The university says it is "too early to say" whether the Super Bowl ad was a success. In a sense, that's not technically wrong. The initial metrics, however, suggest the ad was a significant failure. According to Chad Baldwin in the story:
On Sunday, Baldwin said the university had 10,000 visitors to its website with 7,700 of those new.
That was a bump of 1,500 people compared with the same period last year. A map showing where the visitors were coming from revealed people from markets where the ad ran, including Denver, Seattle, Phoenix, Chicago and Dallas.
“Interestingly, there were some quite good numbers coming from Alabama, South Carolina, Florida, where we did not advertise,” he said.
I am very glad they reported this. Now we know that the university website (which was linked in the ad) saw an increase of 1,500 visits compared to the same period last year (when there was no UW Super Bowl ad so it serves as a decent control case). We also know that the increase in traffic is holistic, meaning it also captures social media and YouTube views of the ad in places where it did not air on the broadcast. We have no idea how much of this 1,500 visitor bump in traffic represents "new" visitors, but for the sake of this exercise let's say they all were.
Let's break this down. According to UW's information, UW spent $2 million to run the ad in about 25 markets, totaling about 10 million viewers. In a crude sense, 1,500 people out of at least 10 million people who were shown the ad followed the university's call to action (CTA) to seek out more information about UW. That is a conversion rate of .015%. Not 15%. Not 1.5%. It's fifteen-hundredths of one percent.
This is a catastrophically poor conversion rate. It would get creative agencies fired in the real world. If you don't believe me, Google it, call some friends who work at tv stations or ad agencies, etc. I don't care. I'm not saying it's a failure because I want it to be. I'm saying it's a failure because it is.
CTA is only one of maybe 15 or so metrics that tv people use to measure the effectiveness of an ad. Another common one is ROAS - Return on Ad Spend. This is the one that Baldwin is probably using to make the case that it is "too early to say" whether the ad was a success. Let's look at this and see if he's right.
A common rule of thumb for a good ROAS is 4:1. Go ahead and google this or ask ChatGPT or whatever. I'm not making this up. It is what it is. Under this metric, we would need the ad to generate about $8 million in revenue for the university to justify the $2 million ad spend. How possible is this?
When we were coming out of COVID in 2020, the university reported that they were concerned they might see a 20% enrollment drop. That story is here. In the story, the university reported that this expected loss of 1,900 students would equate to a loss of $10 million in revenue. Using this math to factor revenue per enrolled student, the university would need to see an increase in enrolled students of about 1,520 to achieve the 4:1 ROAS.
This means, of course, that to be judged a success every single new visitor to our website would need to be converted to an enrolled student. I will leave it you to determine whether this seems likely. I will tell you that a common benchmark for an average conversion rate in e-commerce marketing is 1% to 3%. We need it to be 100%. Please imagine me making very loud farting noises now.
You might say, come on Cup. This isn't just about enrollment. This is also about brand awareness and increasing interest in the university. And I would say, you bet! Let's take a look!
Below is a chart from Google Trends measuring interest in the "University of Wyoming" as a search term over the past 90 days. Note that it is not measuring literal search instances, it is showing the number of times the topic is searched relative to itself over time. What we see here is that for the two days around the Super Bowl, UW was searched on Google at a frequency about 75% of what Google has seen in terms of its highest typical interest over time. And then, by Feb. 11, it settled back into its long-time trend. The ad drove a spike in interest, there is no doubt about it, but the spike was temporary. It was not sustained in any meaningful way because the ad was a one-time Hail Mary rather than the kickoff of a strategic campaign, and within 48 hours it was as if it never happened at all.
When I started to dig into this, I really did not want to confirm my own suspicions. I was hopeful the university did not light $2 million on fire at a time when Burman himself has said that programs are at risk of elimination if they don't find an additional $1.5 million in the budget. Unfortunately, the data does not lie. What it shows is exactly what I suspected; that the ad did not resonate because it was made in-house by institutional marketing rather than by a professional ad shop, that it had no sustained impact because it was not supported by any reliable, ground-tested market research in advance, and that the ad may have generated momentary goodwill and alumni pride through the earned media rollout but any benefit was extremely temporary and not tied to a meaningful or material increase in revenue.
