PPC in 2012: What Higher Ed Marketers Should Know
Pay-per-click (PPC), or paid search, plays an important – and in many cases growing – role in the recruitment marketer’s toolkit. As we look ahead, we’ve identified five key PPC trends that we expect to emerge in 2012. What do you think?
1) Larger portion of marketing budgets allocated to Paid Search
In light of the heightened regulations surrounding the higher education space and the need for more transparency, schools will be moving further away from third party inquiry generation and allocating a larger percentage of their marketing budgets to paid search initiatives. Concerns regarding compliance with affiliate lead generation, coupled with the inability to track the full effectiveness of more traditional methods of print, radio and TV, will result in a shifting focus to paid search. Through paid search, every dollar spent can be tracked for the most effective ROI, all while managing consistent, compliant messaging.
2) Rising search volume for associate degrees
Search volume for queries related to associate degrees rose substantially throughout 2011 and is expected to continue to rise into 2012, resulting in higher cost-per-click rates and more competition on related keywords. Associate degrees have become more popular over the past few years as people looked to go back to school after being laid off from work. Associate degrees are usually less expensive and can be completed more quickly than bachelor’s degrees, allowing the student to get back on the job market sooner than other programs. Schools that offer associate degrees will be able to capitalize on the increased traffic potential, but competitive bids will be necessary to obtain top positions.
3) Expansion to Third Tier Networks
With tightened budgets and more competition in the main engines of Google and Bing, more advertisers will look to third tier networks in 2012 to supplement inquiry volume at lower CPCs. Though the options for geo targeting and robust reporting are more limited with these networks, they have provided many schools with quality inquiries that can convert into enrollments and starts. Competition for online programs will only continue to grow, resulting in CPCs exceeding the $20 range for top position in Google on core phrases such as “online colleges.” Schools that cannot afford to remain competitive for expensive key phrases will be forced to turn to these third tier networks to expand their reach.
4) Growth of Mobile Paid Search
As the mobile phone market continues to grow and more people own them, the ability for a school to advertise via mobile phones will become even more important. According to comScore, 234M Americans now own mobile devices, 90M of which are smartphones. More and more potential students are relying on their mobile phones for researching and planning, making it more crucial to run mobile paid search campaigns and to drive traffic to a mobile optimized landing page. Most paid search campaigns target just desktop and tablet users, leaving the entire mobile market untapped. Schools that have not yet expanded their paid search campaigns to mobile should definitely look to do so in 2012.
5) Thorough Brand Monitoring
The increased focus on paid search moving into 2012 will require brand monitoring on search engines to be even stricter. Most search engines place no restrictions on the use of brand-related keywords, allowing competitors and affiliates to bid on other brand terms, driving up the CPC for those valuable keywords. In one example, after detecting and cleaning up brand violations, a school saw an 87% decrease in average CPCs on their brand terms. Although search engines may have established procedures for filing complaints, they don’t proactively monitor brand usage, leaving the responsibility of actually monitoring for inappropriate bidding and improper use of brand terms in ad copy up to the brand itself. Schools must take an active role in protecting their brand through policing for brand violations, and then enforcing a reach out policy to handle detected violations. The use of brand monitoring tools will grow in 2012 as more schools take a more proactive approach to protecting their brand across the paid search landscape.
Tags: higher education, paid search, Pay-per-click, PPC, predictions, search marketing
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 24th, 2012 at 1:07 pm and is filed under 2012 Marketing Predictions, CUnet, marketing, Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
