"Ramping Up MIT's web traffic"- MIT OpenCourseWare
Situation
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) OpenCourseWare (OCW) Project offers free web access to 1,600 classes in 35 academic subjects at MIT. To promote the OCW project, MIT applied for a Google Foundation grant. These grants allow organizations to advertise on Google to publicize their projects.In August 2006, MIT was awarded a $450,000 Google Grant. MIT asked Position2 to manage the Google Adwords account.
Our Strategy We made the following changes: - Google set up the initial account with 1,400 keywords. To cover 35 academic subjects and 1,600 courses, we added 48,548 keywords.
- The initial ads had a very low click-through-rate (CTR). We wrote multiple ads for each academic subject, targeted the ads to landing pages, and used A/B split testing to find the best ads.
- To reach audiences in China, Germany, and so on, we translated keywords into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic.
- We also developed a strategy for the account. If professors, university lecturers, teachers, tutors, and instructors learn about MIT OCW.
- They will use it throughout their teaching career and pass it on to other instructors and top students. So we set up campaigns to create a viral distribution effect.
Results
In September, when the account was set up by Google, the account had 52 clicks per day at $0.76 per click. We took over in October. The increase in activity was immediate. - Clicks went from 52 per day to 17,650 per day
- Cost-per-Click (CPC) fell from $0.76 to $0.07
- Click-through-Rate (CTR) went from 0.12% to 4.02%
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