‘Tis the season again! With graduations ceremonies around the corner, many colleges are looking for last-minute solutions to bring more fun and sharing to the ceremony through social media.  After all, a graduation is the perfect time to boost your students’ engagement.  Here are 3 tips to make your graduation ceremony more interactive and  enhance your other education marketing efforts:

1. Create a hashtag for the ceremony: Hashtags can be used for Twitter and Instagram and will allow you and everyone following the hashtag to share stories about your event. NYU used the hashtag #CongratagradNYU to have families and friends congratulate their graduates. No need to have your Graduation ceremony at the Yankees Stadium like NYU to make it fun!  A simple screen in the graduation arena/auditorium can be a fun way to add memories to the ceremony. The University of Central Oklahoma used the TweetBeam feature and thus tripled the engagement from last fall. This new way of visualizing Twitter loads tweets live from Twitter on one page that can be customized by creating walls for any topic. (In the example below, the keywords were “queensu2013″ , for Queens University’s 2013 Convocation.)

2. Ask your students to tag themselves: Ask students and attendees to use your specific hashtag to share pictures of the event on Twitter and Instagram. Then feature the shared pictures on Facebook and ask your grads to tag themselves. The University of Southern California posted hundreds of photos on its Facebook account within hours of the ceremony ending, with the simple message of, “Congrats to all our 2013 graduates! These photos were collected from this year’s USC grad social media campaign. See yourself or your friends here? Tag them in your comments and give them a big “fight on!” Everyone started liking, tagging and commenting immediately, keeping the party going way after the end of the ceremony. New tools are now available to allow attendees to tag themselves in very large crowds. Boston University decided to use Giga Tag that allows users to tag themselves, and share shots with their communities. Here is a peek at Boston University’s graduation ceremony Giga Tag.

3. Share your graduates’ personal stories on video that will be played at the ceremony: In the weeks leading to graduation, Boston College featured interviews of seniors that were about to graduate. They then created a video series, Class of 2013 Seniors to Remember. A great way to connect and bring electricity to your ceremony.

What will you do this year to make your college’s graduation ceremony more interactive?

Source: postano.com

1. Develop a social media strategy
   • Define your social goals: Along with the Marketing team, determine what your college wants to achieve through social media. Determine what success will look like on your Analytics tool. More traffic to your site? More leads? More registrations? Do not limit your goals to “increase numbers of leads”, but aim for precise success metrics: “Increase the number of leads from social media by 50”. It will make the goal more realistic and will increase your chances of success.
   • Define your social channels: Facebook is still one of the main social media platforms for colleges, but recent studies show that students are leaving Facebook to platforms that are more specific to their social group or needs. Instagram, Pinterest, Scoop it, Storify it, Tumblr? How to reach your audience without spreading yourself thin through the social media race? The only way to think about it is to make sure you are relevant. Start by analyzing your students and prospective students: how are they using a specific network? Is it consistent with how you would be using the network to promote your college?
   • Gather your team:  Identify the persons who will be working on creating or keeping your college’s presence online. Your team should include staff from your main social goals. If the main gaol is specifically recruitment, have a member of the Recruiting team onboard. If it is just to promote the college image, include a marketing person. Make sure you consider creating a social media Student Ambassador team.
   • Define your keywords and key messages: Find out what keywords your college tries to rank for. Keywords should be part of your communications strategy. Various SEO tools can help you determine what they are. Make sure you use those keywords throughout your online activities and on social media.
   • Establish a social media content strategy that includes your college’s blog, but also all the content you need to create to be shared (videos, comments). For each month, determine how long you will spend on your various platforms, what you will be doing (sharing, community building, etc.), what you will be sharing with your community. This will make you save time as it will offer you a base of content while allowing you to share content spontaneously. Your social media content plan should also include a channel plan, defining how each piece of your content will be shared (time, platforms, etc.) Make your online presence consistent with your offline presence. This is beyond logo and colors. It pertains to the tone of your school online and offline, the atmosphere in your school.
2. Manage your college’s brand efficiently
   • Maintain a consistent image: Keep all your profiles updated with the right profile pictures, background and cover, as it is the first thing that potential students will see once the click, for instance on your Google+ account. Logo sizes and specs will change over time. So will the types of content. That is why it is important to manage your social media profiles on a daily basis.
   • Choose the right tools to manage your social media presence: there are many tools out there to help you manage all your accounts more efficiently Hootsuite, Spredfast or SproutSocial can also help you manage the image of your brand and spread your content effortlessly on different networks.
   • Be actually active on social media: Once you create an account on a social media platform, you need to be active on it: share relevant content and engage with your audience.
3. Monitor your college’s online reputation
   Social media reputation management is key to keep an eye on your college’s reputation and react appropriately. Listen to what is being said about your college.
   • Use the right tools: Many platforms allow you to do keyword search, which will give you an idea of the perception of your school. It is important to look for key hash tags for possible mentions. Other tools are available such as:
     • Google Alerts is a great way to start to receive emails every time specific keywords are being used online.
     • Tweet Beep which are Twitter alerts
     • Social Mention allows you to keep track of mentions and the sentiment associated to them
     • Finally, Mention, helps you create alerts for your college, your competitors, and get notified instantly when there is a new mention on any source on the web (forums, blogs, social media networks, videos, news, etc.) If you like a mention that comes out about your college, you can retweet it or post it on Facebook and share it with all your community. Mention can be used on different platforms on the web, desktop and mobile. There is a free plan that allows you 500 mentions per month.

   • Keep track of trends. Keeping track of all mentions and interactions will help you identify trends and react appropriately. Recently, some of our clients had to face the “Spotted at” trend, where students share anonymously on a Facebook page. Although the nature of the content was generally good natured, it could easily lead to bullying and had to be monitored closely. We helped our client determine what they could do to limit its effects and advised them to create a a policy about social media use in their school.

Google’s Adwords Extensions are enhancements to your ads that extend the functionality or content provided in the ad into a number of useful areas. They provide valuable “lift” that can help you to improve the ROI on those campaigns and meet those goals.

Map extension

This extension allows you to provide a map to your institution, right beside your ad. If a visitor clicks on the “Map of …” link at the bottom of the ad, the map on the right will appear, providing a guide to the student to your location. This extension is particularly useful to school’s marketing when geographic proximity to the school is an important student decision factor.

Additional website links within your site extension

This extension allows you to provide links to additional pages on your website within the ad itself. In the example below, this college, which has multiple campuses across Canada, has embedded direct links to campuses in different provinces, allowing searchers to immediately click through to the provincial level of details that are relevant to them.

Click-to-call a phone number extension

This extension provides a button within mobile PPC ads to click to call an institution’s inbound call centre. This mobile extension allows the prospective student to simply click, through the ad, to speak with a school representative to obtain the information that they are searching for.

Connect +1s from your Google Plus page extension

Authority and trust elements are very important in all types of advertising. This extension presents your Google Plus +1s number to your target student audience in your ad. This scenario provides one more reason why you need to add Google Plus to your mix of active social networks, as Google continues to build a tighter link between social “authority” and search.

Mailing list extension

This extension allows you to collect email address for your newsletter or mailing list, right up front through your PPC ad. This option enables a new strategy for PPC advertising. The extension might be used to collect emails for follow up information, to be added to a general mailing list or for an upcoming event notification like homecoming or alumni conference.

Live chat extension

The live chat extension puts your live chat link directly in front of your customer in the search ad. Live chat is beginning to be implemented on more and more higher ed websites but unfortunately I was not able to find an example of a college or university using this related feature. Here’s an example from the world of ERP software.

If you are currently running PPC campaigns, we recommend you take a little extra time to learn about these extension options to enhance your efforts. They will definitely help you increase your return on investment on what can be expensive, (but necessary), PPC advertising.

If you’ve used Adwords Extensions in your higher ed campaigns we would love to hear about how successful they have been for you. Which have given you the most dramatic results? Which ones have been most successful? Which would you recommend against and for what reasons?

References:

Google Support: Enhance your ad using extensions

SEOMOZ: 6 Ways Google Ad Extensions Can Improve your Adwords Campaign

FYI , this “research- based” post is a summary of info gathered from a number of blog posts of others and conversations I have had with our web analysts. ( See a list of these very helpful blog posts at the bottom of this page). We don’t have a lot of experience with UA yet but hope to have a site up and running with it in the near future. We’ll be back later with more comments based on our experience with UA, at a later date.

What is Universal Analytics?

Announced in Oct 2012, and then made available to the public in beta at the end of March 2012, Universal Analytics is the next major iteration of Google Analytics. It is a big change in how it tracks web traffic, moving from what has been a per visit approach, to a more visitor centric point of view. By assigning a unique client id to visitors, who register on your site, it tracks visitors across devices and touch points, including multiple visits, multiple browsers, multiple devices and off line behavior ( ie in your CRM system).

How Does it Work?

UA uses a new measurement protocol (a protocol is a set of rules) which let you send data from any device/system/environment (including smartphones, tablets, call center data, digital appliances, point of purchase systems or any online or offline customer contact point) to your GA account provided you have formatted your data according to the protocol. Through this protocol you can import offline conversion data into GA.

