Any senior leader will understand that not paying attention to financial data will have dire consequences eventually. I would argue that marketing data deserves the same attention.

Why pay attention to marketing KPIs?

There are three reasons why marketing data deserves your attention, even if you do not have a background in marketing.

1. It’s a leading indicator for financial and academic performance

Your enrolment may be OK this year, but if admissions is receiving fewer applications than last year, next year’s intake is at risk.

Look further ahead and the pattern becomes even clearer. If you are receiving fewer student enquiries, seeing web traffic drop or your school becomes less visible across the web, all else being equal, you may have an enrolment problem building.

Marketing performance can also affect academic reputation in a qualitative way by making your institution more visible and attractive to the students you most want to reach. For example, QS includes an indicator, which looks at both the share of international students and the diversity of their nationalities.

2. Earlier, smarter, and less drastic course corrections

Early warning gives you time to make measured changes and give them a chance to work. Marketing data enables you to see farther ahead and this can help to avoid drastic measures such as layoffs and budget cuts.

When you are falling behind, a marketing fix may be all that’s needed. For example, raising your advertising budget or shifting priorities.

At other times, you will need action across the institution, backed by active senior sponsorship. Think of changes in course portfolio, fee structure, target markets, or scholarships. Underlying IT issues can also greatly hamper marketing performance.

3. Proactively support (and challenge!) the marketing team

Like all professionals, marketers can get bogged down in business as usual. They may have learned to live with certain facts of life. But to achieve genuinely better marketing and recruitment results often requires challenging the status quo.

Some examples:

• IT: No one makes the time or investment needed for systems that could save substantial time and money within two or three years.

• Compliance: Data protection, and if you’re in the EU, GDPR compliance is important, but sometimes data protection policies overreach and hamper effective marketing.

• Message: If your institution’s positioning is unclear, your marketing will struggle to pursuade.

If you’re a marketing manager or director, you have a duty to highlight these challenges, time and time again, in language that non-marketers can understand.

If you’re a leader without a marketing background, your duty is to make every effort to understand the overall and long-term impact on your institution.

Each of these examples represents a deadlock that needs senior involvement to break. One party, or perhaps both, will need to go out of their comfort zone. That usually only happens with pressure and support from leadership.

Which KPIs to track?

If you agree that keeping an eye on marketing performance is important, the next question is, what to track, and how often? If you are not looking at marketing data yet, quarterly is a good place to start.

Below are the key metrics to keep an eye on, working outwards from enrolment to discovery.

Admitted students and offer take-up rate. You’ll never have more new enrolments than the number of students you admitted. But admitted students may have applied at multiple institutions or decide not to enrol for different reasons. The admission-to-enrolment ratio (offer take-up rate) will tell you how often this happens.

If offer take-up rate is low or dropping compared to previous years, it can point to a communications issue, such as not reassuring offer holders enough or a shift in the competitive landscape.

The best way to find out what drives a low offer take-up rate is to contact admitted students, or a sample of them, soon after their offer and ask for feedback.

Website visits and website conversion rate. Any applicant is highly likely to have visited your website at some point, probably multiple times. As I argue in my book , your website is therefore a crucial link in the student recruitment chain.

But it’s not just about how many prospective students visit your website, it matters just as much what they do there. The website conversion rate is the ratio of website users that take an action divided by total web traffic. Low conversion can point to poorly executed campaigns or structural website issues. A common cause is offering too few low-touch ways to engage, perhaps only an “apply now” button.

Pre-website visibility. It is increasingly important to pay attention to what prospective students see, and do not see, about your institution before they ever visit your website.

The media landscape is changing: AI is changing how students search and people are less likely to click out from social media platforms. There isn’t one single place or number that can capture your visibility across the web, but you can keep an eye on this through a composite of:

• (GSC) impressions: Google reports how many times your webpages were featured in its search result pages, even if people didn’t click through
• Social media visibility: Social platforms such as Instagram and YouTube report on visibility and impressions of what you post. Social listening tools can also track visibility and sentiment in posts by others.
• AI mentions: AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini don’t share stats on what people ask and what they mention in their answers. You can still identify the prompts that matter most, test them regularly and track whether and how your institution appears.

Taken together, online visibility level is often your earliest signal. Improving visibility will carry over to website visits, enquiries, applications, and enrolments.

