Online Advertising Strategies to Effectively Market a Business School

Advertising has always played an important role in creating visibility for educational institutions. In today's time, digital marketing is the sought-after mode as there has been a significant shift from offline to online advertising. With the evolving times, flexibility and convenience take significant importance and it is critical for educational institutions to shift gears and adapt to the new formats. In order to stay relevant and have a competitive advantage, digital advertising helps higher educational institutions go that extra mile in engaging with their potential customers. It also helps in building awareness and attract good quality of students. In the world of digital advertising, 'Google Advertisement' is an online advertising platform developed by Google, where advertisers bid to display brief advertisements, service offerings, product listings, or videos to web users. It can place advertisements both in the results of search engines like Google Search and on non-search websites, mobile apps, and videos. Google AdWords offers the most pragmatic solutions and tools to all strategic issues of digital advertising. Click Through Ratio (CTR) stands out as the most significant index of reflecting its influence and impact. Amongst the array of choices, the right strategy requires an academic and strategic backing. The objective of this paper is to assess on the impact of Google Adwords is used in digital advertising campaigns promoting business schools in specific. This research concentrates on CTR as a measure of the campaign's effectiveness. This paper try's to understand CTR in the context related to the type of content embedded in these digital advertisements; the structure of this content; and hence identify and suggest new strategies. This paper identifies and proposes the right online advertising strategy that can be used by a Business School (B School). Purposive/non-probabilistic sampling was carried out to choose the specific of Business Schools (B-schools) for this study. The business schools selected were based on the National Institution Ranking Framework (NIRF) 2018 of the Indian Human Resource Development. The data was analyzed using to the Social Sciences Statistical Suite (SPSS). There was only access to publicly available and publicly displayed advertisement with no access to user profile data. CTR was utilized to measure total and proportional engagement. The advertisements were then categorized based on their content and analyzed through a one-way ANOVA test. For the purpose of an operationalizing, CTR was utilized as defined by Pak et. al. (2018): "A ratio showing how often people who see your advertisement end up clicking it." The main components analyzed are the characteristics of an effective advertisement appearing on the digital platform measured through its Click Through Ratio. One-way ANOVA has been conducted to assess the Click Through Ratio of advertisement segregated in twenty categories based on their format, content and time of appearance. The analysis reflects that Click Through Ratio differs for different format of advertisements, the information that they contain and for the time and day that they appear. Strategies based on these findings are suggested along with discussion, limitations and further scope of research.