For now, experts suggest adding Universal Analytics tracking code in parallel to the existing Google Analytics tracking code on your current website. This is necessary to retain all of your past GA data. If you simply replace your “classic” GA with Universal Analytics you will lose all of your history. A migration path is promised soon from Google that will merge your GA history with Universal Analytics. New sites only require the Universal Analytics tracking code to track all activity going forward but you should also carefully consider UA’s limitations before you make a final decision to use it alone.

What are the Main Features of UA?

• Understand visitor interaction across devices and touch points by tracking multiple visits, multiple browsers, multiple devices.
• Track offline behavior – i.e measure call centre or CRM activity. UA will provide a better understanding of the relationship between online and offline marketing channels that drive sales and conversions than GA

For example, you might track a unique, prospective student across multiple visits to your site using each of their mobile, tablet and desktop devices, and then cross reference related call centre or CRM events, from deep in the recruitment cycle, back to the original lead source of the prospective student.

• integration of your college’s or university’s mobile application tracking and additional insights into performance
• More effectively track multi-channel marketing campaigns.
• Create your own custom dimensions and metrics to better understand your visitor behavior. (Dimensions are a characteristic of your visitor and typically appear as a row in your analytics report )

Issues?

• A migration path to integrate GA and UA data is not yet available.
• Currently a fair bit of technical knowledge is required to use custom dimensions, custom metrics and integrating data across multiple devices/ platforms. You should have some serious expertise on hand  to guide you in the adoption and use of UA. Also keep in mind that it is still in beta so the product will change and continue to improve with time. 
• Privacy is an issue. You will need to give your end users proper notice and get consent about what data you will collect via UA.

Implications in Higher Ed?

Universal Analytics provides visitor centric tracking that could prove extremely valuable to higher ed marketers as competition for paying students continues to increase. The ability to track visitor activity across multiple devices will help bring the expanding device universe back into some sense of focus. The ability to track and integrate off line activity, like call centre or CRM system activity could be the most important piece. The capability to calculate ROI across devices, across marketing campaigns and deep into the bottom end of the recruitment funnel will create a powerful tool that could change how higher ed marketers do their business. Privacy and complexity issues complicate and may limit the adoption of UA in higher ed but its potential is strong to be a game changer.

It is still very early in the introduction of Universal Analytics and to date I have not heard of any colleges or universities moving to it yet. We would love to hear your perspective on its capabilities and get your reaction on how important it will be in your web analytics future.

References:

Expanding Universal Analytics into Public Beta

Beginners Guide to Universal Analytics – Creating Custom Dimensions & Metrics

Resources for Learning About Universal Analytics

Universal Analytics: Switching to the Next Version of Google Analytics

The Power of Universal Analytics in the Palm of Your Hand

Recently we have begun to read about and hear an expanding range of opinion on the merits of RWD, based on real experience with it in the marketplace from both web design professionals and higher ed marketers. RWD is a particularly effective strategy for content rich websites like we have in higher ed. Large, complex sites incorporating multiple interactive applications and requiring mobile versions with different search and UI priorities present more of a challenge to this approach.

This post is an effort to collect and summarize some of the prevailing wisdom on RWD to provide the non-specialist with a summary of the pros and cons of RWD, specifically in context of higher ed. Given that RWD seems to evoke a “love it” or “hate it” response in so many people, I am sure I will offend the sensibilities of some by my comments so I would like to apologize for that in advance. (I am a Canadian after all). Regardless of its nature, I do look forward to any and all feedback.

I think it is important that people approach this conversation with as open-minded and balanced an approach to website design as possible. My approach to try and accomplish this has always been to start with business and marketing requirements of a site to determine its form, format and content.

Ethan Marcotte, author of one of the seminal works of RWD, also makes this point in his book “Responsive Web Design”.

            “But most importantly, responsive web design isn’t intended to serve as a
             replacement for mobile web sites. [...] And as a development strategy,
             it’s meant to be evaluated to see if it meets the needs of the project
             you’re working on.”

So let’s take a look are RWD from the point of view of its impacts on different stages of a website’s development, lifecycle and marketing effectiveness.

Site Design Considerations

- Creating one design in RWD, serving all platforms vs multiple designs for mobile, tablet, desktop or app saves time and money.
– One RWD design across all platforms provides a common user experience across those platforms. For example – A student discovers an interesting educational program using their mobile phone on the bus trip home, then go on their desktop at home to further investigate and enter into a website that has the look and feel and sensibilities of the one that drew them to it in the first place. That “scent trail” as referred to in conversion optimization, is a key factor in producing a positive outcome from a prospective student’s web experience.
– Implementation of RWD requires a complete site redesign and reimaging of web applications across desktop and mobile. It is an all or nothing approach that cannot be phased in partially.
– Building effective navigation in RWD for small screen formats (ie smartphones) can be a serious challenge. Sacrifices in design are often made to make it work effectively.
– Image optimization in RWD across multiple formats can be a problem
– Advanced page functionality ie forms, applications etc can be difficult to implement.
– If user intent and/or user requirements are different across platforms, RWD can be difficult to apply, particularly if a mobile page or app is optimized for touch or lead conversion.

This example of a mobile app from JP Morgan Chase Bank demonstrates how a mobile device is intended to be used quite uniquely versus the purpose of a desktop site. According to the company,  consumers used this feature to deposit over $4 billion dollars and the app has won several awards including the highly renowned Webby Award in 2011.

Source: sixrevisions.com 

Site Production Considerations

- Production of a RWD site is generally a more complex project management challenge than a traditional site, takes longer to build and the approvals process, because it is quite different can be more difficult to manage.
– A range of hardware platforms (and resolutions) are required to thoroughly test your RWD site. Emulators or simply scaling a browser window can be used but they never seem to be quite the same results as working on the real thing.

Site Maintenance Considerations

- One of the real benefits of RSW is that it is much simpler to maintain one code base than two or three. This has important implications on the skill set requirements of your team ( internal or external), the amount of time required for maintenance of your site, as well as your management resources to oversee them. Saving time, money and human resources is a high priority for minimally resourced higher ed Marcomm or IT web groups.

Site Performance Considerations

- RSW sites are generally slower to load than m.dot mobile sites. In the example below the responsive mobile and responsive full web page take approximately the same time to load. Even though the mobile page only displays part of it, it needs the time to download all of it at the front end. An optimized mobile site with the same content would typically load much faster. And the really important part is that every extra second of delay in page loading causes a reduction, (reported up to 7%), in conversion rate.

Source: Sixrevisions.com

SEO Considerations

- Google has publically declared that it likes RWD sites , and apparently ranks them higher.
– A RWD site will reduce your bounce rate on mobile visitors which increases lead generation and ultimately trickles down to increased registrations.
– Because there is only once site, RWD sites typically get better page indexing
– Inbound links are directed to one site.
– All of the above typically improve your search engine page rankings.
– If visitor search intent is different for your mobile vs desktop site RSW has its limitations. The example below demonstrates how keywords can be very specifically mobile and local search oriented. Often these are very different keywords than you would typically optimize your desktop site for.

Marketing Considerations

- Analytics for RWD sites are collected under one Google analytics account making it much simpler to oversee your site’s visitor traffic, goals and marketing ROI.
– The example below demonstrates how traffic, funnel and goal conversions can be analyzed by screen size.

 Source: Adobe Blog

- RWD sites have their limitations with respect to efficient A/B testing and conversion rate optimization tactics. The tuning of content and its presentation is more difficult to engineer efficiently across pages that are so scaleable.

As Marcotte’s quote suggests each site has different requirements and objectives and should be evaluated as such. RSW is very effective in certain circumstances but marketers need to be aware that it has its strengths and weakness and apply its use, accordingly.

What factors were most important to you in your decision to use RWD in your last redesign. Or conversely if you chose to stick with a desktop/mobile format strategy, what motivated your decision and with hindsight would you repeat it? What other considerations would you suggest to add to our list. We look forward to hearing from you.

Other Sources:

5 Ways Responsive Design is Changing SEO

Responsive Web Design: The Ultimate Guide for Online Marketers

Responsive Web Design is Not the Future

The Top 25 Responsive Sites of 2012

In recent examples where we’ve split off and launched mobile-only PPC campaigns to parallel existing PPC campaigns, we have seen lifts in conversion rate from baselines of around 5% to anywhere up to 18%. That’s a pretty amazing result in any market but it turns out this is not unique to higher education. With a bit of research on the web you will find many corroborating studies and reports that confirm that mobile is generally getting higher click through and conversion rates than traditional desktop format marketing.

So after recovering from the celebrations, and leveraging this strategy across a few more campaigns, we buckled down and tried to really understand what’s different about mobile lead generation and to identify the factors that are influencing these results.

So here is our thoughts on why mobile seems to be working well for us, so far.

1) Most mobile lead generation forms are simpler and less threatening

Out of necessity, most mobile lead gen forms, on websites or on mobile PPC landing pages, keep it really simple, often only requesting full name and email, as above . This makes good sense given the challenges of typing and the limited attention span of a visitor using a smart phone. It is also generally accepted that by keeping the number of fields to an absolute minimum that you will scare away the least number of prospects, who are afraid of being put into a hard sell sales cycle they if they provide phone number and address details.

