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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