mainstream digital ad strategies, brands are able to display personalized digital ads to targeted audiences in-between episodes.
By serving their highly-targeted ads to the spectrum of OTT channels via premium connected TV commercials, ATI could generate massive attention for their brand and educational programs, and possibly convert students at a faster rate. To achieve this, Genius Monkey crafted a campaign that would:
- Continue running steady ads as a campaign baseline
- Use display, video, and targeted career-field campaigns (such as HVAC, auto technician, and personal trainer programs) as controls
- Add OTT channels to ad efforts for greater reach
The Results
After adding OTT to the mix, the corporation saw an immediate improvement in their programmatic performance. Attribution showed that users were converting faster than previous years. Prior to adding OTT, 63% of conversions occurred after 90+ days, but that number improved to be just 35% of users taking over 90 days once OTT was added, shrinking the path to conversion.
In fact, before OTT was running, only 5% of the conversions occurred in less than 2 days of the user seeing their first ad. After a month of running OTT, that number jumped to a staggering 22.6% of users converting in less than 2 days. The addition of OTT channels in their ad campaign helped ATI boost their path-to-conversion time, with strong results:
- Path to conversion became substantially shorter
- Users who took over 90 days to convert decreased from 63.5% to 35%, a 45% improvement
- Users who took less than 2 days to convert improved from 5.1% to 22.6%, a 343% improvement
Summary
By delivering our high-performing ads throughout the OTT spectrum, Genius Monkey successfully engaged the very customers ATI wanted to reach. The result was a boost in richer media ad impressions and brand awareness, as well as a marked increase in student enrollment with a shorter path-to-conversion. This shows the powerful impact of Over The Top when added into a healthy ad campaign mix.
With programmatic OTT channel placement, a targeted ad is served to a targeted user, whereas traditional TV ads aren’t targeted and are served to mass audiences. This targeting technique optimizes conversions by finding viewers with high interest and conversion potential, and serving them a detailed rich media commercial–with results to back it up.
By combining quality ad content with our programmatic precision targeting, we helped the client get prospective students to quickly fill out website forms, which helped boost enrollment numbers faster.