The A/B test example below provides vivid proof of this behaviour.

        The Original lead gen form required: Full name and email
           Variation 1 lead gen form required: Full name, email and phone number

The additional commitment required on the part of the prospect student to provide a phone number was enough to dramatically reduce the conversion rate. I would argue that in this case these prospects are not necessarily poor quality prospects but that they were at the very beginning of their research into possible options, or in other words, at the very top of the recruitment funnel, and as a result, were not willing to commit to a the higher level engagement that might be facilitated if they provided a phone number.

2) Mobile is a much more “directed” search platform

Source: Search Engine Land

Searching on a mobile device often has different intent from the kind of searching we do on a desktop or with a tablet. Mobile searching is very directed, “mission-based” searching. If, in the moment, what we are doing in the real world, ( on the bus, in a line for coffee, etc), is more import than what we are doing in the virtual world, then we want to get in, find what we want, and get out. Mobile facilitates this type of searching best. In this type of a search, it is reasonable to expect that prospect students would convert, on an information request goal, more readily, that when in exploration mode while sitting at home on their desktop in the evening, when the have more time to gather and consider the nuances of the information they find.

Source: emarketer

This behaviour may change in the future as we move more and more towards our mobile devices as our primary internet access points, and transfer our search requirements to it, but at least for the present this seems to be the case.

3) Mobile search is used to find local information

     Google says that 95% of smartphone users look up local information regularly.
     Google says that 50 % of its searches on mobile have local intent.
     Bing says that 53 % of its searches on mobile have local intent.

Mobile searchers are thinking local and they are thinking immediate. Assuming, like most post-secondary institutions, that a large part of your target audience is in your local area, it only makes sense that mobile will produce higher lead generation conversion rates. Given these kinds of results, local search advertising is expanding very rapidly. My guess is that higher ed will likely contribute its fair share to its projected growth in the coming years.

Source: Search Engine Watch

4) Mobile leads to action

Mobile devices seem to be an almost perfect direct response medium. We want information on the go, and when we get it, we seem more willing to act on it.

     70% of mobile searches lead to action within 1 hour. 90% eventually lead to action
     90% of leads from other sources do not take action, leading to 2-5 % conversion rates
         Source 

     61% of mobile searches lead to an inbound phone call
     Inbound phone calls generally convert at 10 to 15 times the rate of other leads.
         Source

These general statistics should get your attention. Unfortunately I don’t have education market specific stats to further delve into but as the research becomes available it will be very interesting to see how much of these general online consumer behaviors will be  translated into the higher ed market. The success of mobile in producing inbound prospect phone calls is an aspect that should be considered closely to effect a closer integration of inbound marketing with your school’s admissions call centre.

Mobile has demonstrated its chops to us as an effective tactic in higher ed lead generation. Lead quality and conversion to student rates remain to be seen down the road but I have high hopes that these leads will prove to be of high value. I hope these insights will be helpful to other higher ed marketers as you extend your marketing activities into this new territory.

Do you have other insights into the effectiveness of mobile marketing from your experience. Have you seen similarly high levels of lead conversions from mobile sources? We would love to get your take on mobile and hear about its role in your marketing plans for the coming year.

Astute analysts have come to realize that simple marketing channel attributing methodologies, such as “first click” and “last click” attributions, are flawed and result in misallocation of school marketing budgets and efforts  (which further affect the overall campaign ROI) because most of them fail to provide full insight into how a user interacts with marketing touchpoints before the conversion happens.

What is multi-attribution?

Let’s consider a scenario of a prospective student trying to enroll in a diploma program.As a very first step, the student searches for “Accounting diploma” and sees Adwords ads from several accounting schools.Let’s say one of the schools that comes up in the search is McGill University. The student then then searches “McGill University,” visits McGill’s website by clicking on an organic result, leafs through a few web pages, and

leaves the site before making a decision. McGill University retargets this student a few days later through ad banners and the student comes back to the site, identifies a program of interest, leaves to search for program reviews, and then comes back through some review portal and eventually completes the enrollment

In the above scenario, a prospective student is exposed to the following marketing channels before enrolling into a course.

As we all know, most of the analytics tools use last click attribution by default. In this case, using last click would result in the review portal getting full credit for generating a new conversion. All of the previous touch points would not be acknowledged as being a part of the entire process. In contrast, multi-attribution tools track all the touch points that the prospect was exposed to before the conversion, and allocate credit among all these nodes accordingly. Understanding the role each touch point has can further help you make vital marketing decisions to manage advertisement budget at a macro level.

There are a few different ways to distribute credits when using a multi-attribution tool. Here are some of the most used ones:

Funnel Position: Classify the touch points as Introducers (the initiator), Influencers (touch points in the middle of the funnel) and Closers (last known touch point before conversion) and distribute credit based on organizational preferences.

Time decay:  Assigns the maximum credit to the touch point that occurred nearest to the time of conversation.

Algorithmic: Use statistical and predictive models while taking time decay and a linear model into account.

Even credit: Simply divide the credit evenly among all known touch points

Choosing the justified multi-attribution tool

Picking the right tool is perhaps one of the most vital decisions your college marketing team will make. Each tool is unique, they have their own algorithm, but for the sake of simplicity and effectiveness, here is a comprehensive set of parameters you should consider while choosing a multi-attribution solution.

Data accuracy and integrity:

The tool is nothing more than a way to visualize data. Quality data is persistent and continues to provide insights way beyond its projected life. In order for any multi-attribution solution to board your college’s needs, it is essential that it should be able to answer affirmatively to following questions:

1. Does the tool account for cookie deletion and the use of multiple browsers?
2. Does the tool retain historical data?
3. Can the tool track user interactions across both online and offline channels?
4. Does the tool store data at a granular level (including clicks)?

Customization and flexibility

 Make sure the tool is flexible enough with well-reasoned and built-in attribution models that you can easily pick from. Also ensure that the tool “Be clear about your goal but be flexible about the process of achieving it.”allows for enough customization to suit your organization needs and goals. Additionally, ask your vendor the following questions to make sure it’s the right fit:

1.  Does the tool allow you to easily build custom attribution models?
2. Does the tool allow you to use custom cookie windows?
3. Does the product allow you to change attribution methodologies?
4. Is the tool flexible enough to allow multiple models at the same time?

Deployment

IT resources at most colleges are already tight and don’t have the flexibility to allocate dedicated resources. In order to reduce (or avoid) extra overload, the proposed tool should meet the following criteria:

1. The tool should be easy to deploy.
2. The tool should play nicely with existing web ecosystem and tag management solutions.
3. The tool should be easy to maintain on an ongoing basis when new updates are deployed or changes are made for conversion optimization.

There are hundreds of multi-attribution tools in the market right now, and they all have their own pros and cons. While choosing the multi-attribution solution, keep in mind that data quality in particular is vital. In order to truly evaluate the performance of your marketing effort, your tool needs to have a robust tracking mechanism that can account for all user touch points on- and offline.

My Top 5 Multi-Attribution Tools:

 Over the course of my digital marketing career, I have used many different analytics/attribution solutions. Some worked, some didn’t, and some are just plain AMAZING. Here are my favorite five attribution tools:

Attribution modeling has become an inevitable essence in today’s competitive media market place, where audiences are bombarded by multi-advertisement messages. Using a multi-touch attribution model allows your college to track all user touch points and pull more precise information about user interaction with their brands.

Proper attribution still poses a number of challenges to marketers and institutes alike because there are so many parameters involved. There is no clear-cut answer to queries about weighting each channel or the impact that has on the value of a conversion. As technology and digital analytics continue to reinvent themselves, new answers will continue to appear.

In the second part of this post, we will discuss multi-attribution solutions using Google Analytics. Stay tuned, and in the meantime, please tell us about your multi-attribution solutions and share your feedback.

It never fails to surprises me a bit when we find this situation because effective SEO practice is fairly easy to understand and apply, but more importantly, it provides a huge ROI on minimal investment of time and money.

Here are four simple reasons why I believe you must invest in SEO:

Reason 1: SEO Will Give You Competitive Advantage

In the 2012 Noel-Levitz E-Recruiting Practices Study it was reported that 42 percent of four-year private universities, 34 percent of four-year public universities, and 21 percent of two-year colleges are investing in an SEO process to improve search results. Simply put, this means that;

 60 % – 80% of the higher ed market, (depending on the type of school),
DOES NOT INVEST IN SEO.

Clearly, if you are looking for opportunity to rise above your competitors in your target markets, search engine optimization can help you do that. With the rise of “Content Marketing” in the last year, I think that these percentages will fall in 2013 but there is still lots of gap to take advantage of.

Reason 2: Prospective Student Rely Heavily on Search to Find Schools

Prospective students use many means to identify and narrow down their top school preferences. But what most of the research on the topic seems to have in common is that students are using search engines is a primary “discovery” tool in this process.

 Source: 2012 Noel-Levitz E-Recruiting Practices Study

2/3 of the prospective student population use and highly value 
search engines to research colleges.

There is a confusing inconsistency here between what students are doing to find colleges and that schools are NOT investing in SEO to improve their likelihood of being found by students.

