Sure, allocating more budget to paid search marketing will result in more impressions, clicks, and traffic to your web site. But will those visits translate into more inquiries, and, more importantly, more starts for your school? The results of a new campaign from our paid search team indicate the answer is “YES!” (if managed correctly).

Increasing PPC Spending

Over the past year, our paid search team has been working with one of our schools to gradually increase spend. As a result, they also succeeded in growing inquiry and start volume at a consistent inquiry-start rate of around 10 percent. The school’s media spend in Q1 of 2011 was around $127k, and that grew over 300 percent to $534k by Q1 of 2012. This was accomplished by increasing geo-targeting radii, expanding keyword lists to include more general phrases (e.g. “career school in PA”) to capture users at earlier stages of the search funnel, bidding more aggressively on core program keywords, launching campaigns on the Google Content Network, and testing 3^rd tier search channels.

Evaluating Performance

Continual testing throughout the past year has allowed our paid search experts to pinpoint the initiatives that performed well for a given campus location or program category, and adjust from there. Campaigns were optimized as needed to keep the cost-per-inquiry within the school’s expectations. Inquiry volume followed suit, growing approximately 85 percent from Q1 2011 to Q2 2012:

More Bang for the Marketing Buck

The end goal for most schools is to have their PPC inquiries convert to actual starts, at an acceptable cost-per-start. Since paid search inquiries convert at a much higher rate than those from other affiliates, schools can afford to be more aggressive and accept a higher cost-per-inquiry, knowing that the amount of starts generated throughout subsequent months will ensure an acceptable end cost-per-start. With time, our paid search team expects to see those Q1 2012 inquiries convert to starts at a comparable rate, and as the data matures, the overall cost-per-start for that quarter will continue to improve.

Schools need to keep in mind that paid search has a longer conversion cycle. While most schools see the majority of their starts come in within 90 days of the inquiry date, PPC inquiries can continue to convert to starts four, five, and six months later. So it is crucial to review PPC performance on a rolling basis, and look at a large enough date range to account for this longer conversion cycle and ensure that pre-mature data is not skewing the overall results. It is also important to specify an adequate timeframe for testing various initiatives to make sure enough data is accumulated, and potential inquiries are given enough time to convert, before the full value of that test is evaluated.

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.

Do all inquiries have the same properties? Or does the origin of the inquiry impact its time to convert into a start for schools? In an effort to answer this question, we recently conducted an investigation into the conversion cycle of inquiries across different channels, with some very interesting results.

While it’s important to note that our findings are based on a single school, the insights we gained into the PPC conversion cycle could have a significant impact on media spend and optimization, and are worth taking into consideration for any school that runs PPC campaigns.

What We Found
Using a monthly rolling conversion report, we plotted out the starts received each subsequent month from a given month’s media spend. While, anecdotally, a school’s average conversion window from inquiry to start is 90 days, the data for PPC inquiries we examined indicated a noticeably longer timeline.

As the graph illustrates (below), inquiries generated in October 2010 continued to convert to starts six months later. While 80 percent of the total starts came through within expected timeframe (the first 75 to 90 days), a significant number of inquiries were still converting to starts after that window. In fact, we found that on average, it took five months to generate 90 percent of the total starts.

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