A total waste!
On Sunday, Baldwin said the university had 10,000 visitors to its website with 7,700 of those new.
That was a bump of 1,500 people compared with the same period last year. A map showing where the visitors were coming from revealed people from markets where the ad ran, including Denver, Seattle, Phoenix, Chicago and Dallas.
“Interestingly, there were some quite good numbers coming from Alabama, South Carolina, Florida, where we did not advertise,” he said.
I am very glad they reported this. Now we know that the university website (which was linked in the ad) saw an increase of 1,500 visits compared to the same period last year (when there was no UW Super Bowl ad so it serves as a decent control case). We also know that the increase in traffic is holistic, meaning it also captures social media and YouTube views of the ad in places where it did not air on the broadcast. We have no idea how much of this 1,500 visitor bump in traffic represents "new" visitors, but for the sake of this exercise let's say they all were.
Let's break this down. According to UW's information, UW spent $2 million to run the ad in about 25 markets, totaling about 10 million viewers. In a crude sense, 1,500 people out of at least 10 million people who were shown the ad followed the university's call to action (CTA) to seek out more information about UW. That is a conversion rate of .015%. Not 15%. Not 1.5%. It's fifteen-hundredths of one percent.
This is a catastrophically poor conversion rate. It would get creative agencies fired in the real world. If you don't believe me, Google it, call some friends who work at tv stations or ad agencies, etc. I don't care. I'm not saying it's a failure because I want it to be. I'm saying it's a failure because it is.
CTA is only one of maybe 15 or so metrics that tv people use to measure the effectiveness of an ad. Another common one is ROAS - Return on Ad Spend. This is the one that Baldwin is probably using to make the case that it is "too early to say" whether the ad was a success. Let's look at this and see if he's right.
A common rule of thumb for a good ROAS is 4:1. Go ahead and google this or ask ChatGPT or whatever. I'm not making this up. It is what it is. Under this metric, we would need the ad to generate about $8 million in revenue for the university to justify the $2 million ad spend. How possible is this?
When we were coming out of COVID in 2020, the university reported that they were concerned they might see a 20% enrollment drop. That story is here. In the story, the university reported that this expected loss of 1,900 students would equate to a loss of $10 million in revenue. Using this math to factor revenue per enrolled student, the university would need to see an increase in enrolled students of about 1,520 to achieve the 4:1 ROAS.
This means, of course, that to be judged a success every single new visitor to our website would need to be converted to an enrolled student. I will leave it you to determine whether this seems likely. I will tell you that a common benchmark for an average conversion rate in e-commerce marketing is 1% to 3%. We need it to be 100%. Please imagine me making very loud farting noises now.
You might say, come on Cup. This isn't just about enrollment. This is also about brand awareness and increasing interest in the university. And I would say, you bet! Let's take a look!
Below is a chart from Google Trends measuring interest in the "University of Wyoming" as a search term over the past 90 days. Note that it is not measuring literal search instances, it is showing the number of times the topic is searched relative to itself over time. What we see here is that for the two days around the Super Bowl, UW was searched on Google at a frequency about 75% of what Google has seen in terms of its highest typical interest over time. And then, by Feb. 11, it settled back into its long-time trend. The ad drove a spike in interest, there is no doubt about it, but the spike was temporary. It was not sustained in any meaningful way because the ad was a one-time Hail Mary rather than the kickoff of a strategic campaign, and within 48 hours it was as if it never happened at all.
When I started to dig into this, I really did not want to confirm my own suspicions. I was hopeful the university did not light $2 million on fire at a time when Burman himself has said that programs are at risk of elimination if they don't find an additional $1.5 million in the budget. Unfortunately, the data does not lie. What it shows is exactly what I suspected; that the ad did not resonate because it was made in-house by institutional marketing rather than by a professional ad shop, that it had no sustained impact because it was not supported by any reliable, ground-tested market research in advance, and that the ad may have generated momentary goodwill and alumni pride through the earned media rollout but any benefit was extremely temporary and not tied to a meaningful or material increase in revenue.
A total waste!
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