To Recap:
- Two thirds of students rely heavily on search to find schools
- Colleges must appear in the search engine rankings to be found.
- At least two thirds of schools don’t invest in SEO to improve their rankings.

     So why is that?

The best reason I have been able to come up with to explain this is that many marketers don’t understand the difference between branded and unbranded term searching. They must be assuming most students are doing branded searches on their college’s name and therefore they are always going to be found. And once they are on the home page they can draw them into their program pages and move them into their recruitment funnel. I am sure this does happen that way in some cases but my bet is that it is rare and getting rarer. It probably works for the Harvards of the world put given the super competitive nature of things at all other levels in the market it is assuming a lot to think that high rankings for you brand will mean success in non-branded competetive program areas.  It is much more likely today that students are searching on something like “best green architecture program on east coast”. Without a serious SEO effort you are not going to get found for these kinds of search terms. Conversely, a college that has invested in SEO for key distinguishing search terms like this will have a much better chance at being found by a prospective student.

So if these higher ed specific stats above are not enough to convince you, let me throw a few other arguments in here. These stats are general and not specifically for higher ed but they indicate some pretty important behavioral characteristics of search that I am pretty sure prospective students will also have.

Reason 3: You Must Rank Highly on Page One of the Results Pages to be Found

The research on this topic is pretty conclusive.

75% of seachers never scroll past page one results.
Source: Marketsharehitslink.com, Oct 2010

Assuming this applies to students, this means that 75% of your prospective students will never get to your website unless your website search results gets to page 1. Sobering, right?

Even more sobering is that you have to get to to the top 3 organic listings to really have chance of being clicked. You’ve probably all seen examples of eye tracking studies on how people interact with search engine results pages, like the example below.

The red area indicates where people’s eyes tend to focus.

60% of the clicks go to the top three results.
Source: Marketing Sherpa, 2007

Reason 4: Search Generated Leads Close at the Highest Rate

The quality of prospective student leads that you generate (or purchase) is relative to their source. You know this if you track conversion rates of different types of leads through your recruitment funnel. Search generated leads (also known as in-bound leads) are likely the highest quality leads you have, converting to registered students at the highest rate. This is a general market stat, and not education specific, but research indicates that:

14.6% of SEO generated leads will close, while outbound leads, (such as direct
mail or print advertising generated) have a close rate of only 1.7%.
Source: SearchEngineJournal 2012

So clearly if you want to increase your leads and registrations, focusing on SEO to produce them is a high return on investment option.

If you are part of the higher ed community that is not currently investing in SEO, I hope that these arguments will get you thinking about how you can increase your marketing ROI by investing some of your resources into search engine optimization.

SEO is non-glamorous, operates in the background, and is sometimes slow to have impact but it may still be the best investment you can make to improve your school’s recruitment performance. We end up doing some SEO work with almost every new client we start working with. And it works.

I’d really love to hear back from some of you who have specifically chosen not to invest your marketing budgets into SEO and get your reactions to my arguments. What other marketing channels are you using, in lieu of SEO and what kind of ROI are you getting with them?

 Feedly

Feedly shares many of the functionalities of Google Reader, such as keyboard shortcuts and tags, but offers a much more attractive interface, turning your feeds into a magazine-like reader.

It is available for Chrome, Firefox, Safari as well as on iPhone, iPad, and Android. The application allows you to share content on Twitter and Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest as well as via email. It is also free, just like Google Reader.

1. Simple steps to subscribe to Feedly:
2. Go to Feedly’s website
3. Get Feedly for Chrome/Safari or Firefox
4. Connect via Google Reader
5. Allow the access

Newsblur

Newsblur’s interface is very similar to Google Reader’s. It allows you to import all your subscriptions from Google Reader without creating a new account. It also allows you to hide or highlight specific content pieces. Just like Feedly, Newsblur lets you to share content on social media. However, a main difference is that Newsblur enables you to follow friends and to add comments to what you are sharing. For that, just connect your Newsblur account to your social media profiles. When you find an interesting story, click on the share button.  A small comment section will appear.

Newsblur offers a free subscription for to up to 64 feeds, with a premium account option starting at $ 24/year. With the traffic generated recently by the closing down of Google Reader, Newsblur has been overwhelmed with requests. That is why it is not accepting any new free subscriptions at the moment.

Simple steps to subscribe to Newsblur:

1. Go to the Newsblur website
2. Sign up or Login in
3. Enter a username, password and your Gmail address
4. Create account
5. You will be asked for a payment. You can ignore this request and on the same page re-enter website address
6. A Welcome from Newsblur appears. Click on Let’s get started
7. Then click on Import from Google Reader
8. Accept access to your Google Reader
9. Install the bookmarklet to share on Newsblur
10. Connect with friends (via Twitter or Facebook) (you can skip this step too)

The Old Reader

 Really popular among users who are switching to a new RSS feed, Old Reader is a web-based beta feed reader modeled after the old Google Reader. So for those of you who loathe change and are not interesting in testing other alternatives, this clone of Google Reader may be the right choice.  A major downside is its sluggishness to import subscriptions from Google Reader. Note that the Old Reader has no social features.

Simple steps to subscribe to Old Reader

1. Go to the Website
2. Click on Connect with Google
3. Accept access to Google
4. Import subscriptions: Choose an OPML file (You can grab it From Google Reader settings  page) and import

We have been experimenting with the 3 platforms and here is what we have found:

• Old Reader and Feedly are both free. Newsblur’s free option is currently not available to new users.
• Importing subscribers from Google Reader is easiest with Feedly and Newsblur, made by a simple click.
• We found Feedly was the easiest for sharing the news that you like with your community and friends.
• Also, because of its magazine-like interface, Feedly is the most modern and user-friendly.

We enjoy using Feedly and recommend it for your higher education marketing activities.

What about you? What Google Reader alternatives have you been using? Which ones would you recommend? Share your experiences!

Part of any content strategy will necessarily involve developing processes of creating new content, as well as editorial calendars that will help streamline the publication of this new content.  We’ve spoken about content generation and content calendars before, but in order for these two practices to evolve naturally and at a desired pace, there needs to be a content culture instilled within your college or university.

What is Content Culture?

The content culture is the overall position people at your college hold regarding the content that is being produced for and published on the college website. Establishing a strong content culture will be the gateway to ensuring a constant flow of significant and effective content.

Why do we need a Content Culture?

The driving force behind any initiative is collaboration. The Marketing or Communications departments will likely spearhead a lot of the web content projects, but it would be inefficient to have such a small representation of your college write all of the content on behalf of the entire school. You want to establish a content culture because it will encourage all the different communities within your school to work towards the same goal, even if by doing it separately.

Ultimately, content should be synonymous with substance, and you want to promote a content culture because it runs parallel with the overall philosophy of providing an enriching learning environment. The aim is to establish a culture that not only promotes content creation, but one that fuels college-wide collaboration.

From a higher ed marketing perspective, establishing a content culture will contribute greatly to the overall digital marketing strategy that a college or university has.  Having a constant flow of engaging and diverse content will enhance search engine optimization efforts and overall online visibility, which in turn, propels student recruitment.

How do we create a Content Culture?

Like any plan of action, the most difficult part of the process is the execution. Below we have listed strategies you can implement in order to jumpstart the development of your college’s content culture.

1. Encourage everyone to participate: A lot of people within your college’s community (students, staff, faculty, administration, partners, etc.) don’t even know that they are able to submit content, or even pitch ideas to whoever oversees web content. The only way to ensure that the content is a true representation of your college as a whole is to showcase the voices of everyone who is in involved in the day-to-day.

Example: Thompson Rivers University’s TRU Blogroll welcomes students, faculty, staff, alumni and anyone else in their community to contribute to an existing TRU blog or create one of their own. What’s so great about the page is that Thompson University has established an equalized place where students and faculty ventures hold the same weight, and are considered valuable additions to the overall collection of ongoing blogs.

2. Promote various types of content submissions: Remind everyone that content exists beyond text formats. Many people will shy away from contributing content because they shy away from writing, or feel like writing will be too much of a time commitment. Encourage contributors to submit photos, videos, illustrations etc. For example:

• Images: Science professors can host a photo scroll on images of students in the lab
• Video: Business professors can begin a video series of practicing business skills in the real world, like putting students through mock job interviews.
• Text: Recruit a student to be the official Events blogger, and have this student write up a review of any event (on-campus conferences, talks, open houses, etc.) for the school blog.

Example: The Kenyon College News Room includes content from their various demographics and contains text, audio, video and visual content.

3. Define a process: Admittedly, having everyone on board is theoretically ideal for content generation, but it can definitely disrupt the publication flow. Full participation will necessarily require a streamlined process where content contributors submit to a designated person or team (Communications or Marketing) who will subsequently edit, polish, and publish the content.

The key is to make it easy and clear for everyone to participate while also adhering to established style guides or preferences. You can offer access to a “Content Submission Form”

Example: Looking at Kenyon College again, their Public Affairs team gives clear guidelines to how people can submit anything, from an event posting, to videos and web content.

