With a budget of less than $20,000, Immigration New Zealand (INZ) developed a unique methodology that can be used to benefit the long-term skills shortages of New Zealand. The overall objective of the Queenstown Seasonal Employment Campaign was to determine if an online strategy could be developed to fill short-term needs for a region, community or industry for New Zealand by advertising in specific geographic regions and aimed at specific audiences worldwide.

The strategy was to utilise new online applications to build geographical targeting ability, utilise the results of extensive testing to attract visitors to a microsite created for this pilot, and then convert traffic to completed registration forms, all within the set budget and timeframes. Geographic (GEO) targeting allowed a display of specific, tailored messages to specific audiences in specific geographic regions.

Multivariate Testing improved ROI from $200 per registrant to less than $15.75 in less than two weeks of advertising.  A series of targeted pay-per-click ads were developed for several search engines, utilising testing to optimise click-through rates to the microsite landing page. Testing and Web Analytics resulted in an optimised microsite and registration form for registration conversion. Personalised email communications were then generated specific to registration details.

The regional pilot campaign ran for two weeks in May 2009, registering those interested in working in Queenstown. In just 14 days, INZ generated 1,181 leads. There were 11,923 views of the site and 10,499 unique visits resulting in 8.2% of those who hit the landing page completing the registration form.