UNSW Global
Baidu Paid Advertising
The Back Story
The UNSW Global approached Sekkei Studio to help promote their new Engineering and Science diploma. The target audience for this program were Chinese high school graduates whose Gaokao (The National College Entrance Examination in China) scores left them ineligible to directly enter a traditional undergraduate school. Students who completed obtained an Engineering and Science diploma through UNSW Global would have a much higher chance of entering into year two of a traditional four-year program.
The goal was to expose potential students and parents to the program, turning views into clicks and registrations, running an initial campaign for six months from June to November of 2018.
Due to regulatory hurdles, Baidu’s advertising ecosystem was identified as the best available option to suit UNSW Global’s marketing needs. Competition for education related keywords on Baidu is fierce, and therefore expensive—previous campaigns run through Baidu had a CPC of 8-10 RMB.
New marketing strategies were needed for the campaign to be a success, and to control costs. Exposure, clicks, and sign-ups remained important, but Sekkei Studio now also needed to discover and develop new marketing strategies to help lower the campaign’s CPC and maximize conversions.
What we did
Sekkei Studio’s marketing team needed to think outside the box due to UNSW Global’s requirements. We combined a few strategies to help spread UNSW Global’s message while also reducing the campaigns CPC.
Baidu Paid Advertising
Our approach utilized a number of different elements from Baidu’s adver-tising environment, the first of which was placing Baidu ads related to the di-ploma program. Due to the highly competitive bidding around branded key-words, Sekkei Studio looked for, and was able to identify, a number of non-branded keywords connected with the market. Prudent use of both branded and non-branded keywords drastically reduced the CPC of UNSW Global’s Baidu search campaign while simultaneously increasing exposure.
This strategy was also applied for mobile users on Baidu’s related plat-forms such as Baidu Tieba, Baidu App, and Baidu page/browsers. Baidu Feed Ads work to specifically target mobile users in the correct demographic pool, appearing as a native advertisement as mobile users scroll through a Baidu page.
The third part of this strategy involved posting through Baidu Industry Search, allowing UNSW Global to be given top bidding on industry related sites, education sites, forums and even competitors websites. This allowed UNSW Global to target a highly motivated audience while still keeping costs under control. Each of these websites also made use of their own SEO keywords and, using Baidu Industry Search, were able to utilize those keywords to the benefit of their own exposure.
The Results
Using this multi-pronged Baidu approach, UNSW Global was able to achieve a widespread message coverage. This in turn netted a vastly expanded coverage net for the campaign, while also drastically reducing the campaign’s CPC.
