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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There’s no doubt that call centers are one of the biggest areas of regulatory concern for schools and their third-party vendors, particularly when it comes to complying with the Department of Education’s misrepresentation rule.  And there is good reason for the concern – phone calls are, by their very nature, unstructured and even the most extensive scripts cannot account for every question that might arise during a conversation with a prospective student.

Considering that, it’s not surprising that a growing number of schools refuse to accept inquiries from third-party call center affiliates (~16%,  up from ~12% in 2010 based on CUnet client data). Furthermore, many clients who still accept third-party call center inquiries are scaling back the budget they allocate. These decreased budgets are largely tied to concerns about quality assurance and representation, regardless of conversion rates.

While this concern is understandable, it’s important to realize that with the right processes in place, schools do not need to eliminate their reliance on call centers completely. In fact, call centers can remain an important source of highly qualified inquiries, assuming they are following a number of best practices.

This message was reinforced in the recent document published by the APSCU Student Recruitment Task Force which provides guidance on the Misrepresentation Rule. Their suggestions include requiring third-party call center affiliates to only use school-approved scripts and regularly monitor call recordings. An optional step above that involves “live monitoring” calls so ensure agents are following scripts and not giving customers misleading information.

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Playing with Google+ Pages for Businesses is like unwrapping the world’s most disappointing Christmas present. We put out the milk and cookies. We waited up, hiding under the covers, ears attuned for the sound of 32 tiny reindeer hooves prancing on the roof. And, when we trundled downstairs on Monday, bursting with optimism and excitement, we discovered that some unshaven fat guy in a red suit had ransacked our pantry and left us with an empty Millennium Falcon playset, not even a Han Solo action figure in sight, and two hours of cleaning frozen reindeer poop off the roof.

All right, maybe it’s not as bad as that (thanks for the memories, mom), but the analogy is the same. We were eagerly awaiting Google’s foray into the world of company pages, hoping that it addressed shortcomings that currently exist in other offerings on the market, including Facebook Pages. However, due to a bevy of missing ingredients and some questionable information about the Google+ user base, Google+ Pages tastes like yet another bad soufflé served up to the social media palate, failing to rise to the occasion. And, while Google is still refining their recipe, it’s not ready for consumption, particularly for proprietary higher education institutions which already have myriad stable social venues to engage on.

Here’s three reasons why:

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With the Major League Baseball World Series having just been completed, there’s been much discussion in the news and sports talk radio shows about the use of sabermetrics in the sport. Sabermetrics, which was highlighted in the recently released movie “Moneyball”, focuses on using underutilized baseball statistics to find players that have been overlooked by teams that prefer to use more conventional statistics and methods to evaluate players. Several teams, including the Texas Rangers (one of the World Series participants), have used this method of analysis with great success. What many don’t realize is that the same principles can be applied to increase the effectiveness of marketing and inquiry enrollment campaigns of schools in the proprietary education industry.

As a Marketing Data Analyst at CUnet, part of my job is to use innovative methods of analysis to help schools see which niches in a marketplace can be maximized, along with which characteristics their typical students seem to have and where those students can be found. We also help determine which distribution channels are most effective in reaching those prospective students as well. With that said, I’ve noticed for some time now the parallels that exist between what we try to help schools accomplish and what many of the “sabermetricians” are attempting to do: we both use undervalued and overlooked methods of analysis in an attempt to find value.

Some of the methods we use to assist schools include composing competitive analyses, geo-target analyses (mapping where a school’s student population comes from), and demographic reports, along with more innovative solutions such as segment profiles, which divides a school’s student population into multiple segments and then provides the specific demographics of each segment, and behavior profiles, which provide more clarity into the activities students engage in away from the classroom. Many of these methods have been used to help schools gain more insight into both the markets in which they reside in as well the characteristics their “typical” student tends to exhibit.

Let’s take a look at few real-world examples of the value this has provided our clients.

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The rapidly growing mobile market offers a great platform for schools to extend their brand message and engage prospective students. So, it’s not surprising that we’re seeing a huge growth in  mobile marketing campaigns in higher education.

What is surprising is how many of these campaigns are not correctly targeted or well optimized for a huge portion of the mobile market. In this post, I’ll explore one of the most influential mobile channels (Google Mobile Pay Per Click) and provide some tips on how to ensure your mobile campaign is reaching it.