What if you’re not capturing these KPIs?

It is not uncommon for education institutions to struggle with reporting marketing KPIs. But if this is the case, you are flying blind. The first order of the day should be to establish a basic way of measuring marketing performance – so you can benchmark performance year over year.

In short

Paying attention to these marketing KPIs can help you spot enrolment risk early. You will buy yourself valuable extra time and options to act, and by addressing inefficiencies such as low offer take-up rate or website conversion, you may improve recruitment outcomes without increasing your marketing spend.

For additional background, please see:

• “șÚÁÏčÙÍű Podcast: Are you using the right digital channels to reach international students?”
• “Survey highlights a growing ‘engagement gap’ between international student expectations and institutional response”
• “AI is changing how students search: What it means for marketing and recruitment”

The post Beyond enrolment: The marketing signals education leaders should watch appeared first on șÚÁÏčÙÍű Monitor - Market intelligence for international student recruitment.

Google Analytics is the de facto standard for web analytics. Whether you work for a university, an agency, or any other type of organisation, chances are that Google Analytics is already tracking who visits your website and what actions they take.

In my experience, most marketing professionals in higher education are well aware of Google Analytics and know it’s worth paying attention to in order to improve the effectiveness of their online marketing efforts. However, over the years, the Google Analytics interface has grown into a real beast. With so many reports to look at, even seasoned marketers can get lost.

Yet, if you’re spending money and effort on getting people to visit your website, it’s essential to see which efforts actually bring results, and which ones should be improved or abandoned. In this article, I will like to take you along the steps of finding out the answer to the question: “How are my campaigns performing?”

Let’s get started.

Where to look in Google Analytics?

If you have access to your Google Analytics account, I suggest you open it and follow along. It’s going to be a lot more meaningful to look at your own data!

As you may be aware, Google is in the process of phasing out Universal Analytics and replacing it with its successor: GA4. So I’ll provide step-by-step instructions and screenshots for both versions.

Universal Analytics

GA4

What to do with this knowledge?

If you’ve followed the steps above, you now know which traffic sources are working best for your website in terms of pure volume of visitors (traffic) as well as quality (engagement and conversion). So what?

Here are a couple of common situations you might encounter, and what you could do.

1. A paid campaign is bringing in lots of visits, but with notably lower engagement and conversion than other traffic.

This definitely needs fixing. There are a few possibilities:

• Targeting: The ads are not showing to the right people. See if it’s possible to improve the campaign’s targeting
• Ad copy: People are clicking the ads with the wrong expectation. Your website may not be delivering upon the “promise” that your campaign has made. Experiment with ad copy and creative to see if you can get visitors who are more engaged.
• Landing page: The first page people see on your website (landing page) is a poor fit with the ad campaign. Try sending people who click the ad to a different page. Create a fitting landing page if you need to.

2. A paid campaign is bringing in a little traffic, but the traffic has high engagement and conversion.

• Expand the campaign. You may have an opportunity to get more high quality traffic where that came from.
• Tight on budget? Consider diverting budget from other campaigns.

3. Google Analytics reports lots of direct traffic

• Some amount of direct traffic is unavoidable, but if there’s a lot, you’re missing valuable data about your campaigns.
• If you’re advertising with Google Ads, make sure to link Google Analytics with Google Ads. Here’s how to do it for and .
• You can also add to your links in paid campaigns and in any email you send out. This will tell Google Analytics the traffic source, making it easier for Google Analytics to classify the source. It’s even possible to encode UTM parameters into QR codes to track traditional advertising!

If you are making an effort to attract prospective students to your website in any way, it is essential to have a basic understanding of Google Analytics. By following the steps above, you’ll gain a better understanding of what is working and what’s not, do more of the former and fix or cut the latter.

For additional background, please see:

• “A fresh look at Google Analytics for international student recruiters”
• “Have we reached the tipping point for technology-fuelled recruitment?”

The post Using Google Analytics to track and improve online campaign performance appeared first on șÚÁÏčÙÍű Monitor - Market intelligence for international student recruitment.

Editor’s note: Just as we published this item, on 16 March 2022, Google that it its current Universal Analytics framework will stop processing data on 1 July 2023. This means in effect that the new Google Analytics 4 framework described below must be used from that date forward.

