Tag: UPCEA

Key Insights:

• Search Influence and UPCEA have teamed up to create a nationwide benchmark for cost per inquiry (CPI) specifically for professional, continuing, and online education institutions.
• With an industry-standard benchmark, higher education institutions can better understand how effective their marketing efforts are in attracting prospective students and the factors influencing their success, from media spending to agency fees.
• To truly harness the power of calculating your CPI, you need a team/system in place that can properly interpret your data.

Search Influence recently co-hosted a webinar with UPCEA titled “The Power of CPI to Measure Higher Ed Marketing Success.”

UPCEA is a leading online and professional education association whose members constantly push higher education to new heights. Through everything from professional development to conferences and seminars, UPCEA and its members are diligently working to improve educational access and outcomes.

Since partnering in 2022, Search Influence and UPCEA have hit the ground running with webinars, research studies, and countless blog posts.

In our latest collaborative webinar, we stressed the importance of measuring CPI.

Cost per inquiry (CPI) is the ratio between the amount spent on your online advertising campaign and the actual inquiries made. You can utilize this in your higher education marketing toolkit to measure your campaign’s effectiveness.

But to truly master the art of measuring cost per inquiry in higher education, you’ll need more details from the experts.

Watch the recording from our CPI Webinar for a roadmap to guide you through the challenges of calculating CPI for your institution.

Hear from UPCEA’s Chief Research Officer Jim Fong, Senior Director of Research Bruce Etter, and UPCEA Platinum Partner Search Influence as they provide their insights on the best place to start and how to remove common roadblocks to keep you on your path.

In this blog post, we’ll summarize the webinar’s highlights and help you determine the best way to utilize cost per inquiry in higher education.

What Makes Cost Per Inquiry in Higher Education Important?

In higher education marketing, CPI is a vital metric that helps you understand how effective your marketing efforts are in attracting prospective students.

CPI provides a clear, quantitative way to assess the efficiency and quality of your marketing strategies in engaging with your target audience. It refers to the cost of generating a single inquiry or lead from a prospective student through advertising or promotional campaigns.

Multiple dimensions of CPI

When diving into the world of CPI, it’s crucial to consider the various dimensions through which you can examine this metric, including:

1. Media Spend: This dimension focuses on the direct advertising expenses incurred in generating inquiries. It helps institutions analyze the cost-effectiveness of their digital advertising campaigns, ensuring they allocate resources wisely to reach prospective students. This is most common.
2. Media Spend and Management Fees: This accounts for both internal and external costs associated with marketing efforts. In addition to direct media expenses, including management fees provides a more comprehensive view of the total investment required to generate inquiries. This is less common than looking at just media spend.
3. All Marketing Leads and All Leads From Marketing Efforts: Institutions more accurately understand their marketing funnel by considering all leads, not just those that ultimately enroll. This broader perspective allows for the evaluation of the entire journey, from initial inquiry to the conversion of prospective students into enrolled students. This is the least common way to calculate cost per inquiry.

Benefits of Measuring CPI in Higher Education Marketing Campaigns

 

Cost per inquiry holds significant importance for colleges and universities:

1. Confidence in Inquiry Generation: A calculated CPI instills confidence that an institution’s marketing efforts drive an appropriate volume of inquiries from prospective students. Assurance is vital for ensuring institutions’ marketing campaigns align with their goal of attracting high-quality leads.
2. Benchmarking Against Industry Standards: CPI allows colleges and universities to benchmark their performance against industry standards. By comparing their CPI to broader industry metrics, higher education marketers can assess whether their outcomes align with expectations and identify areas for improvement.
3. Vendor Assessment: When working with third-party vendors or partners in higher education marketing, having a clear CPI enables institutions to evaluate the realism of promises made by these vendors.

Top CPI Questions From the Webinar Audience

Q. What is the first step in trying to calculate CPI?

It all starts with the tracking. Most institutions have CRM (customer relationship management) systems and know their spend.

CRMs can determine the source of the inquiry (which marketing channel brought in that inquiry), but that data isn’t always leveraged, or isn’t viewed in aggregate. If you’re unfamiliar with how to pull this data, seek admin support.

Determining the source, and pulling high-level reports, will allow you to get more granular with your CPI.

But data is just data until you have a skilled marketer to interpret it.

Similar to the need for a thoughtful editor to adjust AI-written copy, a human touch is necessary to truly get nutrition from the data salad your CRM prepares.

Not interpreting the data from your online advertising campaign is like having a gold mine in your backyard but never buying a rock hammer and picks.

