| Course | BU 439 Digital and Social Media Marketing Strategy |
|---|---|
| Unit | Unit 5 |
| Paper type | Paid campaign plan |
| Length | About 930 words, 6 pages |
| Format | APA 7 student paper |
| School | Herzing University |
| Program | BS in Marketing |
| Updated | September 2026 |
Free sample paper for BU 439 Unit 5
Twenty-Four Hundred Dollars, Three Campaigns and a Rule for Stopping Each: A Paid Campaign Plan for a Composite Toledo Roller Rink's Parties and Adult Nights
Student Name
Business, Herzing University
BU 439: Digital and Social Media Marketing Strategy
Instructor Name
March 11, 2026
Twenty-Four Hundred Dollars, Three Campaigns and a Rule for Stopping Each: A Paid Campaign Plan for a Composite Toledo Roller Rink's Parties and Adult Nights
What the Money Is Buying
Skyline Skate Center, the composite Toledo rink used through this course, has run its organic channels on six staff hours a week since March. The owners have now set aside $2,400 for paid advertising over eight weeks, March 16 to May 10, 2026. Before any platform or cost, this plan states what each campaign is buying.
Campaign A buys birthday party inquiries from parents who search for a party venue. Campaign B buys birthday party inquiries from parents who are not yet searching, reached through the social platforms where the rink already sees party questions. Campaign C buys first visits to Thursday adult night from adults who have not skated at Skyline before. Awareness for its own sake is not bought: each campaign is judged by an action the rink can count. Parties matter most, since each party brings in about $219 plus extra skaters and food, while an adult night admission brings in $12.
Audiences a Platform Could Be Handed
Each audience is defined in the terms an advertising platform actually accepts, so the definitions could be entered without interpretation.
Campaign A, search: people in Lucas and Wood counties searching for phrases such as "kids birthday party places Toledo," "roller skating party" and "skating rink near me," with ads shown from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. The rink's own name is excluded as a keyword. Blake et al. (2015) found in a large field experiment at eBay that ads bought on a company's own brand name brought almost no additional sales, because people searching for the brand would have found it anyway, and the rink already appears first when its name is searched.
Campaign B, social: parents aged 28 to 45 within 15 miles of the rink on Facebook and Instagram, plus a lookalike audience built from the 2,300 past party email addresses, uploaded in the platform's matched-audience tool. Past party customers themselves are excluded, since the monthly email already reaches them for free.
Campaign C, social: adults aged 21 to 35 within 12 miles on Instagram, shown the best-performing adult night videos from the organic calendar, then a second ad with the Thursday details shown only to people who watched at least half of the first.
The Budget and Its Reasoning
The split follows the value of what each campaign buys and how close its audience is to acting.
| Campaign | Budget | Per week | What it buys | Planning assumption (composite) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A. Search, party venue phrases | $1,000 | $125 | Party inquiries from active searchers | About $1.50 per click; about 1 in 15 clicks becomes an inquiry |
| B. Social, parents not yet searching | $900 | $112.50 | Party inquiries | About 1 inquiry per $40 spent |
| C. Social, adult night first visits | $500 | $62.50 | First-time adult night visits | About 1 first visit per $12 spent |
| Total | $2,400 | $300 |
Search receives the largest share because its audience is already looking for exactly what the rink sells; the planning assumption gives about 44 inquiries for $1,000. Social party ads receive slightly less because they must persuade people earlier in their planning; at the assumed rate they would bring about 22. Adult night receives the smallest share because each visit is worth far less than a party, and because the organic Instagram and TikTok work already reaches this audience at no cost. At about $12 per first visit, Campaign C only makes sense if some first-time visitors return, which is why it is judged on return visits as well. Every rate in the table is an assumption for the composite case, not a benchmark, and the first two weeks exist to replace the assumptions with the rink's own figures.
How Results Are Counted
Each campaign sends people to its own landing page on the rink's website, tagged so the site's analytics can tell the campaigns apart. Party inquiries are counted from the inquiry form and from phone calls, with staff asking every caller how they heard of the rink and recording the answer in the booking log. Adult night first visits are counted at the door: the rink adds a simple question to its wristband sale, "First time at Skyline?", and anyone answering yes is asked whether they saw an ad.
Clicks and views are recorded but not treated as results. Johnson et al. (2017) show that simply counting the actions of people who saw an ad overstates an ad's effect, because many of those people would have acted anyway, and the most reliable measurement compares people who saw the ad with similar people who did not. The rink cannot run that kind of experiment at this budget, so it treats its counts as upper limits on what the ads achieved and compares the eight weeks with the same weeks in 2025.
When the Spending Stops
Each campaign has a stopping rule, set now so the decision is not made under the influence of a good or bad week. Campaign A stops if, after $400 spent, cost per party inquiry is above $50. Campaign B stops if, after $300 spent, it has produced fewer than three party inquiries. Campaign C stops after four weeks if fewer than 15 first-time adult visitors report seeing an ad, or if fewer than a fifth of them return within the following month. Money from a stopped campaign moves to whichever remaining campaign has the lowest cost per result, not back into the owners' pockets, unless all three have stopped.