As a marketer working in the education sector, you need to collect and analyse data to know whether your campaigns are achieving their goals. It’s very likely you already have Google Analytics (GA) installed on your website for this purpose. The question is: Are you optimising insights from GA in order to improve your recruitment results?

Google Analytics: why do we care?

There are three key areas where GA can play an important role in driving marketing success. To start, insights from GA should inform strategy. For example, when deciding on focus countries, you’ll want to see whether your website is already receiving significant visits from particular (sometimes unexpected) countries that you can build on.

Secondly, GA is an excellent tool for monitoring online campaigns. It can shed light on quantity (“Are we getting any clicks from our listing on that study portal site?”) and quality (“Do visitors generated by this campaign actually engage further with us?”).

When you’ve launched a new campaign, GA can tell you within days whether it is performing to expectations. This allows you time to have the difficult but essential conversations right away, when there is still time and budget to fix things.

Finally, GA can help you to improve your website user experience. On the path to enrolment, prospective students can face numerous roadblocks. If a frequently visited webpage isn’t well optimised, it can easily cut the results of any advertising you do in half.

It’s easy to spot the main “roadblock pages,” and it often requires only minor changes to your website to remove these obstacles – if you know where to look.

Setup essentials

At first sight, GA seems quite user-friendly. You can click around without any prior knowledge and see all kinds of “interesting” statistics about your website.

GA tracks what website visitors do at three levels: visits, engagement, and conversions.

The first two work right out of the box.

Web visits are measured as users, sessions, and pageviews on your site. Other things being equal, more is better. If you launched a campaign yesterday and it is hardly bringing any new visitors to your website, that needs fixing right away.

Engagement metrics include average time spent on the website and number of pageviews per visitor. The scores of this metric will vary depending on traffic source and landing page, the first page a visitor arrives on. If engagement is low, it could mean any or all of the following:

1. You are not addressing the right audience;
2. Your messaging is not resonating;
3. There is a roadblock on your landing page.

Conversions refer to actions that people take on your website, such as filling in a form, signing up for an event, or submitting an application.

Conversions are the acid test for online campaigns and website user experience. If your conversion rate is low, you’ll have no chance to follow up with prospective students on your website and it is very likely that they will forget about you.

Conversion tracking takes some setup work. It usually also requires minor changes to your website or some setup in Google Tag Manager. The full process is beyond the scope of this article. You can find a step-by-step description in .

Before you start tracking conversions, it will be useful to find out whether your institution already has plans to implement GA’s next version: GA4.

The advent of GA4: what’s changing?

Google has that the current version of GA (Universal Analytics, UA) will be replaced by a new version: GA4.

This is not just a marginal upgrade. GA4 is an entirely new piece of software. It is not compatible with your existing Google Analytics setup. Even the reported numbers will look different.

Why the change? Since UA was introduced some 10 years ago, the Internet has changed:

• We access websites through multiple devices.
• Webpages have become much more interactive, and longer. There are “one-page websites” and sites with foldout text and embedded videos.
• Some sites have an accompanying app.

GA4 has been adapted to these new behaviours. There are two key differences between GA4 and the original GA:

• Where UA models website visits as a sequence of pageviews, GA4 treats all actions (“events”) on your website equally, whether it’s a scroll, a video view, a click or indeed a pageview.
• GA4 is much better at tying multiple visits to the same user. This is important, because your campaign might not lead to a conversion upon the first visit, but the same prospective student may come back after a few days and sign up for a webinar.

So what should you do? Wait it out a little longer, or switch over as soon as you can? At the time of publication, switching over from UA to GA4 is comparable to moving house:

Universal Analytics is like your current house. You’ve been living there since 2012 and know your way around. Everything works. But your needs have changed. It’s time to move.

GA4 is like your new house. Much more spacious and practical. Most of the basic functions are already there, but it is not quite ready to live in comfortably.

I’ve set up GA4 for a number of websites and despite the hype, it is not a mature piece of software yet. Many features we take for granted in Universal Analytics are simply not available on GA4 yet.

There’s no doubt: in a year or two, Google will stop supporting UA. So my advice today is to set up tracking in GA4 as soon as you can and run it in parallel with your existing UA setup.

Once the time to switch comes, you will have collected a few years of historical data, making the transition a lot smoother.