Utilize tracking data to optimize your future campaigns and help inform decision-makers on the proper next steps for your institution.

Q. When will the results of the CPI benchmark survey be published?

Search Influence and UPCEA anticipate publishing the results of our higher ed research survey in Spring 2024.

Q. How often should schools analyze CPI?

It depends on your campaign strategy and consistency. Monthly, at a minimum.

If your school has a more aggressive digital marketing strategy with ads running consistently throughout the year to attract students, analyzing CPI monthly might work best.

If you are making adjustments and watching them closely, and your spend is large enough, you may look at CPI just a few days after a change.

You do want to take a step back and look at quarterly, yearly, and monthly trends. Perform seasonal comparisons (YOY) and compare to the same semester the prior year.

Q. What’s the relationship between cost per enrollment and cost per inquiry?

Unfortunately, we don’t always have access to cost per enrollment because it can be complicated, especially in the online and professional education world, where adult learners might take a while to decide if they want to go through with the application process and return to school.

That being said, we have seen that when cost per inquiry is optimized down, your cost per enrollment should also decrease — assuming quality is maintained.

Search Influence & UPCEA CPI Benchmark Survey

According to UPCEA, higher ed institutions had an average marketing budget of $1,294,630 in 2022.

No matter your institution’s budget, you need some standardized measurement to know exactly what your ad spend is getting you.

That’s why Search Influence and UPCEA have partnered to create a nationwide benchmark for cost per inquiry. This initiative seeks to standardize the measurement of CPI, ensuring uniformity and consistency in how higher education professionals evaluate this critical metric.

UPCEA and Search Influence believe this metric can help democratize success in higher education marketing.

Our latest endeavor with UPCEA is a response to the industry’s long-standing need for a credible, industry-specific benchmark for measuring success. The foundation of this benchmark is the CPI Benchmark Survey, an initiative designed to collect diverse insights and data from digital marketers across higher education.

This initiative is poised to elevate the landscape of higher education marketing strategies, fostering a community of shared knowledge and best practices for engaging new students and optimizing the enrollment funnel.

With the implementation of an industry-standard benchmark, our shared goal is to enable universities to measure their CPI accurately and gain comprehensive insights into the myriad factors that influence it. From media spend to agency fees, each component plays a pivotal role in determining CPI, and these variables vary from institution to institution.

If you’re uncertain about your institution’s CPI or are seeking ways to optimize your marketing budget, we designed a CPI Worksheet. You can use it to calculate your CPI and, in the near future, compare it to the broader industry standard we are diligently working to establish.

Gain a Better Pulse on Your CPI

With nearly two decades of experience in digital marketing, including higher education digital advertising and search engine optimization, Search Influence is your trusted partner for understanding your institution’s cost per inquiry.

Our experts simplify CPI analysis, allowing you to effectively assess marketing efforts, evaluate lead generation, and enhance your enrollment funnel.

Contact Search Influence today to learn more about our lead tracking, reporting, and data analytics services.

And be sure to watch our recording of The Power of CPI to Measure Higher Ed Marketing Success to gain more valuable insights.

Key Insights

• Cost per inquiry is the most important metric to measure and drive the efficiency of campaigns.
• Cost per inquiry is most frequently tracked as a KPI for digital marketing channels (i.e., CPI from paid search or CPI from organic), and it can also measure the effectiveness of digital marketing spend across all platforms.
• Search Influence and UPCEA’s 2024 research established a reliable industry benchmark for cost per inquiry and cost per enrolled student in online and continuing education.
• The joint study found a strong link between metric tracking capabilities and overall campaign performance satisfaction.

As the education sector evolves and marketing programs — especially to adult learners — become more complex, understanding and harnessing the power of cost per inquiry (CPI) is essential for staying competitive and achieving your institution’s goals.

CPI is the definitive key performance indicator for higher education marketers to track advertising campaign success. Serving as a dual compass, this metric guides your higher education marketing endeavors toward optimal campaign performance and strategic budget spending. It also empowers you to gauge your efficiency, optimize your ad spend, and make data-driven decisions.

For far too long, higher education digital advertisers haven’t had a benchmark for this critical metric, and certainly not one specific to professional, continuing, and online (PCO) education.

That’s why Search Influence and our higher education partners at UPCEA (the leading online and professional education association) collaborated to establish the first industry-wide benchmark for CPI — to the tune of $140.

In our 2024 study, “Search Influence and UPCEA Higher Ed Marketing Metrics Research Report: What Gets Measured Gets Managed,” we took a look at the state of CPI tracking among PCO units and what marketers need to know to get the most value from their budget spend.

