BARTonline is a virtual campus for Barton Community College. Although the college is located in Kansas, virtual students can attend online from anywhere. Their goal was to increase the number of online students with a focus on several different programs. One of those programs was the Medical Lab Technician degree.

Their target audience was students ages 17-23 in Kansas, Texas, and Florida. The audience was selected for several reasons. Prospective students in Kansas would have greater familiarity with the brand via the brick and mortar school. Additionally, Texas and Florida were selected because research shows both states have high percentages of students who do not complete their degrees after starting at a traditional four-year college.

We developed three ads, as well as an illustrated mascot to personalize the college brand, to promote the degree program. We ran ads targeting the audience above, as well as a secondary target of parents of grown children in that age range. The same creative ran for both audiences and the ads ran from September 24, 2018 to February 19, 2019.

During the campaign, we monitored performance to optimize delivery for both audiences. Overall, the image showing a microscope gained the most unique clicks during the course of the campaign, but the image that had the most goal completions once they reached the landing page was the image containing petri dishes. Goal completions were achieved if the visitor clicked on either the apply now or explore courses buttons after visiting the landing page.

Screengrabs of the ads, landing page and Google Analytics results are included below.

Highest CTR

Most Goal Completions

Least Engagement - Optimized for Others

Landing Page

Results