As part of a group project for the Digital Metrics and Analytics module at Technology University Dublin, I worked on a project that involved creating a website that showcased students discounts in Dublin city. For the project, we created a website and developed a strategy that measured the impact online and offline marketing methods had on traffic to the site, improving CTR, bounce rate and average duration spent on the site and optimising the site based on the results we found.

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Table of Contents
1. Project Overview...........................................................................................................2
2. Introduction..................................................................................................................4
2.1 Business Overview .............................................................................................................4
2.2 Branding ............................................................................................................................4
3. Website Overview.........................................................................................................6
3.1 Preliminary Activities..........................................................................................................7
3.2 Layout................................................................................................................................9
3.3 Student Deals Page.............................................................................................................9
3.4 Contact Us Page ...............................................................................................................10
3.5 Live Social Page................................................................................................................10
3.6 Website Updates..............................................................................................................10
3.7 Additional Functionalities.................................................................................................11
4. Awareness Campaign..................................................................................................12
4.1 Overview .........................................................................................................................12
4.2 Social Media.....................................................................................................................12
4.3. Email Campaign...............................................................................................................17
4.4 Offline Marketing.............................................................................................................19
4.5 SEO..................................................................................................................................20
5. Results........................................................................................................................22
6. Conclusion ..................................................................................................................30
7. Appendices .................................................................................................................31

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1. Project Overview
www.studentbrokeaz.com - A website showcasing local discounts for students
For the purpose of this project we created a website that showcased discounts available to
students in Dublin. When brainstorming ideas, we wanted to choose a concept that we as a
group were passionate about. The concept of Student Broke-Az came about from the
recognition that there was a lack of local deals promoted in our area. Our primary research,
which involved visiting local shops and restaurants, revealed that many businesses around
Aungier Street offered student deals that were not widely promoted. The main goal of
Student Broke-Az was therefore to create a space where students could go to discover these
deals. The tasks undertaken were as follows;
• Created a user-friendly website that differentiate our site from competitors
• Visited local restaurants to find deals and ask businesses to get involved in our
campaign
• Promoted brand awareness digitally through the use of social platforms
• Created quality content for Facebook, Twitter & Instagram to engage and reach users
• Used paid targeting on Facebook (interests, geo-location & demographics) to increase
reach
• Designed & distributed branded business cards to compare traditional vs digital
marketing
• Used email-marketing to target new users and re-target existing users (creation and
design of a newsletter)
• Use analytical tools to measure the success of the campaign (Google Analytics & Social
Analytics)
• Drew conclusions of analytics results to identify the aspects of our campaign that
generated the best results
• Reflect on aspects of the campaign (what worked, what we would have done in
hindsight)
In order to reach our objectives, we set out a clear and concise timeline to be adhered to. The
timeline dedicated specific goals that had to be completed. The timeline was flexible at times
to accommodate unforeseen tasks that required attention. However, we continuously used
the timeline as a guide to help the project remain on schedule.

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Timetable Overview
Website Analytics Overview

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2. Introduction
2.1 Business Overview
The company idea that has been developed is a discount website for Irish students. The name
Student Broke-Az was decided upon, as it reflects the lifestyle and language of the target
market. The website was developed as students often have a low-income and search for
discounted items online to match their budget. The main goal of the website is to keep third
level students in Dublin up-to-date on the latest discounts available to them.
Currently, all deals sourced are targeted at third level students from Dublin. The long-term
strategy is to expand the deals across Ireland with separate web pages for each county.
2.2 Branding

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2.3 Audience
3. Website Overview
We designed two templates for our website, one layout design for the homepage and one to
fit all other pages; student discounts, contact us and follow us. We made regular updates to
the design, but stuck to the original brand design and focused on improving user experience.
We added links to our social platforms and a sign-up in our header and footer.

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3.1 Preliminary Activities
In order to ensure an ethical and successful collection of user data, several actions were
considered and implemented at website launch;
GDPR Compliance
In order to comply with the EU data protection standards, two amendments were made to
the website. First, a privacy policy was created and made visible on the website. This ensures
that visitors are aware of their rights and how their data is intended to be used, enabling full
consent. Secondly, the sign up option for our newsletter allows visitors to opt-out of any
promotional content.
Tracking Pixels
Tracking pixels were added to the website from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. In order to
gain access to these pixels, ad manager accounts were created. The pixel tags were then
added to the header of all pages of the website. By implementing these tags, additional
demographic information was collected which provides deeper insights, a fuller integration
between social and site and provides the option for any future remarketing campaigns. The
use of these pixels was added to the Student Broke-Az privacy policy.
Google Analytics & Google Data Studio
The website was connected to Google analytics in order to collect site data. The tag was
implemented across each page in order to ensure a complete collection of data. Data studio
was set up and connected to the google analytics site. This step allowed a range of KPIs to be
selected and arranged on a visual dashboard. The live connection also enables a continuous
overview of the website’s performance based on these KPIs. The results of our KPI’s can be
found in section 5. Results, page 23..