Before you dive into the research, here’s what to know about CPI in digital marketing, how it’s calculated, and why it should be your school’s top tracking priority.

What is Cost Per Inquiry in Higher Education Marketing? How Do You Calculate Cost Per Inquiry?

Cost per inquiry is a fundamental metric that plays a pivotal role in higher education marketing. CPI measures the financial investment required to generate a single inquiry or lead.

CPI = Cost / Inquiry

In the context of higher education digital marketing, an “inquiry” refers to a prospective student expressing interest in your institution’s programs, courses, or services. This expression of interest could manifest as filling out a contact form, requesting a brochure, or making direct inquiries via email or phone.

The “cost” in the calculation depends on what marketing campaigns you are trying to measure, your marketing mix, and tracking technology (for example — are you able to track an inquiry back to the source?).

Cost per inquiry is most frequently tracked as a KPI for:

• Digital marketing channels (i.e., CPI from paid search or CPI from organic)
• Digital marketing spend across all platforms

Some may look at it:

• CPI per program
• Organic CPI (leads from organic search visitors)
• Overall CPI across all marketing expenses

Different ways to calculate CPI in marketing

In our CPI worksheet, we provide two foundational calculations to help you get started:

• Digital Advertising Media Spend ÷ # of Inquiries Attributed to Digital Advertising = Digital Advertising Cost Per Inquiry
• Marketing Expenses ÷ Total Inquiries (All Sources) = Overall Cost Per Inquiry

This industry-standard cost per inquiry calculation creates an “apples-to-apples” comparison, helping institutions like yours know the real cost and payoff of your marketing efforts.

Why Measure Cost Per Inquiry in Higher Education Marketing?

The significance of measuring CPI cannot be understated for marketers.

CPI in advertising is THE most important metric for campaign efficiency.

Once you know your CPI, you can begin to optimize your efficiency!

When you consistently measure cost per inquiry in your higher ed marketing campaigns, you can:

• Have confidence that you’re driving an appropriate amount of inquiries and yielding the desired results
• Evaluate your outcomes against broader industry standards
• Project your marketing results and how quickly you can generate necessary inquiries
• Judge if the promises from third-party vendors are realistic

Research Numbers at a Glance

In our 2024 Marketing Metric Research Study, we examined not only whether PCO units tracked cost per inquiry but also their level of campaign performance satisfaction. Our findings yielded a strong correlation between CPI tracking and perceived campaign success — thus bringing to life the old adage, “What gets measured gets managed.”

Key Research Findings:

• Less than half of PCO units track cost per inquiry (46%) and cost per enrolled student (43%).
• Nearly one out of five (17%) higher ed marketers do not track the source of their inquiries, nor CPI or cost per enrolled student.
• Among the PCO units that track cost per inquiry, the average CPI is $140, with a median of $106 and a range of $29.03 to $450.
• 92% of those satisfied with their tracking capabilities also express satisfaction or strong satisfaction with the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.

For further insights into CPI, how it works, and why it works, be sure to check out our full research study. For more tactics to improve your marketing results, take a look at our Higher Education Marketing Resources & Guides.

Learn More About CPI in Higher Education Marketing

Search Influence and UPCEA are committed to elevating strategy standards in higher education marketing. We hope that, with this industry-wide benchmark for measuring cost per inquiry, you can implement practical strategies for achieving efficient ad spend.

And, in a world where nearly one in five dollars of programmatic advertising goes to waste, this pivot to efficiency is much needed.

Ready to see how you measure up to others in the sector? Download the Marketing Metrics Research Study today to take the guesswork out of CPI in advertising.

Image Sources:

Image 1: Unsplash

Image 4: Unsplash

Key Insights:

• Research indicates that most people’s first interaction with a brand occurs through a search. This makes it critical to optimize your university’s online presence for SEO.
• Despite 84% of marketing departments considering SEO as a core part of their strategy, 51% of institutions surveyed still lacked an established SEO strategy. This gap in readiness can result in missed opportunities to attract prospective students and increase enrollment numbers.
• Building a successful SEO strategy for higher education starts with understanding search intent, conducting keyword research, and creating high-quality content that addresses these keywords. It’s also important to build authoritative links both internally and externally.
• Beyond content, universities must focus on website architecture, user-centric design, site speed optimization, and mobile responsiveness to improve discoverability and enhance the user experience.

For the second year in a row, Search Influence presented at UPCEA’s MEMS (Marketing, Enrollment Management, and Student Success) conference.

 

The UPCEA MEMS conference serves as a watering hole for higher education marketers, specifically those within professional, continuing, and online education.