The post A fresh look at Google Analytics for international student recruiters appeared first on șÚÁÏčÙÍű Monitor - Market intelligence for international student recruitment.

is the product of a 10-month study by the UK’s Higher Education Commission, an independent body made up of leaders from the education sector, the business community, and the major political parties in Britain.

The study was inspired in part by the changing context of higher education institutions today, and also by some of the resulting pressures on traditional institutional business models. “Higher education is at a point of unprecedented uncertainty and change, with fiscal changes that are leading to increasing focus upon a more student (and customer) focused model,” says the study report. “There are new entrants into the market place, some of them offering flexible education online, and increasing focus upon international competition and overseas’ markets. Our inquiry found that institutions today have to respond to many external pressures in an effective and dynamic way, as well as to better understand – and better meet – the needs of the student body, as both key participant and funder of higher education.”

The field of “Big Data” and data analytics is wide, but the study wisely narrows its focus on data processes and analysis that can have a material effect on the student’s experience of university. The report focuses on the current state of play and emerging models in the UK, but acknowledges examples from other countries. It notes in particular that systems and tools for data analytics have been more widely adopted in markets such as Australia and especially in the US.

To this point, however, very few UK institutions have adopted data analytics to any great extent. A June 2015 survey of 53 British institutions found that nearly half have not implemented any sort of learning analytics at all, and only one of the responding institutions indicated that analytics were fully implemented and widely supported across the university.

Response of 53 UK institutions to the question, “How far has the implementation of learning analytics progressed in your university?” Source: Heads of E-Learning Forum

The report identifies a number of significant barriers to adoption for higher education institutions, including ethical and privacy concerns, the limited data capabilities of many institutions (in that many do not yet have effective data management systems in place), and the need for strong strategic vision from university leaders.

Even so, and with the aforementioned business pressures firmly in mind, the authors project the widespread adoption of analytics – including increasingly advanced data systems – in the next three to five years. More to the point, “These will include predictive analytics, adaptive learning systems, and analytics designed specifically for students, presented in student-facing apps. We may also see the development of sophisticated course advisor systems, which use data about previous students’ study choices to advise current students on what modules to choose and what extracurricular activities or internships they should consider. All of these will be powerful assets for students, giving them access to instant, personalised information and resources that fit into their daily lives.”

A closer look at learning analytics

The study report clearly highlights that improved student retention is the primary motivation for institutions to adopt more robust analytics systems. This is, the authors note, informed, “by the simple economic driver that it is easier to try and retain existing students than it is to have to go out and recruit another in a competitive market.”

Student retention has been shown to relate strongly to a stream of data analysis called learning analytics. We can understand the term to describe a process through which data about a student – their characteristics, academic performance, and learning behaviour – is collected and analysed even as their programme of study unfolds.

In this important respect, learning analytics differs from predictive modelling or other streams of data analysis in that it is concerned both with observing and responding to the student’s experience in real time. The point of doing so is to allow university staff and teachers to adapt their teaching and also better support students, particularly students-at-risk.

Nottingham Trent University (NTU) is a rare example of a UK institution that has widely adopted learning analytics, and is also the subject of a case study in From Bricks to Clicks. The university has found in its analytics work that there are four observable metrics that relate strongly to student success:

1. Attendance on campus (which is tracked through swipe card data for building access);
2. Library usage;
3. Attendance in tutorials;
4. Use of the university’s “Virtual Learning Environment”, or VLE (that is, the university’s online portal for students).

NTU tracks these factors and combines them so that each student receives an overall engagement score. If a student scores poorly, or has no engagement for a specified period, their instructor receives an alert. That triggers a follow-up with the student to determine what additional supports might be required. Students have access to the same engagement data and can monitor their own progress as well.

A student view of the learning analytics dashboard at NTU.

System data from NTU has clearly established a strong correlation between high engagement and high retention, as well as improved student performance. In other words, the ability to measure and respond to student engagement in real time allows the university to drive better retention rates.

The same is true for The University of Huddersfield, another institution cited in the report, which has also had great success with an analytics-based intervention programme. As the university describes, “Interventions range from automated emails and text messages to a sophisticated targeting of ‘support priority students’ in the highest risk categories, who can be provided with personal support tailored to their circumstances and risks. Support is offered well before the usual signs of significant problems are evident, ensuring that it tackles issues before they become deep-seated and hard to address
The results have been significant. Overall non-continuation rates have fallen from levels in the high-teens to well below 10%.”

