Advertising

Do you want to advertise to students in an environment where they will pass on their knowledge of your brand instantly?

The key benefit of student advertising on The Student Room is that not only can you target your advertising but you will be doing it at a time where your audience can act upon it. The power of social media and peer to peer influence means The Student Room members frequently use the forums to aid their purchase decision and there are many ways that you can be part of this.

We get 300,000+ visits a day – more than any other student site. By immersing your brand in this vast student community you’ll be able to influence and develop strong recognition among the UK student market and we have a number of ways to help you achieve this…

Targeted Adverts
Homepage Feature
Forum sponsorship
Takeovers
Behavioural Targeting

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Targeted Adverts

Few sites offer the targeting opportunities of The Student Room. Using standard ad creative formats (MPUs, Leaderboards and Advertorial Announcements) you can reach your intended youth market.

• Target by Subject | University | Career area of interest | Age | Sex | Location | Year of academic study/graduation.
• We have over 250 forums covering every possible topic that students talk about.
• Harness the benefits of social media by advertising to students in their environment.
• With Ad Trafficker we’ll optimise your campaign as it runs to deliver the best results and provide a post campaign report on request.
• For further targeting options take a look at our sophisticated Behavioural Targeting option designed to compliment all of your promotional needs.

Leaderboard (728 x 90 pixels | 30kb)

Perfect if you are running a particular campaign or offer and want to drive student traffic to your website.
This takes a commanding position right next to the sign-in box at the top of all pages and is also the last thing you see after reading a discussion thread at the bottom.

Mid-Page Unit (300 x 250 pixels | 30kb)

As with leaderboards this is a great way to draw attention to your brand across the site with an animated ad.
This is a large, eye catching rectangle positioned directly under the search box on the home page. It also appears at the end of the most recent post in all forum threads.

Advertorial Announcements

A great way to announce a new product or promotion to those in the student market who try and avoid adverts. Here we’ll promote your logo alongside an editorial link of up to 80 characters (including spaces) – usually with a strong call to action. The great thing about social media marketing is that your logo and link can be targeted to a specific forum, a selection of forums or across our whole site.
In addition to this the advertorial can be easily reviewed and changed throughout your campaign so that it always stays relevant to the students you want to target.

Homepage Feature

Would you like to make front-page news? Shout from the rooftops with the best spot for student advertising; the biggest ad space on the homepage of the world’s largest student community. If it’s brand exposure and response you’re looking for then 1 million* unique visitors every week should have you glowing with joy.

Your ad will be one of four rotating features at any one time, and they typically run for a week. You have huge creative flexibility with up to 155 characters of editorial alongside a large image (243 x 248 pixels). And we can give you up to 3 additional text links. Or we’re always open to new ideas, if you have something else you would like to do with the space then get in touch and we’ll see what we can do.

Campaigns are fully trackable and can host up to 3 links for various areas of your website such as a call to action or promotional page. The best way to take advantage of the ready to act nature of social media.

*Average weekly unique visitors (Google Analytics), June 2011

Forum Sponsorship

A unique form of student advertising; we can put you right at the heart of the student community with a space dedicated to your brand at the top of a forum on our site. With over 250 forums hosting over 35,000 posts per day* there’s bound to be at least one that fits your brand.

You can have your logo/campaign creative and editorial positioned above a forum of your choice for a defined period. Within your space we’ll promote your logo or campaign creative alongside up to 80 characters of editorial (including spaces), as well as a link within our site or to your external campaign.

Every page within your chosen forum will display your branding and a call to action. Crucially at the exact time when students are engaging with the topic associated with your brand.

Key Features

• Advertise to engaged students writing more than 35,000* posts over 250 forums daily.
• Ownership of your forum of choice by tenancy rather than CPM.
• Every page impression in a forum of your choice will convey your branding and call to action.
• Wide range of forums covering conversations about products, organisations, careers and lifestyle.
• Build strong relationships with your target audience that last in a way that only The Student Room can provide.
• Sponsor for a week, month or year depending on individual needs.
• Full campaign support providing detailed tracking and reporting so you can monitor the performance and effectiveness of your student marketing activity.

*Site Analytics, June 2011

Take Overs

If you want to totally immerse our 250,000 daily student users* in your brand then you need one of our takeover options, offering maximum brand exposure and designed to get people talking about your brand by taking full advantage of the long term benefits of social media marketing.

With 35,000* posts a day your brand will benefit from a level of peer to peer discussion unique to The Student Room because students come to share information and implement their buying decisions.

Homepage Takeover

This means that your logo sits alongside ours and the site background becomes yours. You also command every impression of the Leaderboard, Mid-Page Unit and one of our four rotating Homepage Features. With this much exposure on the Homepage of the largest student site in the world you’ll be the talk of uni SU’s and student common rooms around the country.

Site Takeover

If you really want to push your brand recognition to the limit then you need a site wide takeover, it’s the same as a homepage takeover but your branded site template will extend across the whole site. Regardless of whether a site member is in the student finance forum or on a members profile they’ll be exposed to your brand constantly.

If you need us to we’ll work with you to design your takeover. And with such powerful real estate you’ll have enormous scope for creative flexibility, with images and logos alongside lovely editorial and targeted campaign destinations. Site takeovers take student advertising and brand recognition to a new level.

*Site Analytics, June 2011

Behavioural Targeting

Designed to compliment your social media campaign options, behavioural targeting uses information collected on an individual’s web-browsing behaviour, such as the pages they have visited or the searches they have made, to select which advertisements to display to that individual. On The Student Room this allows us to market your advertisements to the students who are most likely to act on your ads and engage with your brand.

We can implement this independently or combine it with other targeting techniques based on geographic location, demographics or the surrounding content.
For example, if you’re looking to target photography students, we’ll show your ads to people engaging with our photography forums in a specified time period, perhaps you want photographers in the South-East. You can even accurately reach students accessing the site from a specific university so you can hand pick students from your top institutions.