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3.2 Layout
The Student Broke-Az homepage houses;
1) Links to the social media accounts: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter
2) Search Bar
3) Navigation links to all pages
4) A sign-up button
5) Student Broke-Az branding
6) Contact information, including link to Google map and contact form
7) A link to our Privacy Policy
3.3 Student Deals Page
The offers were inputted as blog posts which displayed the amount of views each promotion
received. Once an offer is clicked, user are navigated to a new page with more information
on the deal – including links, discount terms and conditions and product images (see below).
We updated to this showcasing method to a) track user activity, b) create a more visually
appealing layout and c) promote social sharing. (See appendix 1 for Student Deals page)

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3.4 Contact Us Page
Initially the Contact Us page just provided an email point-of-contact for users to mail if they
needed any information about the brand or discounts. We updated the page to provide a
contact form, a Google map and a privacy policy (See appendix 2 for Contact Us page).
3.5 Live Social Page
The website also includes a live feed to our social media posts. Users can view our content
and follow through to the Instagram page if necessary. We chose the Instagram platform as
it produced highest engagement. To showcase live feeds of all our social channels we needed
to upgrade the installed app, therefore, decided to display the Instagram feed only. (See
appendix 3 for Live Social Feed page).
3.6 Website Updates
We implemented one major design upgrade in week four when we began to optimise the site
for mobile. The website footer and header were also upgraded, with the header showcasing
the two strip navigation bar currently displayed and footer sectioned into four columns. We
tested the site on our class members to gain user feedback. From this feedback, we improved
the site performance by categorising the discounts into three categories; food, fashion and
fun. We later added a fourth category; near Aungier St. (See appendix 4).
In week four we also created a background image of a collage of offers to always showcase
discounts. We later altered how the discounts on the Student Deals page were displayed and
applied the live social media feed, Google map and contact form.

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3.7 Additional Functionalities
Three additional digital marketing functionalities were added to the website in order to
attract and retain customers; Chat Bot, Pop-Up, Tracking Pixels.
Chat Bot
A Chat Bot was added to the website. The goal of adding the digital messenger service is to
help users with any queries they have about the website or specific deals and to potentially
increase the duration of time spent on the website. (See appendix 5)
Popup
A pop-up was created in order to retain website visitors. The pop-up (See appendix 6) is
triggered when a visitor is about to leave the website on desktop or after 30 seconds on
mobile. The creative shows the Student Broke-Az logo to gain user trust. This digital marketing
initiative resulted in a total of 14 conversions and an increase in visitor duration from 4
seconds to 12 seconds. From the analytics report (see section 5. Results, page 27). the bounce
rate decreased in weeks four & five due to the addition of the pop-up that encouraged users
to stay and look around.
Tracking Pixels
Tracking pixels were added to the website from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. In order to
gain access to these pixels ad manager accounts were created. The pixel tags were then added
to the header of all pages of the website. By implementing these tags, additional demographic
information was collected which provides deeper insights, a fuller integration between social
and site and provides the option for any future remarketing campaigns. The use of these
pixels was added to the Student Broke-Az privacy policy.

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4. Awareness Campaign
4.1 Overview
To promote our website we used a mix of online platforms, offline advertising and email
marketing. As an information-giving based website in a competitive service-offering space,
we understood that a promotional strategy for each of our selected channels was going to be
important to differentiate our brand from competitors.
The goal of our awareness campaign was to;
o Generate website traffic from core market segments
o Use most appropriate channels to target these markets
o Adhere to best-practice guidelines ensuring maximum exposure
o Ensuring a consistent brand message and identity is communicated
o Monitoring strategy results using research and analytics, measuring results to improve
ongoing work, investigating deviation from projected outcomes and acting when
required
4.2 Social Media
We used Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to promote our website online. Our goal was to
use our social media strategy to help validate our brand and create a strong online presence,
informing our target market of student deals within the Dublin City area. We wanted to show,
through our social platforms that our website and brand was active, which we achieved by
scheduling daily posts through Hootsuite. Our posts were scheduled at the beginning of each
week and the message and tone varied depending on the platform we used.
Platform analytics was used in conjunction with social scheduling in order to improve the
reach of our promotional activities. Through analytic research we identified that our target
market were most active and engaging at lunch-time (See appendix 7). Therefore, we
scheduled majority of posting to be published at this time. To ensure our strategy was
effective, a number of tactics were applied across social channels:

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1) An informative brand description on social channels
Our website name along with a simple bio is clearly visible at the top of social profiles, along
with a link to the homepage of our website. This made us easily searchable. Our distinct logo
was used as our profile picture on each platform to ensure brand recall.
2) Consistent content
We ensured our content style was consistent throughout our social channels, using high-
quality images and captioned accordingly. Our colour scheme was bright and vibrant with
good quality pictures which demonstrated our youthful and up-to-date brand image.
Descriptions of the deals were simplified and offerings were clearly outlined.
3) Band Identity and Culture
We identified that the type of student deals we were promoting as our unique value
proposition and our source of competitive advantage. For this to work we needed to identify
with the culture of our target audience.
Using a youthful and friendly style approach to our content creation we wanted to
communicate to our audience that we are just like them, students with low income looking
for discounts to match our budgets. This revealed the human side to our brand and allowed
us to engage a lot more with our users.
4) Market Segment Targeting
To successfully drive traffic to our website to social platforms we had to find our target
audience. Defining who they were from the offset would give us a solid foundation from which
to create and promote all future Instagram content.

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Our Instagram account was an essential part of our social media strategy. The age
demographic of users matched our target market segments, with 30% of 18-24 year olds in
Ireland using the platform.
#Hashtags Our use of hashtags was designed so that our posts were able to be discovered
by new audiences on the platform. Using specific targeted hashtags we were able to increase
engagement on Instagram as well as attract new followers. Examples of our tags are displayed
below and were used as a way of cataloguing our posts to maximise our potential reach of
users.
We found that posting deals near and around lunch time during weekdays offered our posts
the most engagement. We identified that food posts around this time were the most effective
for generating and driving website traffic. This was supported by the use of Instagram and
Facebook stories as a complimentary way of increasing awareness of our posts. Stories seen
by our target audience are a way of keeping our posts “top-of-mind” and “top-of-feed”

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With over 88% of 18-24 year olds using Facebook, this channel proved a very important way
for us to promote our website. In such a saturated environment quality posts over quantity
was our approach. Sticking to set guidelines ensured that promotion on our Facebook page
(see appendix 8) was done effectively, therefore, traffic to the website was increased.
Our tone of voice used throughout our profile was youthful and friendly, as if we were talking
to users individually. This was an important aspect of our strategy as we wanted to describe
our deals in enough detail to give readers a reason to leave Facebook in favour of clicking to
our site. We were able to achieve this by using key targeting words like student deals, cheap,
tasty and discounts. We used compelling captions on certain occasions like Black Friday and
Cyber Monday. Engagement during these periods increased (See appendix 9).
Facebook Ads
Paid Facebook ads were used to drive traffic to the website. Users were targeted based on
demographics (students aged 17-25), location (Dublin City), and interests (student discounts,
local food, discount fast food). A budget of €5 was devoted to the campaign. The boosted
post was extremely successful in comparison to the other posts. Unpaid posts reached seven
people and got one engagement. Our paid campaign reached 2,821 people and received 69
engagements. In hindsight more paid posts would have aided our campaign greatly.

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Twitter was our least successful form of social promotion. We believe this mainly to be
because our audience uses Twitter more for entertainment purposes rather than search. To
try and counteract this we were proactive and stuck to strict guidelines.
o Used visually appealing images of our students deals in line with our branding
o Short descriptive tweets, consistent with our other social platform’s friendly and
youthful tone of voice
Targeting
Hashtags were our most effective way of targeting our audience. It allowed us to target our
audience effectively through interest based targeting. We involved the brand in real-time
trending topics to expose our page to larger audiences, e.g. #Fridaylunch