Based partly on these examples, the study concludes that learning analytics has “enormous potential to improve the student experience at university, by allowing the institution to provide targeted and personalised support and assistance to each student.” As the experience of NTU and Huddersfield also reflects, learning analytics can also have a profound impact on an institution’s strategic goals, and retention or enrolment targets in particular.

While such initiatives may bear more immediately on student retention, it is easy to imagine how improved data systems could also influence recruitment and student selection processes as well. First, an improved student experience and better success rates will generally translate into a wider field of happy alumni and also to better outcomes for graduates. And, needless to say, this is a powerful basis for recruitment for any institution.

But better data systems can also yield increasingly nuanced insights into the characteristics of successful students and so aid recruiters and admissions staff in their efforts to identify and reach the next cohort of prospective students that will be best-suited to the institution.

The post Study calls for better data analytics for recruitment and retention appeared first on șÚÁÏčÙÍű Monitor - Market intelligence for international student recruitment.

Somebody types a few words into a search box somewhere in the world and the process begins.

A prospective student is searching online, trying to find the right university or school, but how is he searching? What information is most important to him? What terms does he use and how can you find your way through the staggering volumes of search activity, advertising, and user behaviour to find and engage with this prospective student? More to the point, how can he find you?

It is well established that student search and information gathering is moving online, a shift that has become more pronounced in even just the past two or three years. The BBC recently quoted Harry Walker, education industry head at Google, who said, “The Internet is playing an ever increasing role in the decision making. Students are online searching and consuming content in all forms when they are deciding whether or not to go to university and deciding which universities to apply for.”

Education-related search activity continues to go up every year, and it remains reliably true that “non-branded search queries” account for a large proportion of overall search volumes. Google reports that 9 in 10 prospective students don’t know which school they want to attend at the onset of the search process and they reflect this non-brand orientation in their search behaviour, relying instead on queries for specific programmes or fields of study, specific levels of study or credentials, geographic queries, or other broadly structured search requests.

The implication of this is that while some students may be asking for your university or school by name, many others will not. And that is where serious reflection, research, and strategy around the terms that students use when searching becomes so important.

We’re talking about keywords: the terms that are most relevant and most commonly used in searches that could apply to your institution or school. Keywords have an important role to play in shaping the structure and content of your website, in your search engine optimisation efforts – that is, in placing your institutions as close to the top of the search results as possible – and in your online advertising campaigns as well.

Needless to say, the process of determining which keywords are most important to your recruitment efforts is an invaluable component of online marketing. But it is also a window into the behaviour, intent, and priorities of prospective students.

The “key” is to identify the terms that are most relevant to your programmes and services and that are also most-used in search queries by your prospective students. And today we’ll outline a relatively straightforward process for doing just that.

Start with topics

First, make a list of high-level topics that are most relevant to your institution or brand. What are your key programme areas? Where are you located? Which of your services are most in demand by international students?

For example, if you are a small undergraduate university located in Washington state, some of your main topics might be “business administration,” “work and study,” “support services,” and “Washington.”

See if you can establish between five and ten main topics that you would prioritise based on key programme areas or other features of your institution or school that you know to be important for your international students.

Brainstorm keywords

Now break out each topic and start to brainstorm keywords and search queries that could apply to each. Imagine the terms a prospective student would use to try to find the programme or service you are offering.

For the “business administration” topic, for example, search terms might include:

• Bachelor of Business Administration;
• Study business in Washington;
• Marketing in Seattle;
• Best management degree.

And so on. Don’t limit yourself at this stage because you will narrow the list down shortly. Repeat the brainstorming process for each main topic you identified earlier. If you get stuck at any point, go to your student-facing colleagues – both faculty and staff – and to the students themselves to get their suggestions, too.

Remember that relevance is key, so it is better to be more specific or more closely align the search term with some distinguishing characteristic or distinct strength of your institution or school.

Geography also plays an important part in education-related searches. As we reported in an earlier post, “Internal tracking at Google indicates that ‘geo terms’ – search keywords that include a geographic modifier (e.g., ‘bachelor degrees in computing science in London’) – performed strongly with respect to click-through conversions.”

