Photo By Jeff Berg

2012 ended this week, and while many people are making resolutions for the new year ahead, we thought we would take a moment and look back at the last year. The CUnet blog was a popular spot this year, with our readership growing by over 95 percent since December 2011, and while we think all of our blog posts are pretty great (shameless self promotion… check!), there were a few topics that seemed to be of particular interest to our readers. So, we’ve run the numbers and sliced the data to compile the top five most popular topics on the CUnet blog for 2012. Without further ado, here’s how it all shook out:

Search Engine Optimization

In one of our very first posts of 2012, (SEO in 2012: The Top 11 Things You Need to Know), we predicted some big changes to SEO, with the biggest change being that mobile surfing could overtake desktop surfing in the near future. And as the year progressed, we definitely saw things move in that direction. For the first time in years, desktop web search declined, according to the Macquarie Group in September, and the increase in mobile search seems to be the biggest reason for this decline. Our SEO post also included hot topics such as more localization to search inquiries, search engines become smarter at determining your intent when making a query (we saw Google actually update their algorithms late in 2012), and an increase in rich snippets (which help with your search rankings).

Mobile

Mobile campaigns became a big part of CUnet’s marketing offerings for its clients in 2012, and they are proving to be a highly successful marketing channel. As we noted in our mobile case study results post,  inquiries from our mobile campaigns have resulted in a cost-per-enrollment (CPE) of up to 30 percent lower than those from other inquiry generation channels. Early in the year we posted our 2012 mobile marketing trends where we predicted that 50 percent of all cell phone users in the U.S. would own a smart phone (in March 2012, that statistic was confirmed), and that sales of tablets would increase as competition grew and prices decreased. With more and more people accessing the Internet on mobile devices rather than their PCs, it soon became clear that building mobile-friendly sites would offer a better user experience for our clients’ potential students. However, as we noted in the post Decloaking the Google WAP Mobile Universe many mobile users still own feature phones, so not all of a school’s mobile marketing efforts should be targeted to smart phone users. Targeting both smart phone users and feature phone users is important in making sure you are making the most of your mobile campaigns.

Social Media

You may still be groaning over Facebook’s transition to Timeline, but we hope CUnet’s Social Media Strategist Jeff Berg’s handy guides – Five Things You Must Know About The New Facebook Brand Timelines and OH NOES! A Step-By-Step Guide to Getting Your Page Ready for Facebook’s Timelines! – helped ease you into the new profile layouts. But Jeff’s expertise doesn’t end with making your Facebook pages look pretty. In the post Measuring Success in Social Media Campaigns, he also provides valuable insight into how you can (and why you should) track the ROI and overall success of your social media campaigns.

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Faster, Smaller, and Integrated – Now What?

As we continue our series of predictions posts, we take a look at the quickly changing world of mobile devices, and share some thoughts on some ways that higher education marketers can respond to these changes.

1. 2012 – The Year When Mobile Smart Phones Reach 50% Of The Market

Back in March, 2010, Nielsen projected that the U.S. cell phone smart phone market would finally reach 50% of the total handset market by Q3 of 2011.As it turns out, they were a little premature in their estimates – the majority of Americans still have feature phones (according to comScore’s latest survey, which puts smart phones at 38%). However, with smart phone prices down, tier 2 carrier smart phone inclusion, and increased competition, we can expect to pass that milestone in 2012. With almost half the population accessing the internet on their mobile devices – from social media to shopping sites and more –we can expect the marketing pendulum to begin the swing in favor of “mobile first, desktop second.”

2. The Rise of the Tablets To Main-Stream

The increased competition in the tablet market will drive prices down and increase sales as new models come out allowing the devices to be more main stream. More Americans who use their PC for simple activities like e-commerce, news, web, email, will buy tablets when they want to replace their PC.

So what does all this mean for higher ed marketers? Schools can no longer afford to build and test their websites purely with a desktop user in mind. Sites that are optimized for mobile (including touch screens) will offer a better user experience and in turn, drive better results.

3.  Social Sites and Apps will Continue to Dominate Mobile Traffic

All analytics and indicators show the strong dominance of social sites and social games. This theme will continue throughout 2012, and we’ll see more and more marketers exploring ways to leverage that trend to increase brand awareness. In particular, we expect more attention on Android and iPhone GEO Social apps with creative uses of targeting them.. This recent Nielsen Study reinforces this prediction.

4. RIM Losing Market Share

Research in Motion, the manufacturer of Blackberry, is in serious trouble. With sales already on the decline and a series of network issues in the recent past, they will continue to lose marketshare going into 2012, with the other 3 major players (Google, Apple, and Microsoft) benefiting.

While it’s still possible that RIM could find it’s way back by introducing an advanced touch OS with features and benefits equal to – or better than – Android and iOS operating systems, this doesn’t appear likely at this point. Having said that, marketers should keep focusing on optimizing their mobile presence for all handset types in the market with mobile web design best practices in mind.

5. The Beginning of the Start for Contactless Payments adoption via NFC & Virtual Wallets to Replace Credit Cards

This trend is unlikely to directly impact higher ed recruitment any time soon; however, our list of mobile predictions would be incomplete without it.

Many new smart phones that are coming out now and the rumored new iPhone5 to come will probably have NFC. Allowing users with these handsets to store credit card information in a virtual wallet on the phone and start using the phones at terminals that accepts them like the MasterCard PayPass for quick and easy checkouts.  One example is the Google Virtual Wallet.

6. The Rise of Smart Phone-Connected Gadgets

Finally, if you are up to date with the latest trends and hip gadgets craze, you may have noticed new gadgets in your electronics store that take advantage of the smart phone’s connectivity features to enhance everyday life activities. Today, smart phones enable everything from listening to music through Bluetooth connected stereo phones to tracking fitness and health through app-supported devices like the UP  bracelet or the Fitbit activity and sleep trackers. Expect more of those life-enhancing gadgets to show up and to satisfy our technology-driven lives.