Why Do Different Phones Display Different Search Results?

Many online marketers have no idea that a parallel universe exists of the web called the mobile web (or if they do, they may be unsure what to do with it). Understanding this is the first step in ensuring that your mobile PPC campaigns reach all mobile users.

In order to ensure mobile users reach the best/most helpful search results from their mobile device, Google has a dedicated index of mobile-compatible websites (a.k.a. the mobile web). These sites are indexed separately from the standard Google search index, and are served up in search results from feature phones (in paid ads, these sites get a cool mobile icon next to them like the one below).

In other words, doing a Google search query from a feature phone will serve up mobile web results; doing the same search on a smart phone or desktop will serve up results from the standard Google index, resulting in a different set of both organic and paid search results.

Here’s how it breaks down:

• If you have a smart phone (full HTML mobile browser), your organic search results will be similar to desktop, but the paid search results may be different (only ads that are set up to target smart phones will appear).
• For Feature Phones (phones with a WAP browser), both organic search results and paid search results will be different than those on a desktop/smart phone. To reach feature phones with a paid search, a dedicated campaign is required (paid search campaigns that only target mobile WAP devices do not overlap with regular online paid search campaigns).

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One of the most difficult balancing acts in enrollment marketing is helping clients meet very specific enrollment goals while at the same time fairly compensating affiliates for tailoring campaigns to achieve those goals.  At CUnet, we now have a powerful tool to help our clients do just that.

Using the recently released pricing groups feature in Sparkroom’s Enrollment Marketing Platform, the CUnet team can now work closely with our school partners and affiliates to execute Premium Pricing Strategies, designed to target specific areas to drive up inquiry volume.

For a recent test case in September, we were struggling to reach volume goals for a specific campus for one of our clients. During a 10-day period, with 3 days of advanced notice, we customized a Premium Pricing Strategy that offered 120% normal CPI for this specific campus. The results were as follows:

• 294% increase in volume as compared to the previous 10-day period
• 600% increase in application rate
• 30% decrease in cost per application
• Volume from top quality segment increased by 377%
• 5% increase in contact rate

It’s important to note that these results were not just a result of increasing the price per inquiry; they were only made possible by the detailed analytics that the Sparkroom platform offers. For example, how do you choose which providers to offer the premium pricing to? How long should the premium pricing window run? How do you manage invoicing and reconciliation with vendors?
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Recently, a couple high-profile lead providers have announced that they are leaving the higher education sector. We won’t name them here – if you’re in the space you likely know who they are anyway – but suffice it to say that they were well-known established  players.  This leads to the question – why, and what does this mean for the industry? Is this a sign of times to come?

There are a few reasons why this could be happening, but the most obvious cause is the increased regulatory scrutiny in the sector, and resulting policy changes among those customers in higher education. To deal with concerns around misrepresentation, many schools are renegotiating contracts to help shift responsibility (and liability) over to the vendor in the event of a compliance breach and subsequent litigation.

For a big player in the lead generation industry that serves multiple verticals, you can see how this could be viewed  as a risk (and inconvenience) that isn’t worth taking. Not surprisingly, at CUnet, we have a different perspective.  As a company that exclusively serves higher education, the recent changes have certainly presented a challenge – but they have also created an opportunity.

The past couple of years has altered the playing field dramatically for the proprietary education sector. We are no longer dealing with businesses looking to purchase leads – we are partnering with schools looking for student inquiries. And not just any inquiry – they’re looking for the right students – those that are most likely to benefit from their programs, and therefore most likely to succeed in their new post- graduate career.

To someone not in the industry, that may seem like a semantic shift. For those of us in the industry, we know that it goes a lot deeper.

For us, it means that compliance and transparency are now at the center of what we are doing at CUnet each day. We have invested significant resources, not only in technology, but in personnel to ensure that we are leading the sector when it comes to providing transparency among the inquiries we provide, and compliant practices for all marketing campaigns. In 2009, CUnet launched an entire suite of marketing services to drive more organic inquiries to school’s websites through best of breed mobile, display, search and email services. This has uniquely positioned CUnet as a leader in providing 1^st party inquiry generation in addition to 3^rd party inquiries.

We suspect that there will be more vendor announcements to come, as lead providers are unwilling to accept the liability risks inherent in 3^rd party inquiry generation.  For the colleges and universities that we serve, this will probably serve the sector well  over the long term.