Key Marketing Metrics for Higher Ed: Driving Engagement and Enrollment

Higher ed institutions face a crowded market place — plus you’re often targeting multiple demographics. How can you keep your ducks in a row to measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts? Keep reading to uncover important metrics to monitor and track to gain insight into what’s working and what’s not.
6 m read

For many people, a journey toward higher education begins online. Whether it’s program descriptions, admissions information, or student life blogs, engaging content helps colleges secure more enrollments. However, your content production needs a data-driven approach. It’s only by tracking the right search engine optimization (SEO) metrics for higher education that you’ll discover what delivers long-term value for your organization.

The Value of Digital Marketing Metrics in Higher Education

The past few years have been difficult for higher education providers — especially colleges. While undergraduate enrollments have increased by 3% after a drop the previous year, first-year student numbers still fell by 5% this year. Higher education providers face a shrinking market with intensifying competition, and online presence is crucial for attracting new students.

These days, education providers need to understand prospective students from increasingly diverse age groups and entry pathways. You also need to reach potential students across multiple touchpoints as the decision cycle from first contact to enrollment is a lengthy one. This is the same whether you’re looking for new students or teachers.

So, how do you navigate this landscape and ensure your content boosts business? You need to focus on specific SEO metrics for higher education. With the right metrics, it’s easier to tailor your strategy to different audiences, such as students, parents, staff, and faculty members. A data-driven approach also assists with:

  • Identifying which types of content perform best.
  • Comparing engagement across departments and courses.
  • Understanding how different demographics perceive your organization.
  • Improving marketing budget allocation and returns.
  • Responding faster to industry trends.

Essential Digital Marketing Metrics for Higher Ed Engagement and Inquiries

Meaningful marketing improvements stem from tracking goal-specific data. That’s why you should familiarize yourself with these key digital marketing metrics for universities and other education providers.

1. Website Engagement Metrics

Your website is the first thing prospective students and employees typically see when researching education and career opportunities. How visitors interact with it provides insights into content performance and the user experience.

Improving your content and UX enhances engagement, and this is important because engagement convinces visitors to invest further time and consideration. Engaged visitors are likelier to explore comprehensive program materials and send enrollment inquiries.

Some of the best higher-ed engagement metrics for tracking overall website performance include the following:

  • Time on Page: A metric that measures how long visitors spend on pages. It’s ideal for assessing content quality and tracking optimization effectiveness.
  • Bounce Rates: The percentage of visitors who only view one page before leaving. Lower bounce rates usually reveal higher content relevance and engagement.
  • Pages Per Session: The number of pages viewed during one visit. Pay particular heed to this metric because visitors who view more pages show high intent.

Often, it’s the interplay of various metrics and goals that’s most important. For example, a high bounce rate isn’t always bad if the page has a singular purpose, such as driving contact form completions, and it’s achieving this purpose. Always measure engagement metrics in the context of specific pages and goals.

2. SEO Metrics for Higher Ed Institutions

Search is another vital aspect of your online presence. Whether prospective students are looking for information about courses or talented educators are planning career advancements, your aim must be to rank high for the search engine queries that attract these people to your organization.

To achieve this, you can follow specific metrics depending on your SEO goals and whether you’re tracking local or overall visibility. Here are the most crucial:

  • Keyword Rankings: Keyword positions track your site’s rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Besides revealing your current performance, assessing any upward or downward trends will lend context to search algorithm changes and industry shifts.
  • Organic Traffic: Organic traffic reveals the total number of visitors that visit your site or a specific page from search. Changes in this number help you understand SEO performance when analyzed alongside keyword rankings and engagement metrics.
  • Organic Conversions: Conversions attributable to organic traffic will help you assess whether you’re targeting the right keywords, if you’re landing pages are properly optimized and whether your audience is connecting with your content.
  • Local Search Share of Voice: Share of voice, when measured for local search, tracks how prominently you rank for location-based terms. High local visibility is vital for promoting on-campus courses and events.

3. Enrollment Inquiry Metrics

A lot can happen before someone sends an inquiry to your organization. If you don’t track metrics that measure this part of the cycle, you’ll miss out on the context behind one of the most crucial KPIs for higher-ed marketing. Moreover, you might not notice when issues arise with contact forms and other parts of the UX.

