A fellow colleague at another university e-mailed me about conversion rates for PPC campaigns. He said he had trouble finding anything online about higher ed PPC conversion rates, so I asked him if I could republish my e-mail response in case it might be of help to you. Also, if you have PPC conversion rate info of your own, please share it in the comments below. Thanks!
E-Mail:
Hi Rob –
I found you through BlogHighEd, and was wondering if you had any information to share on a topic that I am currently investigating – pay-per-click search engine marketing.
In addition to an imminent complete website overhaul, I’ve been tasked with developing a pilot PPC program, and I’ve not been able to find any data related to PPC in the Higher Ed vertical.
I posted to the educause mailing list asking if anyone had positive or negative experiences with the various companies that work in this space (Network Solutions, Clickable, Yodle, ReachLocal, etc.), but I did not get any responses. Have you had experience in this area?
Also, I’ve read that across all PPC marketing, the average conversion rate is 2% – but I’m guessing that is heavily weighted towards consumer product sales, and not Higher Ed inquiries/applications. Any thoughts on what might be reasonable in terms of performance expectations after the initial couple moths of keyword honing?
Any information you can provide would be very, very much appreciated. If you are aware of other fellow Higher Ed colleagues who might have expertise in this area, I would be very grateful if you could pass along this email.
My Response:
Yeah, 2% is on the low side. But, since PPC is based on competitive bidding and geo-targeting, conversion rates really depend on which programs are being marketed, where and when. It also depends on whether you are doing display and/or extended network ads. We’ve had campaigns that have had conversion rates as high at 13.75% and as low as 1.57%. Our overall campaign conversion rate since October 2008 is 4.03%. However, this last fiscal year, we increased the number PPC conversions even though we decreased our conversion rate, so it really depends on what you value more, the number of leads or the conversion rate. But I would say with some confidence that you can do much better than 2%.
Hope that helps and good luck with the upcoming campaigns!
Rob
What exactly is meant by “conversion rate” in a higher education setting? Is it the percentage of prospective students who go on to complete an application? Is it those who join the mailing list? That’s not really clear to me. It would be great if we could standardize that metric across our industry.
Mary Beth,
Good question and I should have clarified what a conversion rate was in my answer. The conversion rate for PPC advertising is that rate at which those clicking on a PPC ad complete an end goal. In this case, a conversion is someone who clicks on an ad and then gives us their contact information in the form of an inquiry. The conversion rate, therefore, is the rate at which these click-throughs become inquiries.
Rob
Great, thank you so much for clarifying!
At the institution where I work (the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development) our conversion rate in 2009-2010 was 7.71%. That includes SEM and banner ads, email, print ads, and a small amount of direct mail, primarily for grad program marketing. We redesigned our landing pages in 2009 by stripping away all links and moving readers toward one goal — getting them to join the mailing list — which we think accounts for the decent conversion rate. Here’s an example of one of our landing pages: http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/inquiry/fallemail09-mph1
Mary Beth
Good landing page. That’s the way to do it. Thanks for sharing about your conversion rates. I’m interested in knowing how you track your print ads and develop a conversion rate for those?
Print ads are always difficult to track. We include unique URLs on them which lead readers to similar landing pages — but as you can imagine, we don’t get very many hits and conversions on those landing pages. Either the print ads aren’t that effective (likely) or people are going to our website on their own time and not necessarily to the landing page. We’ve thought about monitoring traffic to our website on the day printed publications are released to see if there’s an upswing in traffic, but I think there are just too many variables involved to reliably interpret the data. We’re definitely moving away from print ads over time; a hurdle is getting faculty to agree to it! They love to see their programs advertised in trade publications…
I hear you. We eliminated all of our print ads when I came here in May of 2008. And they represented about 62% of our budget. One thing you can do to track print ads is to conduct an ad recall survey for all first-year students and have them check all ads they encountered prior to applying to the school. We do that each fall and can demonstrate that students don’t use print and don’t recall print ads.
That’s a good idea, and I may borrow it from you for next year’s marketing planning!
With havin so much written content do you ever run into any problems of plagorism or
copyright infringement? My blog has a lot of unique content I’ve either written myself or outsourced but it seems a lot of it is popping it up all over the web without my permission. Do you know any solutions to help prevent content from being stolen? I’d truly
appreciate it.