Crunch x University of Birmingham
The University of Birmingham has been a valued partner of ours for several years. Their Marketing and Recruitment department relies on our agency as well as internal ad operations team to develop, optimise and deliver hundreds of digital performance campaigns across numerous departments and colleges.
The Problem.
Aggregating all the disparate data from several media channels was proving to be a laborious task for teams. So, one of the department’s main challenges was to make better sense of the combined digital strategies across different media without losing information at a top or bottom level. Our brief was to streamline its performance campaign activities between agency, marketing department and other colleges and schools.
The Solution.
Our data engineers built a set of campaign dashboards showing real-time campaign data streaming directly from the various media channel platforms.
As data points for digital campaigns mount up quickly, it was paramount that we built a robust system capable of managing large amounts of data. After first discussing and agreeing relevant metrics with the client’s diverse stakeholders, we then set up the formulas to power the automated calculations on the dashboards. In addition to giving the Marketing and Recruitment department a single source of truth for all marketing data, the live data campaigns dashboards provided an overview of all campaigns across the university. A single screen now enabled results to be analysed by college, course type, media channel, region, and periods of time.
The Results.
By crunching all metrics automatically and presenting the concise information in one place, Crunch completely transformed the university’s campaign optimisation capabilities. It optimised reporting timing by over 90%, where staff could fully concentrate on acting on the information available, rather than making the information available. This unprecedented view of live data also enabled the campaign specialists to define personalised retargeting messages as soon as online interactions happened, making media budgets go much further. And analysing channel-by-channel results in one place, it meant that if a given campaign wasn’t reaching its specific goals, the teams could easily make further changes to audiences, regions and so on.
Most importantly, the live dashboards are hosted over a cloud-based platform with easy yet secure access by every college and department granted access permissions. All stakeholders were now on the same page with all agencies and campaign specialists, facilitating budget optimisation and agile data-driven strategy.