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4.3. Email Campaign
MailChimp
In order to engage with existing and potential new users, a newsletter was drafted using
MailChimp. A landing page was first designed to encourage subscriptions. The landing page
below included our logo, a catchy headline and
information about the purpose of Broke-Az.
Our main goal for the landing page was to entice
users to subscribe to our newsletter, using the
brand voice that is integrated across our social
channels and websites. We sharing our key
message; that we are students, just like you,
who want cheap deals in the area. A link to the landing page was shared across our social
media channels.
In order to gain the as many subscribers as possible and not deter people by providing an
overload of information, we kept the text at a minimum.
MailChimp Newsletter
A total of two newsletters were distributed across the two-month period, to compare
analytics from launch to completion. The newsletter included social links to all online
platforms to drive conversions by users. Contact details were also listed at the end of the
newsletter, as well as the option to unsubscribe.
See newsletter analytics report in Newsletter Analytics, page 28.

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4.4 Offline Marketing
Business cards were created to analyse the difference in web traffic from online paid
promotion to traditional offline promotions. Business cards were chosen for their cost and
convenience of distribution.
The business cards were
designed to mirror the
newsletter. The taglines were
identical, and the same images
were used. Both contained
links to the website and social
platforms.
In addition, it was decided that
the business cards would be
distributed to people who matched the targeted audience that was created on Facebook.
Every effort was made to hand-out the business cards to people that matched our core target
audience; 17-25 year old students that were in college/university in Dublin City.

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4.5 SEO
Website Optimisation
On week six we implemented SEO onto the site. For this we added keywords into the site text
and titles, updated page URL’s, meta descriptions and image descriptions and alternative text.
We optimised the blog entries also by inputting the same meta information and highlighting
our selected keywords. We included a website share feature to allow users share our site on
social platforms.
Keywords: student, deals, discounts, discount, dublin, broke.
Google Ranking
o student broke az - first and second results
o broke student dublin - no result
o broke students dublin - no result
o student discount dublin - no result
Our SEO efforts increased the search results the website appeared in, but our searched
keywords did not display our site on the first page of the results.

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Mobile Compatibility
50% of people search using mobile. Consequently, ensuring the Student Broke-Az site is
mobile compatible is a high priority. Initially, the interactions with different deals were to be
tracked using a heat map and
hover duration as our KPI.
However, this did not lend itself
to mobile interactions (see first
mobile image). Therefore, the
deals page was changed in order
to facilitate click interactions
which were compatible for
mobile use (second mobile
image).
A report was created from Google
analytics which showed the top
devices used compared with
sessions. It can be seen that 49.2% of out of our current users visit our site via mobile. This
indicates the importance of ensuring a mobile-compatible website for optimum user
experience (See below).

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Google AdWords
An AdWords campaign was created using ad credits to drive traffic to the website.
Goal: The advertising goal of the campaign is to get more visitors to the website
Audience: The audience is targeted in the Dublin 2 area with a 3km radius. The potential
audience size is 3,416,301 people per month. The business category is student.
Budget: €6.25 per day average. Total budget is €80.
Estimated performance: 2,101- 3,508 impressions per month, 299-499 clicks per month.
Duration: The campaign ran over two weeks due to time constraints.
5. Results
Social Analytics
Analytics were pulled from all social accounts in order to get insights into performance and
recommendations for future activity. It can be seen that the most engagement has resulted
from asking our audience questions and providing polls. Lunch time has gained the most
successful engagement which may be due to students searching for food deals at meal time.
(See appendix 7)

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Google Analytics
Four KPIs were chosen to judge the success of the website over the course of the project;
1) Users
2) Sessions
3) Pageviews
4) Bounce Rate
Demographics were examined each week to see if we were attracting our target market.
Channels driving engagement were examined to see which promotional activities were
driving the most engagement (See appendix 11).
Overview of KPI’s

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From the chart above it can be seen that users spiked over weeks four and six. This is when
the two newsletters were sent out using MailChimp, therefore this spike is attributed to
returning users. This hypothesis is verified from our google analytics report which shows that
email is driving engagement. On week four there was a website design update that also may
have contributed to this uptake. There is a significant increase in weeks eight and nine, which
can be partly attributed to the Google ads campaign which generated 82 clicks over two
weeks (see below).
The increase can also be attributed to the business
cards distribution. These are accounted for by the
increase in direct searches as users followed the
link printed on the cards, taking them directly to the website

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Sessions were chosen as an important KPI as they indicate the number of unique sessions
initiated by our users. Sessions are shown to be higher than users across the first seven weeks.
This indicates a high number of returning visitors. This is an important metric to judge the
loyalty of our users. This hypothesis is confirmed with the user retention report (See appendix
10). Sessions are almost equal to users in the final week which indicates a lack of returning
consumers, future marketing activities should seek to encourage loyalty.