Balance your brainstorming across the long tail

Look over your initial keyword brainstorming for each major topic with an eye to ensuring you have a mix of short- and long-tail keywords in the mix.

Short-tail search terms are the more general ones, and often more competitive and hard to differentiate or rank against in search results.

Long-tail terms, on the other hand, are more specialised and may provide a more open field with less competition, in part because they may also reflect a more precise match between the intent of the prospective student and the search result that your institution or brand represents.

To stick with our brainstorming example above, a term like “Bachelor of Business Administration” or even “Business Administration” would be very short tail. It is going to return a large number of results for schools all around the world, and may or may not provide prospective students with a good match for their interests.

“Business Administration degree in Washington,” on the other hand, is further down the keyword tail. It eliminates all programmes outside of Washington and narrows the range to a particular field of study at the same time.

Remember that the most highly trafficked terms are not always the ones that will be the most valuable to you. You want to draw not just large numbers of users but the right users: the ones whose interests and intent are most closely aligned with your programmes and services.

The SEO and inbound marketing specialists at point out that the most popular search terms in many categories still only account for about 30% of web searches. The other 70% are in the long tail, which is where we also tend to find search behaviour that is more specific as prospective students are further along in their decision-making process and that much closer to selecting where they will study.

The search demand curve. Source: Moz

Check related search terms

You can think of the process we’re outlining here as a series of sequential steps. In practice, however, you will likely find yourself moving back and forth as your brainstorming and research process continues. As you do, you will find it useful to research related search terms at different intervals.

Here is a very quick and easy check to do for individual search queries: just enter the query – “business administration degree in Washington” – in a search box and check out the results. When you scroll down to the bottom of the results page, you’ll see that Google also provides a series of related queries for you.

Related search terms generated automatically on a Google search results page

Use these related search terms as a check against your earlier brainstorming and to help you to round out the search terms you’ve compiled for each major topic.

Part 2 just ahead

We will publish the second part of our keyword feature tomorrow, with a focus on competitor research, and handy analysis and planning tools. If you haven’t yet subscribed to our daily alerts, please take a moment to do so now in order to receive a special email alert as soon as Part 2 is published.

In the meantime, happy brainstorming!

The post Part 1: Keyword research: Matching intent with results appeared first on șÚÁÏčÙÍű Monitor - Market intelligence for international student recruitment.

The report, International students in higher education: the UK and its competition uses data from the UK Higher Education Statistics Agency () as well as a 2014 survey of Universities UK members to assess the international competitiveness of the UK’s higher education sector. The resulting analysis reveals signs that international student enrolments in UK higher education institutions are growing again in 2014 after modest declines in 2011/12 and 2012/13. But it also reveals significant and continuing drop-offs from important sending countries such as India and Pakistan.

Universities UK emphasises that the UK’s status as a leading study destination is currently under pressure due to the following combination of trends:

• The intensified investments and initiatives of other major destination countries and emerging regional hubs in increasing international enrolments;
• The comparatively weak efforts by the UK government to bolster the country’s reputation as a welcoming study abroad destination.

“For the UK, a return to sustained growth in international student recruitment is not a certainty in the current climate,” says the report.

“With a spotlight remaining on the wider issue of immigration in public discourse, and with students constituting the largest portion of non-EU immigration, higher education institutions remain implicated within the government’s drive to reduce net migration to the ‘tens of thousands’.

This, coupled with certain policy changes making the UK less competitive in attracting international students, and an absence of a formal government commitment to grow student numbers, has led to the UK recently experiencing stagnation in an industry where it traditionally excels.”

Recent losses for the UK in international student enrolments

Perhaps the best place to begin in order to contextualise the Universities UK report is with HESA statistics. First, we should understand that non-EU students composed roughly 13% of the total UK student population in 2012/13, up from 10% five years earlier.

While over five years, the proportion of non-EU students in UK institutions has become larger, over the past couple of years the total non-EU student population in the UK has dropped. There were 302,680 non-EU students in 2011/12 and 299,970 in 2012/13.

This is a small drop, but it represents a major reversal from the steady and sometimes very significant increases up to that point. As for EU students studying in the UK, there’s been a decline of over 5% (132,550 to 125,290).