At the end of eight weeks the owners decide whether paid advertising continues, using the cost per booked party, not the cost per click, as the deciding number. Chaffey and Ellis-Chadwick (2019) recommend that small businesses judge digital advertising against the value of the customers it brings rather than platform metrics, and a booked party is the value that pays the rink's rent. The rink and its costs, prices and counts are all made up for the course.
References
Blake, T., Nosko, C., & Tadelis, S. (2015). Consumer heterogeneity and paid search effectiveness: A large-scale field experiment. Econometrica, 83(1), 155-174. https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA12423
Chaffey, D., & Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2019). Digital marketing (7th ed.). Pearson.
Johnson, G. A., Lewis, R. A., & Nubbemeyer, E. I. (2017). Ghost ads: Improving the economics of measuring online ad effectiveness. Journal of Marketing Research, 54(6), 867-884. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmr.15.0297
What the BU 439 Unit 5 instructions ask for
BU 439 Unit 5 asks students to plan a paid digital campaign. Prompts typically require objectives stated as actions, audience definitions specific enough to enter into an ad platform, a budget allocated across campaigns with reasons, a way of measuring results and conditions for changing or stopping spending. Many instructors ask where cost assumptions come from if the student has never bought advertising; labeled estimates are usually acceptable. Some prompts ask how paid and organic work fit together, and whether any audience is already reached without paying, which would make spending on it wasteful. The plan is often a short narrative with a budget table in APA 7. Strong submissions distinguish clicks and views from the business results the campaign is meant to produce.
How the BU 439 Unit 5 example is put together
The plan opens by stating the budget, period and what each campaign buys, ranked by value to the rink. An audience section writes each audience as platform settings, including the exclusion of past customers and of the rink's own brand name, with research to support the latter. A budget table gives each campaign's share, weekly spend, purpose and composite planning assumption, followed by a paragraph explaining the split. A measurement section describes tagged landing pages, a booking log question and a door question, and explains why counts are treated as upper limits. The final section sets a stopping rule for each campaign and chooses cost per booked party as the deciding number.
BU 439 Unit 5 rubric: what full points look like
Herzing's paid campaign rubric usually rewards clear objectives, precise audiences, a reasoned budget, sound measurement and defined decision rules, plus writing and sources. Objectives earn full credit when stated as countable actions rather than awareness. Audiences score highest when they could be entered into a platform without interpretation, including exclusions. The budget criterion rewards an allocation explained by the value and readiness of each audience. Measurement is judged on tracking business results, not only clicks, and on honesty about what the data can prove. Decision rules earn points when set in advance with thresholds. Instructors also credit plans that avoid spending on audiences the organization already reaches free.
Common BU 439 Unit 5 mistakes, and how to avoid them
Paid campaign plans often lose points by setting goals such as brand awareness with no way to count results. Another common problem is audiences described vaguely, for example young people who like fun, which no platform could use. Students frequently split budgets evenly without reasons. Some count clicks and impressions as success. Others bid on their own brand name without asking whether those customers would have come anyway. Many plans lack any rule for stopping a campaign that does not work, which leads to spending the full budget regardless. Finally, presenting guessed costs as industry facts undermines credibility; labeled assumptions to be replaced with real data are stronger.
Get a BU 439 Unit 5 example written to your instructions
Send the Unit 5 instructions and the BU 439 rubric your classroom posts, together with any budget ceiling the case sets. We write a custom example that names what each campaign buys, defines audiences operably with their exclusions, prints the assumption under every figure and closes on a stop rule. First custom sample free, back in 24 to 48 hours.
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BU 439 Unit 5 questions, answered
Where do cost figures come from if I have never bought advertising?
From the case, stated as case figures, with the reasoning visible. Describe what the campaign is buying, how many units of delivery that comes to and what one unit is assumed to run, then mark the passage as constructed. Published rate information exists for some placements and can be cited with its date, but a confident number carried in from memory is what this section punishes.
How specific do audience definitions need to be?
Specific enough that somebody could enter them tomorrow. Named interests, stated behaviors, a geography, an age range where the offer genuinely depends on one, and the exclusions alongside. What fails is a paragraph describing a persona, since no buying tool accepts a persona and the criterion here is whether your plan could be executed exactly as written.
Should the plan cover organic posting and paid together?
Only where the instructions ask for it. This section is normally graded on the paid decision alone, and the organic program has units of its own. Where the two genuinely interact, describe the interaction in a short passage rather than merging the budgets, because a total mixing money spent with effort spent cannot be checked against a ceiling.
Where can I find a free BU 439 Unit 5 sample paper?
Nothing is charged to read the BU 439 Unit 5 paid campaign plan above, including the audience settings, the budget table, the stopping rules and margin notes. If your budget or goals differ, send the details and a matching plan follows at no charge, usually inside two working days.
Where do cost figures come from in BU 439 Unit 5?
From the case, platform estimates or labeled assumptions. The sample uses composite planning rates, such as $1.50 per search click, and states that the first two weeks exist to replace them with the rink's own figures.