Beyond enrolment: The marketing signals education leaders should watch
The following is a guest post contributed by Guus Goorts, a Netherlands-based education marketing coach who helps universities and schools improve student recruitment through audits, training and coaching. Find him at guusgoorts.com.
Any senior leader will understand that not paying attention to financial data will have dire consequences eventually. I would argue that marketing data deserves the same attention.
Why pay attention to marketing KPIs?
There are three reasons why marketing data deserves your attention, even if you do not have a background in marketing.
1. It’s a leading indicator for financial and academic performance
Your enrolment may be OK this year, but if admissions is receiving fewer applications than last year, next year’s intake is at risk.
Look further ahead and the pattern becomes even clearer. If you are receiving fewer student enquiries, seeing web traffic drop or your school becomes less visible across the web, all else being equal, you may have an enrolment problem building.
Marketing performance can also affect academic reputation in a qualitative way by making your institution more visible and attractive to the students you most want to reach. For example, QS includes an International Student Diversity indicator, which looks at both the share of international students and the diversity of their nationalities.
2. Earlier, smarter, and less drastic course corrections
Early warning gives you time to make measured changes and give them a chance to work. Marketing data enables you to see farther ahead and this can help to avoid drastic measures such as layoffs and budget cuts.
When you are falling behind, a marketing fix may be all that’s needed. For example, raising your advertising budget or shifting priorities.
At other times, you will need action across the institution, backed by active senior sponsorship. Think of changes in course portfolio, fee structure, target markets, or scholarships. Underlying IT issues can also greatly hamper marketing performance.
3. Proactively support (and challenge!) the marketing team
Like all professionals, marketers can get bogged down in business as usual. They may have learned to live with certain facts of life. But to achieve genuinely better marketing and recruitment results often requires challenging the status quo.
Some examples:
- IT: No one makes the time or investment needed for systems that could save substantial time and money within two or three years.
- Compliance: Data protection, and if you’re in the EU, GDPR compliance is important, but sometimes data protection policies overreach and hamper effective marketing.
- Message: If your institution’s positioning is unclear, your marketing will struggle to pursuade.
If you’re a marketing manager or director, you have a duty to highlight these challenges, time and time again, in language that non-marketers can understand.
If you’re a leader without a marketing background, your duty is to make every effort to understand the overall and long-term impact on your institution.
Each of these examples represents a deadlock that needs senior involvement to break. One party, or perhaps both, will need to go out of their comfort zone. That usually only happens with pressure and support from leadership.
Which KPIs to track?
If you agree that keeping an eye on marketing performance is important, the next question is, what to track, and how often? If you are not looking at marketing data yet, quarterly is a good place to start.
Below are the key metrics to keep an eye on, working outwards from enrolment to discovery.
Admitted students and offer take-up rate. You’ll never have more new enrolments than the number of students you admitted. But admitted students may have applied at multiple institutions or decide not to enrol for different reasons. The admission-to-enrolment ratio (offer take-up rate) will tell you how often this happens.
If offer take-up rate is low or dropping compared to previous years, it can point to a communications issue, such as not reassuring offer holders enough or a shift in the competitive landscape.
The best way to find out what drives a low offer take-up rate is to contact admitted students, or a sample of them, soon after their offer and ask for feedback.
Website visits and website conversion rate. Any applicant is highly likely to have visited your website at some point, probably multiple times. As I argue in my book Genuinely Helpful, your website is therefore a crucial link in the student recruitment chain.
But it’s not just about how many prospective students visit your website, it matters just as much what they do there. The website conversion rate is the ratio of website users that take an action divided by total web traffic. Low conversion can point to poorly executed campaigns or structural website issues. A common cause is offering too few low-touch ways to engage, perhaps only an “apply now” button.
Pre-website visibility. It is increasingly important to pay attention to what prospective students see, and do not see, about your institution before they ever visit your website.
The media landscape is changing: AI is changing how students search and people are less likely to click out from social media platforms. There isn’t one single place or number that can capture your visibility across the web, but you can keep an eye on this through a composite of:
- Google Search Console (GSC) impressions: Google reports how many times your webpages were featured in its search result pages, even if people didn’t click through
- Social media visibility: Social platforms such as Instagram and YouTube report on visibility and impressions of what you post. Social listening tools can also track visibility and sentiment in posts by others.
- AI mentions: AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini don’t share stats on what people ask and what they mention in their answers. You can still identify the prompts that matter most, test them regularly and track whether and how your institution appears.
Taken together, online visibility level is often your earliest signal. Improving visibility will carry over to website visits, enquiries, applications, and enrolments.
What if you’re not capturing these KPIs?
It is not uncommon for education institutions to struggle with reporting marketing KPIs. But if this is the case, you are flying blind. The first order of the day should be to establish a basic way of measuring marketing performance – so you can benchmark performance year over year.
In short
Paying attention to these marketing KPIs can help you spot enrolment risk early. You will buy yourself valuable extra time and options to act, and by addressing inefficiencies such as low offer take-up rate or website conversion, you may improve recruitment outcomes without increasing your marketing spend.
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