Establishing a concrete content culture will take time, so it is important that you set reasonable expectations for your team and all prospective content creators. Keep the momentum going through campaigns, email blasts, and even seasonal incentives (theatre tickets, giveaways, etc.)

Over time, you will see participation levels increase, and have an entire college worth of people playing a part in solidifying your college’s overall brand and web presence.

How does your college or university encourage campus-wide participation in web content generation?

Picture source: Mashable

I have been particularly hard hit by this announcement because Google Reader is one of my favourite tools. In fact I truly do love this application. Those might seem like strong emotions to be applied to a lowly RSS reader but they are mine.

Why you might ask? Well, I use GR every day as a primary tool to help track and organize that fire hose of information flow called the internet that I need to stay current with to do my job as a higher education marketer. First thing, each morning, (and with great relish), I open up Google Reader to find a list of approximately 150 -200 news articles, blog posts and announcements about higher education, educational technology and educational marketing. I read some, tweet some, and flag some for further investigation and in 20 -30 minutes, I feel plugged in, motivated and at least temporarily, on top of a rapidly changing edtech marketing world.

As a result of this personal experience, I’ve recommended Google Reader to many of my higher education marketing friends and colleagues as an essential tool to help them manage their online information needs and to feed their institution’s content development efforts. The argument goes something like this.

The benefits of a robust Google Reader RSS feed to a user are:

1) In a very simple and efficient manner, you can keep up with what’s happening in your field from a technology, societal and marketing point of view. My RSS feed is my professional development assistant that provides me with current information, trends and analysis that I need to know about to do my work as a higher ed marketing professional.

2) It provides an incredibly rich and renewable aggregation of higher education related content that you can redistribute to your professional, prospective student or institutional audience. I regularly tweet and post to Facebook and LinkedIn articles or blog posts that have come to me through my feed that I know my higher ed marketing colleagues will be very interested in. As you know “Content is King” and your RSS feed can be one of your best renewable sources of new, interesting, and trending information.

3) I use my RSS feed as a source of inspiration for ideas for original content that I need to produce for blogs, articles, white papers etc. Faced with a blank piece of paper and a deadline, a quick review of new posts in Google Reader has often given me an idea or angle on an topic that has led to very productive writing of my own.

Since the announcement of Google Reader’s impending retirement, I’ve been procrastinating on the task of replacing it. I have enjoyed and benefited from the use of Google Reader over the years and I am reluctant to make a final break from it. Needless to say, a new RSS feed is in my near future but I think I will hold out until the end and spend these last few months appreciating the simplicity and effectiveness of my old friend.

Have you determined what RSS reader you will adopt to replace Google Reader? Is there anything out there that you know about that is particularly effective for higher ed?

Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated and we’ll certainly share them with all.

What are Hangouts on Air?

Google created Hangouts as a web-based tool to allow Google plus subscribers to communicate via video. Originally, the tool set up a virtual room where up to ten people could hang-out together to converse or carry out more complexes tasks, like group meetings. Last year, Google developed a feature that allows you to share your hangouts on your YouTube channels, and more recently, that allows you to broadcast your hangouts live to an unlimited audience: Google Hangouts on Air.

Why should your college explore Google+ Hangouts on Air?

• It is a free tool that allows you to broadcast your hangout instantly on Google+ and on YouTube.
• It is open to all.
• You can save your Hangouts on Air as videos on YouTube.
• Recordings can be shared easily after the hangout.
• You can edit your videos using YouTube’s video editor – including annotation, closed captioning.

Note that you will need to have a Google+ account and a YouTube channel.  There are also a few drawbacks to this tool:  you will not be able to limit the audience on YouTube once you are streaming and it may prove difficult to moderate comments on YouTube while running the session live. Also, as the broadcaster, you will have to take responsibility for others copyright infringements.

How can your college use Hangouts on Air?

Google Hangouts are already used by some teachers, students, and administrators to share their knowledge and thoughts. However, Hangouts on Air is very seldom used by higher education institutions for marketing purposes. Here are some ways higher education institutions can use Hangouts on Air:

• Host information sessions to reach out to students in your region and throughout the world. It can be very effective for international recruitment.
• Create testimonial videos that you can then share on YouTube directly.
• Create Alumni from all around the world answer questions live.
• The screen-sharing option allows you to guide students through the application process on your website.
• Broadcast events as they are happening at your school: graduation, research presentations, etc. Hangouts can also be used for conferences.
• Here is how Texas Christian U uses hangouts for its athletic programs:

 Let the world know about your Hangouts on Air!

Marketing your videos is at least as important as creating them. For each type of Hangout on Air:

• Set your account to live stream your Hangouts on Air on your YouTube account.
• Create a Hangout.
• Send invitations to your circles on your brand Google+ account and your personal account.
• Promote your event on social media and on your blog.
• Stage the webcams to make sure branded material is visible to all. Creating a Lower Third may be a great way to brand your page.
• Rehearse before starting the hangout.
• Once the hangout is over, share the recording on all your social media profiles.
• Embed the video on your website as well, and make sure to include calls to action to make your viewers take action on the site.

How have you been using Hangouts on Air?

The bigger SEO challenge for higher ed institutions becomes clear once you start examining keyword rankings for their main academic programs. Hundreds, if not thousands of schools, have the same program names so it is difficult for a school to rank highly for a search like “full time BA degree in psychology New York” (even with the regional geographic modifier attached.)

Up until the recent past, for program pages to rank well a school would have to ramp up its on-page SEO, making sure that Page Titles, Metatags, H1headers, Keywords, etc were all tuned up so that the page had maximum SEO effect. Some off- page SEO in the form of inbound links from other outside respected sources would also be a big help. This level of SEO investment would typically give a program page a respectable showing in the search engines.

But this minimal level of SEO activity is simply not enough anymore.

To rank highly today, and be seen by prospective students in their early stage web searching, higher ed marketers must now also produce high quality, engaging, relevant and recurring content about their academic programs, that includes related short and long tail keywords .

So how does one determine what content to produce to get the best SEO results while at the same time optimally engaging your target student.

Enter the 70/20/10 Content Formula.

This model will help you determine how content can be focused to get the optimal results on both fronts. It was developed in the advertising world to support balanced content marketing strategy in brand development. It was recently highlighted by Coca-Cola when used as part of a long-term content marketing strategy for Coke but applies equally well to higher education marketing.

The 70%

70% of your content should be low risk, basic information that talks about the fundamental elements of your program. Some people refer to this type of content as link bait. But don’t get the wrong idea. To be successful with the search engines and your prospective student you must be committed to producing high quality content even at this basic level. You must provide useful articles, with merit, that are on topics proven to be of interest to your audience. This content, with a purpose, should provide basic information and answer the basic questions about you programs. Don’t overthink it, keep it clean, simple and effective and always link it back to the other basic elements of your program. Here is an example from the University of Toronto News Section.

Source:  University of Toronto 

The 20%

The next 20% of the content that you create should be innovative, responsive content, discussing the same prioritized topics that you covered in the 70%, but taken to a deeper level. They might be a bit edgier; you might take a unique stance, or respond to seasonal shifts in the general case. This content may also take a different form as ebooks, webinars, or infographics. Deeper discussion of your priority topics provides serious prospects with more information and more insight into your program’s personality, as they form opinions about your institution and compare it to other schools. Search engines are exposed to more detailed text covering your key topics, encountering more synonyms, antonyms, and related long tail keyword phrases.

Here is an example of a popular HEM blog post that fits into the 20% definition. It combines and contrasts two main topics that are core to our blog’s content , PPC and SEO in higher ed. To this day, 6 months after it was originally published, it continues to attract significant traffic and stimulate feedback from our readers.

Source: Higher Education Marketing 

The 10%

It is within the final 10 % of your content where you should proactively and re-actively experiment with your subject matter. It’s where you introduce controversial new ideas, take some risk with opinion pieces, or experiment with feedback to comments to the 70% and 20%. It presents you with the opportunity to learn more about your visitor’s preferences, win readers, lose readers and celebrate your content expertise. By getting out ahead of your reader with this kind of content you can test new trends, present new ideas and have a bit of fun along the way. This recommendation may seem a bit unrealistic to some , given the rather conservative nature of many post-secondary institutions, but remember that it is your job to generate genuine interest in your institution and engage your students. This is your opportunity to do that with some flair. Just remember not to step out too far outside the range of “normal”, as defined at your institution.

Source: Academy of Learning 

The 70/20/10 strategy is a means to help you more effectively organize your approach to content that will satisfy the appetite for high quality content of both your human and your search engine robot audiences.

What have been your most successful “20%” and “10 %” topics. What challenges do you see implementing this kind of approach within your higher ed institution’s content strategy?

While the recent discussions have been focused on WHY program pages are important, we wanted to focus on HOW you can develop your program pages so they become effective student recruitment tools.

1. Intuitive navigation

Your users will notice what is showcased on your homepage, so it makes sense to gear their eyes and the click of their mouse towards your main program page. But the homepage is only part of the navigation equation. Ultimately, you want to make sure your visitors find the program page regardless of where they land on your website. For example, if a user visits your site for the first time through a link to your blog, will they be able to find the program page as easy as they would from your homepage? The answer to that question needs to be “YES!” Set up your navigation menu so your main pages (Programs, Cont. Ed, Student Services, Research, Community, Financial Aid, etc.) are always visible.

