Successful Online Marketing to Prospective Students:
An Exercise in Mathematics
Jonathan Weindruch, Web Consultant
In the previous article in this series, we discussed search engine marketing as a tool to reach prospective students. In this article, we’ll discuss best practices for monitoring and measuring the success of your website traffic. In short, analyzing your website traffic and search engine marketing campaigns boils down to an exercise in mathematics.
What Should We Measure?
Identifying the metrics for your web analytics is probably the most difficult question to answer due to the plethora of data points to choose from. Whether your institution uses Google Analytics, ClickTracks, or another web analytics software package, the amount of data points available is overwhelming.
Screen Shot from Google Analytics Shows a Few of the Metrics Available for Reporting
A Process for Identifying Your Web Metrics
The first step is to consider your short-term and long-term marketing goals and objectives. In the short-term, you may be advertising on a website, such as businessweek.com, and need to track the quantity and quality of the traffic generated by your online advertising. Similarly, you may have an upcoming email campaign to prospective applicants where you need to track the response.
From a long-term view, you may be concerned with more general questions:
- How many unique visitors were on the website last month? How does that number compare to the same month last year?
- How many unique visitors were on the main admissions page last month? How does that number compare to the same month last year?
- Which keywords from the search engines are providing the most amount of traffic into the website?
- What is the profile of our website visitors who spend more than five minutes on the site? (i.e. people who actually seem to be interested in our website and institution)
- What is the profile of our web visitors who request a brochure or apply online for a program?
By differentiating between your short-term and long-term marketing goals and objectives, you can differentiate between your short-term and long-term web analytics metrics.
General Recommendations for Higher Education Institutions
Each school is different, and it is hard to make general recommendations about what an institution should track on its website. Assuming your goal is to increase the number of inquiries and online applications, Websults recommends that higher education institutions track these two data points thoroughly:
- Number of online inquiries (brochure or information requests) in a month
- Number of online applications started (or if you don’t have an online application system, it would be the number of PDF application downloads in a month)
Many times a higher education institution will have an online process for receiving inquiries online or online applications. The problem is that, in most cases, these processes were developed by people in the IT world who were not considering marketing and web analytic reporting requirements. Consequently, to implement this level of tracking will probably require some changes to the infrastructure of your website. The good news is that these changes are simple.
You'll need to have a unique thank you or confirmation page on your site that visitors will see if they inquire or apply online. There should be a separate thank you (or tracking page) for each key online action you want to track. By tracking activity on your confirmation pages, you can zero in on the traits of your “successful” online traffic.
How to Develop a Profile of your Applicants & Prospective Students to Optimize Your Advertising
Once you are able to track your conversion activity, you can develop a profile which will improve the performance of your future marketing and advertising efforts, For example, let’s assume the following numbers for February 2007 for an institution website:
- 2,000 unique visitors on your admissions page (i.e. anyschool.edu/admissions/)
- 125 people request a brochure
- 75 people start an online application
In this scenario, 10 percent of the traffic in the admission section of the website converted (or performed an activity on your site consistent with your marketing goals and objectives). Questions you should be asking based on data in this scenario are:
- What was special about the 200 people that converted when compared with the other 1,800 visitors who remained passive browsers on the site?
- What was the source(s) of the 200 visitors who converted?
- Was there a common web page where the passive 1,800 visitors elected to leave your website?
Let’s assume you study your converted traffic over a few months and develop this profile on your “successful” traffic:
- 30% of applications and inquiries came from Google after doing a search on “international business college degree”
- 25% came after clicking on a link at usnews.com
- 80% came from these southwestern states: Arizona, New Mexico, & Texas
Assuming you generated the above profile, you could take several steps to optimize your web marketing, such as:
- Make sure your institution is advertising on Google, Yahoo, and MSN for the keyword and variations of the keyword “international business college degree”
- Consider restricting your search engine advertising to Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas to conserve your online advertising budget
- Add more pages and content to your site that discusses your international business college degree program
- Start a blog with current students where they share their experiences studying international business at your school.
- Consider online advertising options on usnews.com
This scenario shows that good web analytics allows your institution to create a profile of your ideal web visitor. By tracking the right data points, your institution become more efficient when it comes to spending on your website and online marketing. The next article, the final article in this 4-part series, will attempt to synthesize online marketing issues and discuss strategies for getting the maximum impact out of your website and online marketing initiatives.
Jonathan Weindruch is an independent consultant who has collaborated with Hezel Associates on several Internet marketing strategy projects. He has consulted with Diné College, Vanderbilt University, and the Tennessee Higher Education Commission. Jonathan, a Fulbright scholarship winner, graduated magna cum laude from Vanderbilt with a major in economics and he also has an MBA from Vanderbilt with a concentration in general management. He is the owner of Websults, a web site strategy consulting firm.