A series of Facebook ads targeting residents of Victoria, BC, Canada (about 300,000 people) advertising the spring 2015 courses offered by the Division of Continuing Studies at the University of Victoria. These ads were part of a larger multi-channel awareness campaign which included newspaper ads, Google ads, and animated display ads on news websites (CBC, Globe & Mail, BBC Canada, etc). These ads ran from the end of November 2014 to the end of February 2015.
Target the ads to people who weren’t already aware of the Division of Continuing Studies, and make those people aware that Continuing Studies offers community courses, not degree programs. In other words: show people that Continuing Studies is part of the University of Victoria, but different from what people usually think when they hear the word “university”. We also had to incorporate the UVic branding and the calendar theme (“satisfy your curiosity”) into every ad.
When people clicked on the ad, they were taken to a landing page with more information about the spring 2015 courses. From there, the user could browse all courses in a particular subject (writing, visual arts, science, philosophy, etc) and register for courses online. But as this was an awareness campaign more than an e-commerce campaign, the KPIs were ad clicks and time spent on the website.
The Facebook ads generated a lot of clicks (more than twice as many clicks as the animated display ads). Originally, the ads were supposed to end at the beginning of February, but they were doing so well that we ran them for another month.