Example: Red River College designed a very clear and intuitive web navigation, allowing users to zoom in on what they’re looking for, as well as discover other services and initiatives happening at the college.

2. Clear layout

Once a prospective student lands on a particular program page, you don’t only want to be sure that they find out all of the information they are looking for, but you also want to be sure they find the information easily. A clean and simple page layout will insure that all of the required information is directly on the program page, which will in turn avoid having users feel unclear about any of the program details or admissions processes.

Some vital pages to include on each and every program page are:

• Admission Requirements
• Program Outline
• Career Options
• Financial Aid

Example: Centennial College lays out their program page through five different information tabs, each one leading the user into section of important and relevant information that will help them understand the advantages of applying and studying at Centennial.

3. Call to Action = Student Reaction

A while back, Scott spoke about the role Calls to Action (CTAs) play in the conversion process. Ultimately, CTAs guide users on what their next step should be. To figure what your CTAs should be, try to adopt the perspective of a prospective student. Think of the possible questions they would ask themselves after reading all of the available information, and design the calls to action based on those questions. For example:

Example: Drew University’s program section has been gaining a lot of attention lately, and rightly so. The design is fantastic through and through, but one detail that really caught our eye was Drew’s use of CTAs. The CTAs are simple, concise, and placed on top and on bottom of each program page. In this snap shot, we see four distinct CTAs below a student testimonial. This shows that CTAs are not complicated items to integrate onto a page, and the simpler they are, the better.

4. The right kind of SEO

The ultimate aim of your program page is to engage a prospective student, but before that can happen you need to get them to visit the page. We understand when clients express the idea that search engine optimization strategies may undercut the value of content. But this isn’t true. SEO is a tricky tactic, but when executed properly it can become an extremely valuable asset to online visibility.

Part of SEO best practices is choosing the right target keywords and properly integrating them in your content. Without overloading your page with keywords (which can actually reverse the desired SEO effect), you should zone in on a few target keywords that you want the page to be visible for, and integrate them into the content naturally and coherently. By doing so, you increase your overall visibility on search engines, which will help students find you while they are scoping out which schools to apply to.

5. Various types of content

I will always be the first one to defend the written word, but when it comes to web sites, sometimes words just aren’t enough. Informative content will be the foundation of your college or university website, but it’s the images and videos that will make it thrive. In regards to program pages, try to integrate various types of content so students can learn about your program offerings through different mediums. For example, integrate photos of students on campus or in residence, or videos of students interacting with their classmates and professors in class. The benefits of diverse types of content can be measured both in user engagement and online visibility.

Example: Carleton College’s main program page features three distinct types of content on the page: text, photos, and a reel of videos that feature students from all different disciplines discussing their overall academic and campus experience.

Your website is a major starting point for many prospective students, so you need to insure that it gives what they are looking for. Implementing these elements will bring a heightened level of overall functionality to your program pages. The goal is answer any questions students may have, and show them the benefits of enrolling at your college or university. If students land on your site and are able to swim through all the pages fluidly, and can grasp the potential academic experience they will have at your school, then they will likely feel fully informed and ready to apply.

What have the most effective tweaks your college or university made to your program pages? 

If you still have questions or if you want to discuss anything, please feel free to ask us through the Comments box below.

Q: We have a limited budget and are not sure if we should prioritize social media. What can social media do for me that I am not already doing with traditional media?

 A: Social media offers you a way to reach students at home and makes it possible for you to keep track of your efforts, thus continuously improving them. Social media also helps shape brand perception. In the end, it can help bring traffic to your site and thus, further down the funnel, help recruit students. Does social media guarantee new recruitment? No, it doesn’t. But with social media becoming intertwined with search engines (i.e., Google merging its search engine with Google+), not using some social media may be detrimental to your other online marketing efforts in the long run.

Q: Should our college have a separate Facebook page dedicated to student recruitment?

A: Many colleges maintain a general Facebook page for current students and host a separate one for other audiences or purposes (Q&A page, Recruitment page, International page, etc.). While this tactic may work for large universities, it is not always efficient for smaller community colleges. There is definitely a need for answering all student questions rapidly. However, many of these Admissions pages do not create much engagement and are unlikely to be followed by prospects. That is why we usually recommend having a general page open to students that all students can contact with a Contact Us page and using private Facebook groups for incoming students to share information.

Q: My team does not have much time for social media. Is there one specific social media initiative we can focus our time on?

A: This isn’t a single answer for this question. The right social media platform really depends on your school and what you goals are. Many colleges jump onto Facebook, thinking that it is the primary step in initiating their social media presence. But a Facebook account with hardly any shared content and virtually no Likes or traffic, amounts to no page at all. Creating a community on social media can be time consuming. So if you are running on a tight schedule, we suggest you follow these steps, one at a time:

• Optimize your website: This may sound like a twist for a question about social media, but if the goal is to get prospects to your site and you have little resources, your first efforts should focus on what should remain the hub of all activities: your website, and, if you have one, your blog. Have all of the info about financial aid and admissions easily visible on your site. Have clear program pages with calls to action. Make it easy to talk to someone, but do not only list names and a phone number: put a face on the contact they will speak with, and a warm picture, like University of Winnipeg:

• Focus on the platforms used by your students: sample your students to determine what platforms they use and where they would like to see their college share information.
• Create or share content that is useful to them. Social media is not about shouting news about your school or programs, but about being useful to your students and community. Once you have identified the platforms, make sure you share relevant content only. One sure way to do that is to create a student blog and have student discuss their experiences at your school.

Q: Not many of our students are on Twitter or LinkedIn. How can we choose the best platforms to reach new students?

A: Choosing the best platforms involves understanding key factors:

What information or resource your students are looking for: if your students are looking for a professional network, LinkedIn and Twitter may be great tools, even if not many of your students are using platforms as they offer a lot of info and network you will be able to share on other platforms.

Once again, Google+ should not be underestimated. Even if it is not widely used by students, many agree that it will become essential to search in the coming years.

If you can produce visual content such as videos and images, use a platform such as Tumblr or YouTube. In fact, Google Hangouts allows you to broadcast edited versions of your hangouts directly on YouTube. This makes for very cost-efficient videos.

Continuously test new platforms or new feature while keeping a close eye on social media analytics.

Q: What are the best platforms to help us increase international student recruitment?   

A: Once again, the best platforms will depend on the type of programs you want to advertise for (general, professional, technical, etc.) and the countries you are targeting. International recruitment is a growing stake for Canadian colleges. Although social media will not replace the traditional international fairs and recruiting agent work, it certainly helps give a direct feel of your school and its people (current students, faculty, staff, etc.). Skype is great to book interviews including enrolled students, preferably from the same country as the interviewees, to answer questions.

How have you been using social media for your student recruiting efforts?

Strategies to reduce bounce rate break down into three general categories: page content, page design, and related technical elements. Most can be applied at any level, (page, section or site wide), so remember it’s up to you to determine at which level the bounce problem lies and then to apply the most appropriate tactics to address the problem. This list is more directed at improving general web pages vs highly focused landing pages. For more information about how to reduce bounce and increase conversion rate of lead generation or registration funnel pages see other posts about conversion rate optimization (CRO) and landing page optimization.

Because this list covers so much ground I have kept it in point form to try and keep the information as accessible as possible. Hope this helps

Page Content

1) Produce High Quality Content
– Nothing beats interesting, relevant, current, visually stimulating content.
– Keep you content up to date,
– Make sure it is at the right reading level
– Split up your content into digestible chunks that people can scan and then dig into

2) Offer Content Based on Visitor Segmentation
– Break down you audience into their respective segments and provide the content each wants
– Study the keywords visitors use to find you with. Some bounce higher than others. Find out why.
– Analyze your internal site search to identify what people are most often looking for on your site
– Consider your visitors points of entry to reveal what they are looking for and give it to them

3) Make it Clear What’s in it for your Visitor
– Make your messaging really obvious, be clear what you do and what you offer
– The features of your programs are great but visitors are more interested in the benefits. Convey value.
– Make related content accessible. Proximity of the link will determine the click-through
– Make your website sticky

4) Be Trustworthy and Professional,
– Trust is required for a visitor to engage with you and enter your recruitment funnel. Earn it.
– Always keep your contact info front and centre. It is amazing how many don’t.

Page Design

5) Correct Poor Page Design
– This is a pretty obvious recommendation but don’t take it for granted. Many pages flow out of you general design, get tweaked, get repurposed, get lost and lose their ability to engage or convert.

6) Make Pages Visually Engaging
– Visual engagement is the first hook that draws visitors into your content. Use eye-tracking, check In-page Analytics etc. to understand a student’s first reaction to your pages
– Be predictable in your design, using consistent placement and formatting so that the visitor quickly learns where to find things
– Whitespace is a good thing, use it often

7) Don’t Interrupt the User’s Experience
– Develop intuitive navigation so the student can see their way into your content
– Take people where they want to go
– Manage multimedia very carefully – some is good at engaging, some makes people bounce
– Many institutions use a lot of internal “advertising”. Be careful of it’s placement and page priority as it can be just as off-putting as a telemarketing on a Sunday afternoon.