At Search Influence, we help higher ed institutions ride the ever-changing waves of SEO strategies. We’ve spent years working on higher education SEO strategies that support universities nationwide in increasing organic traffic and attracting prospective students.

This dedication to building high-level SEO strategies for educational institutions led us to partner with UPCEA to connect with like-minded individuals.

Search Influence and UPCEA collaborated on a three-part research study to look at institutional and marketing leaders’ perspectives on SEO and evaluate the readiness of PCO (professional, continuing, and online education) units.

Our findings shaped our 2023 MEMS presentation. Armed with the understanding that universities need guidance in their higher education SEO strategies, we wanted to show real examples, from multiple schools, of what they have done to improve their visibility in search engines. It was important for us to show not just what the tactics are, but how they drove results. We partnered with 3 great institutions who we knew were effectively executing SEO to share how they have found success.

Keep reading to learn about our in-depth higher education SEO research and real-world SEO strategies you can implement on your university’s website.

Search Influence / UPCEA SEO Research Study: Key Findings

Our collaborative SEO for higher education research study with UPCEA began with a readiness audit of 100 UPCEA member institutions. This audit led to some surprising findings.

When those surveyed were asked, “How would you rate the SEO capabilities of your PCO unit on a scale of 1 to 5, where a 1 is not very capable and a 5 is extremely capable?,” 3.5 was the average capability rating. 41% of those surveyed rated their SEO capabilities as average or below.

An even more surprising finding is that 84% of marketing departments see SEO as a core part of their marketing strategy, but 51% do not have an established SEO strategy.

This missed opportunity leads to fewer clicks from prospective students and lower enrollment numbers for your higher education institution.

So, how can you improve your higher ed website’s SEO?
What are the first steps you should take to create an established SEO strategy for your higher-ed website?

Search Engine Optimization 101

 

You must utilize these strategies to keep search engines happy: keywords, content, and links. Think of these three things as your university website’s building blocks.

Keywords – what are people searching for when looking for your offerings?
Content – how well does your website provide information that speaks to those keywords?
Links – how well do other websites reinforce that you are an authority on those keywords?

Let’s talk through how that might look when you actually do this foundation work:

Every SEO for higher education strategy must start with determining a prospective student’s keywords (in other words, what terms do they search?).

For example, say you do some digging in Google Search Console and see your website receives a lot of website traffic for the phrase “online master’s programs.” Recognizing your audience is searching “online master’s programs” is your first win.

Now that you know your prospective students are scanning through search engines for “online master’s programs,” it’s time to do some keyword research to dial in your strategy.

You choose to use one of the many SEO tools (even a free tool will work) on the market to take an in-depth look at the search volume of “online master’s programs.”

Search volume looks good, but your SEO tools inform you this keyword will likely take much work to rank for. Not to worry, “flexible online master’s programs” has a similar search volume but will be much easier to rank higher for.

After thorough keyword research, it’s time to write high-quality content that uses your focus keyword, “flexible online master’s programs.”

You decide the best action is to write a 1,400-word blog titled “The Benefits of Flexible Online Master’s Programs for Working Adults.”

While you’re writing, you link to the pages you want to be associated with this idea, which are the degree pages that offer flexible online master’s programs. You also include links from highly authoritative external sites — you’re really getting the hang of things!

At the end of this process, you have an informative blog that answers your students’ search intent.

Now to earn authority, you leverage online profiles, media and PR mentions, and partners to build links back to this blog post as well as related program / degree pages.

Lather, rinse, and repeat this process continually. Over time, you’ll see your site’s search traffic rise.

After you’ve mastered SEO 101, it’s time to move on to the next course.

Search Engine Optimization 201

You’ve established relevance with your high-quality content.

You’ve taken the steps to earn authority with link building.

Now, it’s time to improve your discoverability by focusing on your higher-ed website’s architecture.

To earn rankings on a search engine, higher education websites must address three things: relevance, authority, and discoverability.

Fixing the foundation of your virtual storefront

Think of your website as a virtual storefront that welcomes and engages visitors. Sometimes, you need to fix things inside the walls or under ground to create a welcoming place for visitors, or perhaps improve signage to make it easier for visitors to find their way around. On a website, this is akin to the technical foundation and settings as well as the navigation and user experience.

Similar to how a brick-and-mortar retail operation would welcome a walk-in customer, the virtual storefront should prioritize the visitor’s experience and ensure that it is user-friendly, informative, and tailored to their needs.

One common pitfall many universities fall into is designing websites that prioritize their institution’s programs over the potential student’s needs. Additionally, while aesthetically pleasing, overly creative websites might lack a clear target audience, ultimately hindering their effectiveness.

