Geo-Targeted House Ads

At Coursera — like many companies in the valley these days — we're desperate to hire more people, particularly for our engineering department. But hiring is hard, and the reasons can be boiled down to these: 1) there aren't enough qualified candidates in the world, 2) the qualified candidates that do exist don't know that we exist, and 3) the qualified candidates don't want to work for us. Problem #1 isn't something we can quickly solve — though hopefully we are indirectly helping to solve it by offering so many CS courses for free. Problem #3 is also not easily solved — candidates may not like our technology stack, our location, or our culture — all of which are hard to change. So, in the short-term, we're focusing on Problem #2, making sure that candidates know we exist.

Well, I realized that we might actually have potential candidates amongst our Coursera users, and I wondered if there'd be an easy way to let them know that we're hiring. I didn't want to message all 1 million+ of our users, since it wouldn't be relevant to many of them - like those in countries with visas we don't sponsor, or those studying courses outside of CS. So, I decided to display a "We're hiring!" house ad based on the combination of geolocation and course enrollment information. It's my ghetto version of a geo-targeted house ad, and I thought I'd share the idea and code here.

Here's what it looks like — quite basic:

Here's the HTML for the jobs ad, which uses the Twitter Bootstrap alert classes:

<div id="coursera-promo-cs-job" class="alert alert-info coursera-promo">
  <button data-dismiss="alert" class="close">x</button>
  Want to help us build the best online education platform?   <a href="/about/jobs">Join our team!</a>
</div>

And here's the JavaScript. I use the jQuery cookie plugin to check if the user already dismissed the promo, then use our internal methods to check if the user is enrolled in CS classes, and then finally, if I've made it that far, I load the Google AJAX APIs and use the google.loader.ClientLocation object to figure out if the user is in a target country. If the user meets all the conditions, then I show the ad and add a click listener to the close button. I also use our internal analytics to track when users are shown the ad and when they click or dismiss it.

var promoId = 'coursera-promo-cs-job';
if (!cookie.get(promoId)) {
  if (Coursera.user.isInCSClass()) {
    $.getJSON('https://www.google.com/jsapi?callback=?', function () { 
      if (google.loader.ClientLocation) {
        var countryCode = google.loader.ClientLocation.address.country_code;
        var state = google.loader.ClientLocation.address.region;
        if (countryCode == 'US' || countryCode == 'AU') {

          var $promo = self.$('#' + promoId);
          $promo.show();
          Coursera.tracker.push({key: 'user.promo.show.' + promoId});

          $promo.find('.close').on('click', function() {
            $promo.hide();
            cookie.set(promoId, 'closed');
            Coursera.tracker.push({key: 'user.promo.close.' + promoId});
          });

          $promo.find('a').on('click', function() {
            Coursera.tracker.push({key: 'user.promo.click.' + promoId});
          });
          
        }
      }
    });
  }
}

When we first deployed this, I set the targeting quite narrow, restricting it to only users in 2 CS courses and from California. Since then, we've broadened the targeting to all of US and 5 more countries.

As we find the need for more "house ads", like promoting new features that may be more relevant to some users than others, I imagine I will turn this bit of code into a more general purpose library, and maybe we'd move the logic into a database or deploy script, to make it easier to configure ads without changing code. Do you do anything similar on your own sites? Let me know in the comments.