8) Design Information around Page Priorities

- Are your target conversion or content points clearly presented on your page?
– Can students immediately get a sense of what they should expect to find or are expected to do while on the page?
– Respect visitor intent by making sure the page you are presenting to visitors aligns closely with the content promised from the source link
– Make conversion events (ie calls to action, forms, key related links) very clear. Place them above the fold

9) Go responsive web design or create a parallel mobile website
– People searching for information about your college on a mobile device need to see a page that is sized to the format of their device. Full web pages served to a smart phone will almost always bounce.
– Successful student engagement through mobile pages has different rules than for traditional desktop pages. Take a minimalist approach and then learn through experimentation what will work best for your institutions offerings.

Technical Elements

10) Improve Page Load Times for high bounce pages
– optimize content, images, multimedia etc to minimize your page load times

11) Check Browser Performance for high bounce pages
– it’s always possible that something in your code is not working for one specific browser, and the page is not loading in that browser. This is a surefire way to cause visitors to bounce.

12) Open External links in new Windows
– a good example here would be in a univerity’s student ambassador blog. That link they embed in their story will lead the visitor away, often with no way to return if a new window is not opened for the outsid link.

13) Create Unique Titles and Meta Descriptions for each Page.

14) Have a helpful, funny 404 message
– if someone tries to enter your site and gets a 404 “page not found “message you must have a engaging response if you hope to keep the student on you site. It is also a great place to have a little fun and show some personality

Indiana State University 404 message

A Note on A/B Testing

15) A/B Test your Pages
– I am a huge advocate of A/B testing. To really drill down at the page level and determine what is causing your bounce problems and what will fix them, you need to start working with the A/B testing module called “Experiments” in Google Analytics. This is particularly useful for landing pages but remember that, in fact, every one of the pages on your website is a landing page, regardless if it is a visitor being brought to that page from a long-tail Google search or a deep link from a referring site.

I do hope this shopping list of strategy and tactics will help you identify and correct bounce rate problems in your college and university website. Please remember that bounce is relative and you need to look at in context of your site objectives and “goals”. We would love to hear about your experiences managing bounce rate for your institution’s site and the tactics you have used most effectively control this element.

Great web content is an art in itself, but in order for it to become an asset it needs to be written, structured, placed, and optimized in absolute top form.

1) Make the International section visible

Don’t hide information! Position the International section on your website in a way that users have an easy time finding the pages they are looking for. Although this seems like an obvious tip, we are always surprised when we see the International Admissions section buried underneath many layers of the navigation menu. Arrange your primary pages on the homepage or in the main navigation menu so that users can find them easily.

Example: University of Glasgow positions their International Admissions page directly on the homepage by clustering it with the other main “Study” options. This allows prospective students to find the page within seconds of landing on the Glasgow website.

2) Simplify the page structure

Because the International section typically has many different types of information (admission requirements, credit transfer policies, visa info, health insurance, etc.) it is really important to lay out the information with clear headers so that users can zone in and find what they are looking for without getting confused or lost.

Rather than putting all of the informative content on one long page, you should create dedicated pages for each level of information. Every college and university is different, so the program options and types of information will definitely vary from one to the next. But no matter the volume or type, content should always be structured in a way that caters to the target audience, in this case, prospective international students.

Example: York University organizes their international recruitment section by students’ country of origin. Users click on a country through an interactive map and are then redirected to a page that has all of the admissions information. In most cases, York also offers prospective students the option of reading the York International Admissions brochure in their native language.

3) Increase your web presence in targeted countries

Your college or university may have top ranking in a local Google search engine, but is your website also visible in other countries? Google hosts search engine sites in hundreds of countries and the results for any given search will be different in each of them.

In order to increase your web presence in the countries where you are targeting student recruitment, you need to optimize your website or specific program page. Digital marketing strategies like SEO, Pay Per Click, and Social Media Marketing are just a few ways to optimize content to target international user search behaviour, and can be integrated into your current marketing initiatives.

See for yourself: To get an idea of how different the search results across different Google pages really are, search for the keyword “business college Canada” in the following Google search engines:

• Google Korea
• Google Brazil
• Google India

Notice how the results are different in each one? And this is just a small sample!

4) Showcase the international student experience  

Video testimonials and photos will solidify the international culture at your school and will also add a visual component for prospective students to tap into as they discover the overall learning experience offered at your school. One option is to host a video chronicle on your website by having students submit short reels of their experiences while they are enrolled in a program.

Example: The international student experience at Mount Holyoke College is captured through video testimonials and storytelling. Each video includes two or three students from the same region but who are studying in different disciplines. The students describe their experiences in their native language, effectively allowing the video campaign to reach out to other prospective students from the same region.

5) Publish international student-driven web content

Your website is the prime place for international students to speak about how the programs, services, faculty and staff helped them integrate and flourish in a new city or country. The main difference between student-driven content and testimonials is that the former grants students the opportunity to express themselves on an ongoing basis. Offering international students a dedicated platform will help your college or university build a stronger web presence on an international scale.

Example: Durham College welcomes international students to contribute to the International Blog that is hosted directly on their website. The stories that the students share include everything from funny anecdotes to intimate details of their journey away from home. The International Student Blog as a whole really helps Durham form a community within the student body.

International student enrolment rates are growing steadily in North America, and setting up your website properly is an effective way for your college or university to take part in education lead generation opportunities. The time and resources required to build an international recruitment-friendly website will quickly prove to be among the most cost-efficient methods your school puts into play.

How does your team reach out to current and prospective international students?

How do you increase those numbers and become more visible on YouTube and therefore on Google? Here are 4 quick tips to increase traffic to your YouTube videos.

1. Optimize your video content for mobile

Before even shooting the video, be aware that about 20% of all your viewers are browsing on their mobile, and the numbers are growing. Check your channel Analytics section to see how many mobile viewers your channel has.

• If your video will include text, avoid using small fonts to make sure it is easily readable.
• Use very clear audio.
• Provide close-up shots. for enhanced visibility.
• Test your video on your own mobile before making it live.
• Keep your videos short, less than 2 minutes is ideal.

2. End all your videos with a clear call to action

Do not be afraid to clearly ask for what you want prospects to do. The Annotations feature allows you to layer text or links over your video. It is often overlooked, but it is a great way to ask viewers to

• Like a video
• Subscribe to your channel
• Visit your website
• You can also use it to add a link to the video you want your viewers to watch next.

3. Keep your YouTube channel and videos optimized

Remember to align your YouTube channel branding with other platforms. Keep in mind that the left-hand sidebar of the profile will be shrunk on a mobile device, so make sure you only include secondary information, such as a list of programs.

Focus on your college’s keywords:

Start by looking for your college’s keywords: keyword research is similar to the one you do for the website search engine optimization. YouTube Keyword Tool reveals the search volume of keywords and also provides suggestions for other relevant and related keywords.

Be sure that all the videos on your YouTube channel include your target keywords in the following text-rich fields:

• File name: Make sure you change the file name to include your keywords instead of the usual number nomenclature.
• Video title: Include at least one relevant keyword within the 70 characters space.
• Video tags: YouTube will use these tags to determine whether certain content is relevant, so be sure to use applicable keywords as primary tags.
• Channel tags: Under “Channel Settings,” you can insert more general tags, like “business university” or “Toronto career college” properly tag your channel using your keywords.

YouTube has recently made it possible to do search through tags. Keywords are more important than ever. See what Kansas State University does.

• Video description: These are another way to help YouTube know what is going on. Put links in the video’s description so they just have to tap and access the other video.

Read other excellent tips on YouTube channel optimization here.

4. Create a clear video sharing path

Once your channel is updated, make sure you promote it on all your profiles. For best results, have a clear sharing pattern after posting them on YouTube:

• Start by posting them on YouTube.
• Embed them on FB to view videos without having to visit your YT channel.
• After about a week, embed videos on your website to boost views and engagement.
• Add a YouTube widget to your blog to ask readers who have access to videos on your blog to subscribe.
• Share videos through Twitter account(s) and across any other social media feeds that you feel would be relevant.
• Submit to crowdsourcing sites such as Tumblr, StumbleUpon or Redddit.

Please share your tips to promote your videos on YouTube!

An experienced digital marketer, with a bit of time on their hands, will answer “it depends”, and then go on to explain why it is important to understand why bounce rate is so variable on typical higher ed web pages (and in fact, in most industries). If they have no time, but feel pressed to provide a more specific answer, they will probably say its around 50% but that you need to be careful with how you use that number. In this post we’ll try and explain both of these answers, but more importantly we will try to give you a bit more knowledge so that you can intelligently evaluate your own situation.

What is a Bounce?

By definition a bounce occurs when someone visits one page on your site and then leaves the site without visiting any other pages. Bounce rates are generally good indicators of how effective your pages are at engaging the visitor and drawing them into your content. They are also generally seen, along with conversion rates, as an indicator of whether or not your pages are meeting the goals of your site, which are typically associated with a click on a link, a button or image that is associated with a goal, for example, a “Book a Campus Visit” button. Knowing your bounce rate for important pages like this and how well they are “converting” becomes quite important to reaching your site’s marketing objectives.