While this is another trend that doesn’t have immediate/obvious ramifications for higher ed marketers, it is worth watching how this evolves. As more companies come up with ways to take advantage of smart phone connectivity, marketers are bound to follow.

As we continue our series of 2012 predictions for higher education marketers, one overarching trend stood out that we thought deserved a deeper dive. Across all industries, the availability of data has been growing exponentially over the past few years. For marketers, this unprecedented access to real-time data has the potential to have startling a startling impact by allowing educational institutions to make quick, well-informed business decisions. At CUnet, we have a team of people dedicated solely to analyzing and reporting on that data for our clients; they pulled together the key “data-driven opportunities” that we see making the biggest impact for our clients in the coming year.

Refining of inquiry scoring strategies

Inquiry scoring is a useful tool, but has fallen off the radar for some schools over the past year for various reasons. I believe that 2012 will see a renewed push toward using scoring especially in evaluating marketing spends. In the past, scoring has been mainly used to differentiate how a school connects with potential students. Moving forward, more emphasis will be placed on using scores for tiered pricing structures as opposed to other strategies.

Increased focus on demographic and segmentation information

What is a great way to target your potential students? How about data points that typically aren’t asked for on the average inquiry form. Where do these potential students live and work and what do they do in their spare time? Do they like HBO or Showtime? This type of information has become the norm for a number of industries and the higher education space is certainly no exception. Schools want to know how to reach their target markets, and this type of information is a gigantic step in attracting new students. Combining this with tiered pricing through inquiry scoring will also be of greater interest in 2012.

Conversion metrics evolve

Applications and starts are certainly still important, but ultimately student retention (graduating and finding a rewarding career) will be the primary goal. This trend gained significant momentum in 2011 and will escalate in the coming year. Student retention helps to ensure a given school’s dedication to education, building strong brands, and adding qualified and successful individuals to the work force. Schools will spend more time and effort analyzing the factors that impact retention, and use that data to help refine recruitment efforts.

Predicting program trends

With more and more data available, schools will look for ways to identify program trends as before they take shape, so they can quickly respond by adjusting program offerings. For example, the IT field has grown in popularity in the for-profit space significantly in the past few years, and we expect this trend to continue. Even as budgets become more refined as 2011 progressed, interest in IT programs has not only held steady but grown as an overall percentage of total inquiries. 2012 will see even more emphasis placed on IT specific program offerings and will continue to generate even more interest in the coming year.

Source: CUnet seasonality and data findings for 2010 and 2011

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.

2011 was a year of very dramatic change in the world of SEO, with the most notable change coming from Google’s Panda updates, which significantly changed how the search engine processes and ranks web pages. Since Google typically sends most sites in the US about 80 percent of their search traffic, this algorithm change had a pretty dramatic impact.

While most of the dust has settled on that update, we expect more changes to come that will significantly affect SEO strategies. So, what exactly is it we expect to see in 2012?

1. Mobile surfing will overtake desktop surfing.

Mobile usage continues to grow at an astounding rate, and tablets are definitely contributing to the growth. Whether it be a mobile site (built in html 5) or a mobile app, having a mobile strategy will become critical to our success as marketers. That said, mobile SEO is really not very different from traditional SEO (See Seven Mobile SEO Myths Exposed).

2. Voice Search will change search behavior.

With the release of SIRI voice, search will finally take off. Searchers want answers, not a bunch of results they have to navigate through. Since SIRI gets its answers from multiple sources, making sure you are present in each of those sources can ensure that SIRI recommends your site. A small study by The Arora Report followed 40 iPhone users and their Siri vs. Google usage. All 40 users saw no need to use Google ever again. 27 of them hadn’t used Google since they got their iPhone, and the other 13 only used it twice. Of course this was not a comprehensive study, but it is pretty suggestive of where things are going. (more…)

At the beginning of every year, alleged precognitives from around the world gather to spout their own flavor of predictions, from potential meteor impacts to new fashions. While our office psychics are a little light on apocalyptic or Lindsey Lohan-related assertions this year, we have dimmed the lights, rubbed our crystal balls and focused really hard on our Lipton Tea bags to bring you seven seismic predictions for the coming year.

In all seriousness, though (we only have one crystal ball and we use Outlook meeting requests to book it), at CUnet, we’re in a unique position to make some startling predictions about what the higher education marketing space will experience in 2012. Not only do we work closely with the majority of schools in the for-profit sector, either providing inquiries, managing inquiries through agency services and technology, or providing marketing tools and services, we also have over one-quarter of all higher education inquiries running through our systems each month, approximately one million inquiries from over 250 schools. Drawing from our working relationships as well as the trends we see in inquiries, we’ve identified seven big trends ranging from program diversification to the expanding reach of not-for-profits into the proprietary education space that we expect to see over the coming year:

1. COMPLIANCE: Schools will shift their compliance focus from planning to execution.
With most of the fear and uncertainty around the Department of Education’s regulatory changes behind us, schools are now actively moving into “enforcement” mode. While many of the larger schools were early adopters of compliance-focused solutions (implementing in 2011), there remains a large number of schools that are still reacting to the changes and evaluating how to effectively respond. With compliance guidelines largely in place, these schools will now be eager to start implementing more “complete” solutions to enforce these guidelines and ensure audit trails are in place early in the year. In response to the increase in schools implementing compliance solutions, we can also expect to see a rise in the number of vendors entering the compliance solution market as the recognize the increasing importance that schools are placing on the people, processes and technology that are required to create comprehensive compliance response.

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