To succeed in the competitive landscape of higher education, universities must shift their focus and design their websites around students, as well as break down technical barriers that may prohibit a site’s performance.

A few ways you can design your website around prospective students include:

• Creating a user-centric design
• Removing all broken links
• Creating clear navigation
• Ensuring your website is easily navigable when used on mobile phones (not just desktop)
• Prioritizing site speed optimization

Increase Lead-to-Application Conversion With Blogs — LSU Online

Our MEMS conference presentation partners at LSU Online increased their lead-to-application conversions with blogs.

The challenges they navigated included:

• Their programs’ official names are “distinguished” (not what people actually search for).
• They competed with on-campus version pages of the same degree.
• Many adult learners don’t know what degree they want to pursue.

LSU Online tested varying blog topic strategies to see results on search engine results pages, including:

• Start your career blogs
• Comparison content for two programs
• Faculty/director authored blogs
• Online student tips blogs
• Student story blogs

While these blog topics worked with varying success, this influx in targeted content led to an app increase of 17% in just one year. Moral of the story — high-quality content works.

Leveraging SEO audit tools for direction and monitoring

Like any other journey, you need a map to travel to the top of search engine rankings.

LSU Online found success using site audit tools to guide their rise in organic search traffic. Their SEO audit revealed broken links, broken pages, and program pages missing basic meta information (title tag, meta description, etc.)

These tools allowed LSU Online to bring their site audit score from 72% all the way up to 90%+.

Keywords + Content When Launching New Degrees — Tulane SoPA

In November of 2022, Tulane SoPA launched two new online bachelor degrees: An Online BS in Organizational Behavior & Management Studies and an Online BA in Human Resources.

SoPA went all in on SEO, primarily content creation and smart optimization, for these two programs as the primary means of promotion, as there was no specific paid advertising budget.

In one year, Tulane SoPA published 12 blogs that had high SEO value, including: “5 Reasons Every Business Needs An Organizational Management Professional,” “4 Key Legal Considerations for Starting a Small Business.”

As a result of these higher education strategies, Tulane SoPA had 32 students declared as business majors in just over a year.

Profiles and public relations to build links

Search Influence also assisted Tulane SoPA in finding sites with premium (paid) placement for external link building that had value – meaning, they were both authoritative and relevant.

We went through over 20 sites to help Tulane SoPA find the ones that might be worth it. In the end, Niche and Peterson’s had a fair price, high page and domain authority, and a relatively high percentage of followed links.

These backlinks helped to build Tulane SoPA’s authority.

Tulane SoPA also used public relations and earned media to enhance online visibility.

Tulane SoPA faculty completed over 100 earned media appearances in a year. Each appearance is shared on the Tulane SoPA news site, optimized for SEO value, as well as on social media.

The above content strategy helped Tulane SoPA rise in search rankings, thus increasing their visibility to potential students.

Drive New Website Users With Blogs — CCAPS at the University of Minnesota

CCAPS (College of Continuing & Professional Studies) at the University of Minnesota used blogs to drive web traffic.

Their content strategy goals:

• Generate brand awareness
• Increase web traffic and, ultimately, inquiries
• Earn backlinks from other sites and pass link authority to program pages through internal links
• Gain featured snippets

To do this, CCAPS did the following:

• Partnered with a digital marketing agency
• Posted 2–3 blogs per month
• Completed keyword research and targeting
• Combined content with schema markup, internal links, and backlinks to improve authority
• Amplification

Since July 2022, CCAPS published over 40 blogs, generating over 50,000 users by September 2023.

Core web vitals for SEO health

To climb search engines like Google Search, you must dive deeper into core web vitals for SEO health.

CCAPS used LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) to measure website load speed, TBT (Total Blocking Time) to measure their website’s interactivity, and CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) to measure their website’s stability.

All of these web vitals allowed CCAPS to gauge their SEO health and adjust their strategies to rank higher on search results.

Learn More About SEO for Your Higher Education Strategy With Search Influence

Search Influence has helped organizations boost their search engine results and organic traffic for over 15 years.

From our years of driving results for Tulane SoPA to helping our partners at Palo Alto University exceed their expectations, we understand the factors that can help you rank on Google search and beyond.

Are you ready to identify keywords and Google trends on your own? Download our SEO Workbook for Higher Education Websites for SEO tips you can implement yourself.

Need a little more hands-on help to understand Google Analytics and local SEO? Contact the higher education marketing moguls at Search Influence to learn more about successful strategies.