A visitor will usually bounce from a site when she realizes that the site does not offer the information that they were seeking or had been led to believe would be found there by a earlier page or link. This disconnect can be a function of the page that brought them there or related to the content on the page that they bounce from. For example, a visitor may bounce from a page where they thought they would find tuition information but were instead told to call an 800 number to speak to an admissions officer.

From a technical point of view, a bounces occurs when a visitor:
      – clicks on an external link
      – clicks the back button in the browser
      – closes the browser window or tab
      – enters a new URL in the same browser window or tab

What’s a Typical Bounce Rate?

So now that we have defined an individual bounce, lets talk about bounces in aggregate, as in bounce rate. The bounce rate for a particular website is the total % of visitors who bounce from all pages of that website.

So what’s a typical bounce rates for a website? Well surprisingly, benchmark information on this topic is rather difficult to come by. The reason is that “typical” is a really bad way to look at web site performance. Even as much of a cliché that it is, all sites, and all industries are quite different, therefore it is difficult to produce useful comparisons. An ecommerce site, an information portal, a prospective student site all have very different audience and types of content, so trying to compare them is not particularly useful. Regardless, people are always quite interested in seeking out general benchmarks to help them understand how they fit into the broad spectrum of bounce rate performance.

So to that end, here is an example of bounce rates that one webmaster recently volunteered on their blog, as sampled across their clients.

Source:  www.infront.com

So, if I can generalize this a bit, the typical bounce rate seen above falls somewhere between 35 and 60 percent.  This data is quite anecdotal, but it does clearly make the point that companies in different vertical markets will have widely divergent bounce rates, depending on the type of sites they operate and the related intent and goals of their site visitors.

Here’s another more general and statistically more reliable summary of bounce rate from Kissmetrics, a major player in the analytics market.

Source: Kissmetrics.com

I am reluctant to try and generalize how higher ed might fit into these categories because you can find elements of almost every one of these categories in any given higher ed site. My instinct would be for it to be less like a retail or a service site, suggesting a higher than average rate, somewhere in the range of 40-50%

Bounce Rate in Higher Ed

In this blog, we always try to provide really focused information about the higher education marketplace but in this case, I have come up dry on any hard stats. If anyone out there can help us with this please send us back a comment and any references to specific research done in this area that you have found or conducted.

I was able to find some stats for Continuing Education websites, as seen below, which I think is at least close to the kind of activity you would see on a general higher ed website.

Source: www.jmhconsulting.com

The three charts above illustrate the averages, minimums, and maximums for bounce rate, number of visits, and average time on website across 20 higher ed institutions, over a period of one month. The data for these schools is plotted in descending order to give a sense of the trend in our industry.

The average bounce rate for websites was 45%. The lowest bounce rate was 30%. The highest bounce rate was 61%.

So to come back to our original question, “What is a reasonable bounce rate for higher ed,” I think a 45 percent bounce rate is about average. If your rate surpasses 60 percent, you should be concerned. If you’re in excess of 80 percent, you’ve got a major problem, definitely in the ugly zone. You either have some really bad pages that provide no redeeming content or links or the links on those pages intentionally push your visitors off your domain. I’d start by taking a close look at those sections over 60 % to try and improve your general performance. PPC landing pages might be the culprit. If so, get out your Conversion Rate Optimization hat and get to work!

A Bounce can be a Good Thing 

It is also important to recognize, that in some cases, a high bounce rate can be a good thing. For example, if you have a popular blog site that has a lot of return visitors, who spend a significant time on each new post, but then bounce, you have a high bounce rate for that section of the site, but very satisfied visitors.

A Caution about Worrying too much about Average Bounce Rate

Please remember that the average bounce rate across your whole web site is a very blunt indicator. In fact many would argue that is simply too blunt to be of any use at all.  Your average website bounce rate is an aggregate figure made up of bounce rates from many individual sections of your website. Check them individually for deeper insight. Some experts go even further and recommend completely redefining the bounce rate metric as a minimum visitor time on page to make it truly useful. The important point here is not to get caught up in industry averages, or even site averages, rather that you should break your site down into meaningful sections or segments and then look closely at their bounce rate performance relative to their purpose.

Having said all of the above, there is also a time when a bounce is a really bad thing. If you have new or returning prospect students bouncing off your site at high rates, there is clearly a problem. You want them to spend time on your site, perusing the content and moving towards some kind of conversion event, i.e., an information request, a PDFs download, entry into a registration funnel. So how do your do that?

Next week in “15 Ways to Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates“,  we’ll take a detailed look at this question and give you a thorough review on how to refine your design and content and tweak some technical parameters to avoid bounces and drive your websites towards improved performance.

We would very much like to hear about your bounce rate challenges and share them with our readers. Please let us know about your experience and share your best tactics to reduce the dreaded bounce rate.

There are likely two questions you are asking yourself: “Why should we issue a newsletter?” and “How can we get started?” Let’s dive in and find some answers.

Why it’s important to issue a College or University Newsletter

1. Expand your reach. Students and faculty are an integral part of a college’s overall network, but there are many people outside campus grounds that are interested in what’s happening at the college. By offering a newsletter to an extended audience, your college will expand its overall branding to various subsets of the external community, including potential partners and prospective students.

2. Strengthen your ties. Ultimately, a newsletter helps your college stay connected to a given community. As you offer subscribers a regular dose of college-related news and information, you are also giving them another way to contact you and to keep in touch. Even as students or faculty graduate and retire, they will likely stay subscribed to the newsletter, thereby preserving the relationship they have with the college.

Example: One of University of British Columbia‘s  various newsletters helps the Faculty of Food and Land Systems ”Reach Out” to their audiences.

How to launch and maintain a College or University Newsletter

1. Define your audience(s): One of the greatest advantages of a newsletter is that you can design it to target a specific audience. Ultimately, this gives you the opportunity to directly contact a specific demographic with information on important news, updates, and events. For example, you can launch separate newsletters for alumni, prospective students, partners, faculty, staff and currents students. This is beneficial because it allows you to enhance the impact of your communication efforts on various initiatives (open houses, new scholarship opportunities, international programs, new research projects, etc.)

By defining your audiences and then designing distinct newsletters for each of them, you will make it easier for readers to be aware of opportunities that are of interest to them.

Example: Carleton University publishes a monthly newsletter specially catered to prospective students.

2. Develop a schedule and a team: Once you’ve defined your audience, you need to establish a schedule and a team. Maintaining a consistent schedule for your college or university newsletter will ensure a timely and efficient distribution process. Set up a content calendar that will map out the creation and distribution timeline, and which stories will be featured in the newsletter. This schedule will be easier to draft when you know who you will be working with, so develop a team and ensure that each member is aware of how they will be involved with the newsletter each month (or each week! You decide the frequency of the issues.)

As always, we suggest including students in all of your higher ed marketing initiatives. In the case of a newsletter, students can help with choosing topics and writing the content. Ideally, someone who is a part of your target audience would be on the team. For example, an alumnus would be helping with the Alumni Newsletter, an international student on the International Student Newsletter, etc.

3. Set up a template: You don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time you send out a newsletter. Whether you decide to distribute a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly newsletter, the best way to maintain a smooth process is to create and stick to a specific template.

There are many different email marketing service providers (for example, MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, and Vertical Response) that allow you to customize any one of their available templates. Once you choose a template, modify it so that it includes the following:

• College or University logo
• Social media buttons
• Contact information

Once you have your template ready all you need to do is insert new content and corresponding images.  This will allow your team to maintain a simple process and consistent look.

4. Make it visible: Make it easy for people to subscribe to your newsletter by setting up a “Sign Up to Our Newsletter” call-to-action on your website. If you’re setting up a general newsletter for the entire college or university, place the sign-up option on every page of your site by integrating it into your header or sidebar. Or, if you decide to distribute several audience-based newsletters, integrate a “Newsletters” page into your navigation and list all of the different newsletters on that page with the corresponding “sign-up” option for each one.

Example: California College of the Arts (CCA) placed their Newsletters page through their “About Us” section. Also, the sign-up form allows users to sign up for several different CCA newsletters that may interest them.

5. Monitor and analyse: The key to maximizing on your newsletter campaign is analytics. Almost every email marketing service provider will offer a monitoring tool that will allow you to track certain metrics, such as the number of new subscribers, how many recipients opened the newsletter, etc. This level of monitoring paired with Google Analytics will give you an even more detailed view of the activity on your newsletter and how readers are engaging with it. Setting up the analytics of your newsletter properly will help you distinguish your audience (alumni, prospective students, faculty, etc.) and will allow you to follow up with each reader based on how they interact with the newsletter.

If your college or university has yet to launch a newsletter, now is a perfect time to get it started. Gather up a dedicated team, establish your goals and audiences, set up a template, and follow a manageable schedule. After the first few issues, you’ll find your readership go up rather quickly, and you can expect to achieve a more in-depth connection with your communities.

Does your college or university publish a newsletter? If so, how do you find it has helped you connect with your audiences?