Best process for excluding non-relevant college and university personas from targeting?

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Several of my company's product offerings align well with colleges and universities, however, we have a hard time targeting the key decision makers due to students and other non-relevant personas eating up ad spend and showing false positive signs of intent.

I've tried narrowing down persona targeting in campaigns, but it is difficult due to current students being Presidents/Leaders of student orgs, past students that have graduated but are still being affiliated with the university in the data, Masters students previous positions muddying the data, etc.

Additionally, due to the nature of my company's products, we receive a lot of false positive signals from students conducting research and hitting our generic keywords. I of course do not want to remove these keywords from our model in the scenario that we would miss true intent signals.

I also do not want to fully exclude education industry accounts from our campaigns/segments since they do align with some of our offerings. Has anyone else dealt with colleges/universities interfering with their data, and found any work arounds/best practices?

Comments

  • Brandon McBride
    Brandon McBride Posts: 293 ✭✭✭✭✭✭

    I recommend pushing the segment into LinkedIn and doing your advertising there, filtering specifically on the job titles you do want to target.

    You can do this by either pushing a segment into LinkedIn or by using the LinkedIn advertising option built into the platform, which will not consume an allotted segment sync.

  • Christine Kelly
    Christine Kelly Posts: 4 ✭✭✭

    We have a similar problem. We are discussing how we could see if there are relevant web pages they go to, like blogs, that we could maybe unmap as intent. Keywords are really hard to figure out.

  • marcusmauer
    marcusmauer Posts: 9 ✭✭✭

    I have similar issues with my programatic campaigns. Universities eat up so much budget I had to resort to removing them completely. No great solutions I'm afraid, couldn't find a way to avoid wasted dollars so I just pulled the plug on targeting them at all.

  • hasingh233
    hasingh233 Posts: 10 ✭✭✭✭

    Following this thread as we are looking for a similar solution as we get so much keyword based intent from universities as it is primarily students doing the research and they are not the target audience.

  • CarlyShideler
    CarlyShideler Posts: 25 ✭✭✭✭✭

    We also are trying to work through this - following!

  • Carly Watson
    Carly Watson Posts: 11 ✭✭✭✭

    @William Schiffelbein this might help us with better targeting than what we are currently using.

  • jay Johnson
    jay Johnson Posts: 9 ✭✭✭

    There are so many ways to filter personas in the 6sense dashboard. I just ran a list at where I went to college. No filters 5800ish personas; after applying 3 filters; 90 personas and 100% are target personas for Sales and Marketing.