Case Studies

Santa Clara University Leavey School of Business

SCU’s Challenge:

SCU’s Leavey School of Business partnered with CollegeAPP to identify prospects for in-person and online MBA and five graduate business degrees including: Business Analytics, Financial Analytics, Information Systems, and Executive MBA. The immediate goal was to increase awareness and registrations for in-person and web-based information sessions to support a larger recruitment pipeline with domestic candidates to stem reductions in international applications and enrollments.

CollegeAPP Approach:

CollegeAPP’s lists were based on five years of applicant data provided by SCU, then matched to several demographic variables and filtered by CollegeAPP’s proprietary intent score (intent to gain additional education within the next 2 years). We identified approximately 32,000 “high intent” prospects within 75 miles of the campus for digital advertising. We also identified a larger prospect group (approx. 45,000) based solely on intent scores within a larger geo-area.

The Campaign

CollegeAPP ran a 2 week digital campaign comprised of Facebook and programatic banner ads. To test our models against Facebook’s algorithm we ran a Facebook look-a-like audience side-by-side.

CollegeAPP’s value proposition is based on person-level PVI targeting. For this specific campaign we measured our KPI as follows:

Unique Link clicks / number of people reached = Effective CTR

  • CollegeAPP: 1.30%

  • Look-a-like audience 0.49%

  • SCU Contracted Facebook Campaign (rolling yearly average): 0.40%

CollegeAPP’s campaign was 2.7X more effective than Facebook look-a-like audience

CollegeAPP’s campaign was 3.3X more effective than incumbent Facebook campaign