Trends in non-EU and EU student enrolment in the UK, higher education institutions only. Source: HESA

Furthermore, the number of international students entering UK courses for their first year has been sliding down since 2011, with postgraduate commencements – the most popular level for international students coming to the UK – falling 4% from 2010 to 2012.

The story of China and India

Together, China and India constitute the greatest proportion of non-EU international students in the UK, and their combined proportion grew from 36% in 2008/09 to 40% in 2012/13. However, while Chinese enrolments have increased over this period, Indian enrolments have been falling.

First year enrolments of students from China and India in the UK, 2007-2013. Source: HESA

The report notes:

“In 2012/13, one in three new international entrants was from China, up from one in five in 2008/09. Comparatively, Indian students represented around one in fourteen entrants in 2012/13, down from around one in six in 2008/09.”

There is also a broader regional trend emerging, with more enrolment coming from East Asia than from South Asia.

Change in number of first-year enrolments in the UK from selected Asian countries, 2010/11 and 2012/13. Source: HESA

Countries sending high proportions of undergraduate students (e.g., Hong Kong, Malaysia) are sending more students than they have in previous years, but countries sending high proportions of graduate students (e.g., India, Nigeria) are sending fewer.

This is significant because many graduate courses in the UK are subsidised by tuition fees from international students. A similar phenomenon exists for STEM subjects, and international entrants to these courses have fallen by 10% in two years.

If international enrolments in STEM areas continue to fall, they could make certain STEM courses/programmes unviable and thus unavailable for domestic students as well.

Early indicators for 2014

The HESA data for 2013/14 is not yet available; in the meantime Universities UK surveyed 104 member institutions in spring 2014 to get a sense of trends in the 2013/14 academic year. Overall, members were more likely to report growth in international student commencements than declines, and said that China, Malaysia, and Hong Kong are driving the growth, with applications also increasing from prospective Saudi Arabian, Brazilian, and American students.

But the survey also revealed a continuing trend of declines from India and Pakistan.

Change in number of new entrants in 2013/14 compared to 2012/13, by student’s country of origin and level of study. Source: Universities UK survey

The Universities UK report then contrasts the India/Pakistan drops to Indian/Pakistani enrolment trends in competitor countries:

• “In 2013, the number of Indian students enrolled in higher education in Australia increased by 33% to 16,732. The number of Pakistani students enrolled also grew in 2013 – by 39% to 5,681. More recent data suggests that growth is continuing.
• In the United States, recent data looking at the number of F-1 student visas issued to Indian nationals shows that, in 2013, there was a strong increase compared to the previous year.”

More broadly, the report notes that among the major destination markets of the UK, the US, Canada, and Australia, the UK was the only one to experience a decline in international entrants in 2013/14.

Year-on-year change in the number of foreign student entrants in the UK and its competitors. Sources: Institute of International Education, Australian Education International, Citizenship and Immigration Canada, HESA

Challenges to market share

While the report sets out a number of measures in which the UK continues to be an attractive study destination for international students – for example, quality of experience, welcoming institutions, quality of education – it highlights findings from a number of studies showing areas where its reputation is suffering. For example:

“A 2013 survey carried out by IDP Education of 1,100 students across Asia and the Middle East showed that, when it comes to the perceived quality of education, the UK is second only to the United States across the five main English-speaking destinations, with Australia and Canada close behind, and New Zealand fifth.

However, the UK was rated as the worst destination in terms of perceived graduate employment opportunities, and fourth in terms of student visa requirements/policies.”

The report also cites the șÚÁÏčÙÍű i-graduate Agent Barometer study, which shows how agents’ perception of the UK as an attractive destination has fallen from 2008 to 2013 – in contrast to Canada’s increasing attractiveness.

Most worrisome perhaps is a 2014 National Union of Students (NUS) survey that showed that more than 50% of current international students in the UK feel unwelcome, and 19% would not recommend the UK as a study destination to their friends or relatives. This is a particularly worrying finding as other research in the field shows that a country’s attitude toward international students is highly influential in applicants’ choice of study destination.

Post-study work opportunities in the UK are also shown to be less attractive than those in other countries. The report cites a 2013 Ipsos MORI survey that revealed that 91% of Indians considering studying abroad believed the UK’s restrictions on post-graduation work opportunities would put off some or most students. And of those Indians who opted not to go to the UK, 38% said it was because they doubted they would be able to work in the UK post-graduation.