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Pageviews decreased on the last week however sessions increased in the last week this
indicates that more people are viewing the same page. In order to analyse this further a page
view report for these weeks was created with Google analytics. From the page view report
over the last week it can be seen that the from the deals, food is the most popular category.
Promotional activities should therefore be centred around fashion and fun in order to
increase views on these pages.

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The average bounce rate for the website is 43%. This is considered average to good by
industry standard.
o The low bounce rate in weeks 4 and 5 is due to the addition of the pop up that
encourages users to stay and look around when they try to leave the page after a
certain amount of time.
o The increased bounce rate in week 6 can be attributed to the inclusion of a social
media page with live feeds. This website update slowed down the page speed
which is directly related to the bounce rate.
o A fastest cache plugin was added to the page to increase the page speed which
resulted in a lower bounce rate across week 7 and 8.

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Newsletter Analytics
The landing page received a total of 26 visits. 21 of these users subscribed to the newsletter.
The chart below depicts the difference in sign-ups from the launch of the project to
completion. The chart shows that very few sign-ups were made between initially. A spike in
sign-ups occurred on November 28th, which directly correlates to the marketing efforts
(business cards and paid Facebook ads).
Subscriber Report
The below chart shows an overview of Student Broke-Az subscribers and their activities. The
Open Rate is between 69.57% to 73.91%. The Click Rate is between 4.35% to 47.83%.

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Newsletter (24/10/2018)
The first newsletter was sent to a total of five subscribers (total number of subscribers gained
on the first week of project), welcoming new users and encourage further engagement and
website visits. (see appendix, 12).
o 3 out of 5 recipients opened - 60% open rate
o 7 total opens - users went back to email
o 0% click through rate
o No links to social were clicked
Newsletter (29/11/2018)
Following a spike in sign-ups from the landing page, a second newsletter was sent out to
subscribers. Due to the poor CTR acknowledged from the analytics of the first newsletter,
some changes were made to the second newsletter. These changes included additional links
to website, fewer lines of text, more engaging headlines and higher quality images.
Results improved dramatically from the first newsletter; (see appendix, 13).
o Open rate - 73.9%
o CTR - 47.8%
o Clicks per unique visits - 64.7%
o Total opens (users went back to email) - 31
o Clicked to social – 6

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6. Conclusion
From the analysis above it can be seen that the promotional activities undertaken were
successful in promoting the website to our target market.
o Users increased from 4 to 104, which is an increase of 2,500%
o Sessions increased 6 to 112, which is an increase of 1,766%
o Pageviews increased from 63 to 210, which is an increase of 233%
o Bounce rate is 43% which is a good average for a website.
We were successful in attracting our target market as the most used location was Dublin,
Ireland. It can be seen that the paid campaigns were most successful in attracting visitors.
Google ads resulted in 83 clicks to the website and the boosted Facebook post resulted in 58
clicks (2,821 reach). The second most successful promotion activity was the organic social
activity. Consistent scheduled posts with engaging content resulted in a total of 32 clicks to
the website. Finally, the offline promotion resulted in an increase in direct search of 30%.
Using Google analytics throughout this project allowed the team to optimise activities to suit
our users wants. The success of the promotions can also be attributed to the website design
which had ease of navigation & additional marketing functionalities.
From this result, several recommendations have been proposed:
1. Offline marketing activities should include a trackable link to the website to
make it easier to attribute KPI’s; eg. a QR code or bitly link.
2. Promotional activities should be started earlier in the project in order to gain
more demographic data to analyse.

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7. Appendices
(Appendix 1 – Student Deals Webpage)

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((Appendix 2 – Contact Us Webpage)
(See appendix 2.2)

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(Appendix 3 – Live Social Feed Webpage)
(Appendix 4 – Discount Categories)

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(Appendix 5 – Chat Bot)
(Appendix 6 – Pop Up)

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(Appendix 7 – Users by Time of Day)
(Appendix 8 – Facebook Overview))

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(Appendix 9 – Facebook Analytics)
(Appendix 10 - KPI’s User Retention)

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(Appendix 11 - Google Analytics Data)

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(Appendix 12 - Newsletter 1 24/10/2018)
(Appendix 13 -Newsletter 2 29/11/2018)