Conversion rates are the first thing to heed when tracking inquiries, as they help you identify which pages prompt contact most effectively. You can use conversion rates to evaluate actions such as:

  • Course enrollments.
  • Brochure downloads.
  • Campus visit registrations.
  • Event registrations.
  • Virtual tours.
  • Email subscriptions.

From there, you’ll need to look deeper into any inquiries to optimize things further, which is where customer relationship management (CRM) platforms excel. CRM platforms help you identify where high-intent traffic is coming from. They also track other metrics that reveal interaction histories, decision timelines, and how prospects move through each stage of the decision cycle.

You can also use a CRM to gain more context around additional inquiry metrics, such as contact method response rates, lead scoring, and drop-off points. This data is especially important for fine-tuning conversion rates and squeezing more value from your content.

4. Social Media Engagement Metrics

Higher education providers rely heavily on social media to reach prospective students and craft positive relationships with the broader community. In addition to enhancing your overall online visibility, social media offers unique insights into how various audiences engage with your organization. This translates to improved performance across other marketing channels.

However, social media comes with its own metrics for measuring engagement and reach. Here are some examples:

  • Reactions: Likes, shares, repins, comments, and other engagement actions. Some platforms also just call this “enagement.”
  • Comment Sentiment: The overall mood and intent behind comments.
  • Completion Rates: The rate of completed views of stories and reels.
  • Saved Posts: An indication of the value of content as reference or entertainment.
  • Traffic Drivers: Hashtags and topics that drive significant views to your posts.
  • Followers: Growth of your subscriber base.

This data provides a window into social engagement. Other metrics, like the following, reveal how this engagement translates to overall marketing returns:

  • Social Media Traffic: The total referral traffic to your site from social media.
  • Click-Through Rates (CTRs): How many people click through to your website from social media.
  • Conversion Rates: How successful your social media CTAs are at convincing people to perform desired end-goal actions.

5. Email Marketing Metrics

Long decision cycles make email essential for higher-ed marketing. This is because it’s not unusual for prospective students to spend 12 to 18 months researching and comparing options before committing to an institution. Email is the perfect way to maintain interest and remarket to potential students over this duration.

Of course, email needs to maintain engagement over the entire decision cycle to be effective. To ensure it’s hitting the mark, pay close attention to these metrics:

  • Open Rates: The proportion of newsletters you send that recipients actually open
  • CTR: The percentage of recipients who click on links in your emails

With heavy optimization, education providers may achieve email open rates of just over 37% and CTRs above 12% — considerably higher than the optimal rates other industries might hope for. However, these metrics don’t always translate to your end goals.

Often, the most important email metric is your conversion rate. Email marketing conversions average about 3%, but a reasonable rate depends heavily on the content and the intended action.

Rather than fret about reaching a benchmark percentage, analyze emails with the highest conversion rates and perform A/B testing regularly. Learn what content resonates best with your audience, and you’ll gradually achieve more inquiries and other types of conversions.

Tools To Track and Optimize Key Metrics

Many tools can help you track engagement, social media, and SEO metrics for higher education. Here are some of the most popular:

  • Website Engagement: Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics
  • SEO: Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz, Google Search Console
  • Social Media: Sprout Social, Hootsuite
  • Email Marketing: Mailchimp, Constant Contact
  • CRM: HubSpot, Salesforce
  • Reporting: Google Data Studio

Each tool serves a specific purpose, so it’s important to leverage several, including tools that track website engagement, social media performance, and SEO. A CRM platform can then help you connect the various data points from each to understand how they relate to the entire decision cycle and what drives meaningful inquiries.

Applying Insights To Boost Engagement and Inquiries

The insights you gain from data help you decide how to optimize your content, fine-tune your marketing performance, and gradually trim wasted effort from your approach.

For example, if you noticed low application rates across finance courses alongside low content engagement, making the content more approachable could increase application rates. If video links attracted the most clicks in your emails, this might also guide your approach, prompting you to make more video content.

Ultimately, it’s a matter of finding what people like through metrics and then optimizing with A/B testing and other strategies until you notice meaningful shifts in bounce rates, open rates, time on page, and other relevant metrics.

Partner With Victorious for Data-Driven Success in Higher Ed

Unsure how to start leveraging data to achieve success online? Decisive action comes from knowledge and experience. Reach out to Victorious, a higher education SEO agency, for a free consultation, and we’ll leverage our team’s expertise to help you make sense of search marketing data and boost your enrollments.

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