Economic Consulting: Application to Career Starter (by Monica Morariu)

The Capstone Economic Consulting course (G400) with Professor Robert Ridlon in the Business Economics and Public Policy department was a great opportunity to use everything our team learned in our business economics classes and apply it to a real life situation. For the economic consulting capstone, we worked with the co-founders of Career Starter which is a new career competitions website designed to help college students and young professionals launch their careers through competition based hiring.

Professors Ridlon, Lubensky, Harbaugh, and Hauskrecht listen to presentations by G400 students

At the time of the project, Career Starter had yet to launch their website. With the use of Google AdWords and a $250 budget, we had the task of running a three-week campaign with the goal of increasing the amount of pre-launch user sign-ups for Career Starter.

We first developed a strategy that we would run two student-focused campaigns, “internship search” and “full-time job.” Over the three-week period we generated 197 clicks and increased the company’s per-user sign ups by about 73%. 

After analyzing the results of the campaign we realized the potential for low-cost advertising using Google Adwords for Career Starter and based on this analysis we gave our client recommendations.

Due to the company being in its infancy and currently has a limited marketing budget, our first recommendation was to continue using AdWords with an emphasis on efficiency of their campaign by focusing on the Internship Ad Group, as the group had a higher click-through-rate and a lower cost for keywords. Once the website has developed a good user base, our second recommendation was for the website to allocate more of their marketing budget to the Full-Time Ad Group as this group received a majority of impressions throughout the campaign. The last recommendation we suggested for Career Starter was once the website has monetized, Career Starter can consider adding additional campaigns that will target Employers and Universities.

Our team was very excited to start the Google AdWords campaign for Career Starter because not only had none of us worked with AdWords before, but we were also part of the demographic to which our client is trying to target. This assignment gave us a unique opportunity to use online advertising with a purely online business, and essentially develop their online marketing strategy from scratch and see what we could accomplish.