Most institutions spend well upwards of $250,000 per year on digital advertising to recruit new students. Yet, most marketing and admissions leaders have no visibility into the effectiveness of those campaigns -- which prevents them from making key decisions affecting their success.
Before going into our recommendations, let's discuss how digital marketing often works in a higher education context. The general processes and methods are very similar to how search and other digital advertising works in general.
From the perspective of a prospective student, here is how this works:
Now that we've covered how digital marketing works, let's go into each of the 4 recommendations and some of the challenges that might be faced in following them.
The first, and most important, step is to get visibility into application activity in a way that you can tie it back to your digital marketing campaigns and channels. Without this information, you cannot take any of our other recommended steps.
The three most important metrics to you as a digital advertiser are:
Because the purpose of your digital advertising efforts is to enroll students, the only way to truly measure its success is to know application and enrollment activity related to a given ad or campaign. Without implementing tracking in the application for admissions, you cannot determine either of those two pieces of information. As a stop-gap, digital marketers often create a landing page to capture clicking activity from the ad which indicates how often people interact (versus ignore) the ad.
Unfortunately, this is impossible when your institution doesn't have control over the application for admissions solution. The tracking token infrastructure for your institution must be added to the software hosting your applications for admissions -- and other SaaS application for admissions solutions don't support this.
If you have your own application for admissions solution, your digital marketing provider most likely has code that you can embed into it. If you're a Mutara customer, we support this as well.
When you have the ability to tie your digital marketing activities to application and enrollment activity, you can unlock the value of doing more precision digital marketing. For different programs / degrees, you might be able to identify specific demographics, keywords, and channels to try. Being more granular allows you to target the messaging to them and to place ads only to the people who you think would be a good fit.
To do this, however, you need the ability to define, implement, and measure how these campaigns perform. Any one of the following can affect your success:
Once you have your campaigns defined, you will have multiple choices in terms of the 4 items listed in the previous step. A/B testing is a great method for you to segment your activities and test out your messaging, format, and audience to determine what is most effective in helping you reach your goals. Again, being able to measure the level of success you have in not just getting people to click on your ads -- but measure how many apply and ultimately enroll is critical to this effort.
Finally, you will want to measure and adjust several times within an admissions cycle. If your institution has an annual enrollment cycle, what you learn today may or may not be applicable in the enrollment cycle. However, if you have the ability to iterate several times a month, you will achieve much better results. This works extremely well with A/B testing.
The process would work something like this:
The key to ensuring you optimize your digital advertising results is to follow a continuous improvement process. Publish, measure, adjust, and repeat. However, without the ability to adequately measure your advertising results in a manner where they can be tied back to your decisions; your institution is flying blind.
If you're interested in learning how our customers are able to accomplish this, we'd love to talk with you.