What’s at stake

The UK currently commands a 12.6% share of the world’s internationally mobile students, second only to the US.

According to the Universities UK report:

“In 2011/12, the UK higher education sector generated £10.7 billion in export earnings. Around 30% of this value came from overseas student fees 
. international students across the UK spent £3.4 billion off-campus in the form of living expenditure, on things like rent, food, entertainment and consumer goods.”

Put another way, the total spending by international students on fees, accommodation, and other consumer expenses in the UK was more than ÂŁ7 billion (US$11.24 billion) in 2011/12.

What needs to be done

Universities UK considers the British government’s international education strategy to be missing a key element: a firm commitment to and target for international student growth. The association’s report calls for the following from the government:

• An international student growth strategy;
• A consistent message that the UK is welcoming to international students;
• The removal of students from any net migration target;
• Enhanced post-study work opportunities for international graduates.

Commenting on the contents of the report, Universities UK Chief Executive Nicola Dandridge made a point to emphasise the danger of the government’s continuing to lump international students into net migration targets:

“We must do all we can to welcome genuine students who wish to study here. We do not want to lose our leading position as a destination for the increasing numbers of students who want a higher education overseas
.

We are in danger of disadvantaging a group of migrants who not only make a substantial contribution to our society and our economy, but also are not the migrants whom the public, including Conservative voters, are concerned about. The current one-size-fits-all approach to immigration does not work and must be changed.”

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If you were an international student recruiter, what if you could know which alumni from various countries were the most likely to act as brand advocates for prospective students?

Of course these are rhetorical questions – the answer is that knowing these things would be extremely helpful to your job, and to your institution. Moreover, for a growing number of institutions, such answers are within reach because the institutions are hiring specialised staff to perform data mining.

Data mining in the education industry

Already common within the private sector, data mining is defined by research firm as:

“
the process of discovering meaningful new correlations, patterns, and trends by sifting through large amounts of data stored in repositories, and by using pattern recognition technologies, as well as statistical and mathematical techniques.”

Fundamentally for universities and colleges, data mining allows institutions to use data (which they often already have access to) in order to identify patterns that enable them to direct resources and staff more effectively, and understand their students more clearly.

The following table, from a whitepaper by Jing Luan, Chief Planning and Research Officer, entitled “Data mining applications in higher education,” shows how typical data mining questions in the private sector might translate to the higher education institution:

Data mining is already being employed at the University of East London, UK, where reports that information improvement manager Gary Tindell is using it to “see how his institution compares with others in terms of performance, staff salaries, recruitment and retention rates 
. [as well as] to assess the potential market for courses it is considering developing.” Tyndall says:

“We’ve built a student life cycle application, which takes all the student data off our student record system and monitors how admissions are going and how enrolments are going. We’ve also built a benchmarking application, and what we’ve done is taken a lot of the large data sets from Hesa and we compare ourselves on a whole range of stuff – whether that be awards, student numbers, staff-student ratios. We can compare ourselves with other institutions
 and use that data to position ourselves.”

Some think data mining is a transformative application

The blog lists ten ways it thinks data mining will transform higher education; here are five of them with excerpts:

• “It will create a more customised student experience: Data mining can be used to provide better advising, help choosing courses, and even homework help from professors, not to mention the applications it can have in helping students finance their education and plan for a future career.
• Students will get better advising: New software can help schools to determine how well students will do in a given course before they even set foot in the classroom, recommending courses and majors based on students’ academic records and previous performance. Students who haven’t fared well in certain courses for their major may be steered toward other careers that are a better fit for their abilities and goals, though some believe this may discourage students from challenging themselves to excel.
• It may play a role in how students choose colleges: ConnectEDU’s CEO Craig Powell imagines that in the future, students won’t even have to apply to college ‘because an algorithm will have already told them and the schools where they would fit best.’
• It will change college marketing: Data mining won’t just be important for helping students to choose a college; it’ll also help colleges choose which students to market their programmes to.
• It could help some students stay in school: Rio Salado College in Arizona, USA uses data on student performance in online courses to determine who is at risk of underperforming or dropping out. During the first week of class, the programme can predict with 70% accuracy the grade a student will get in a course by using an algorithm to monitor and assess online behaviour.”

How to start

Deciding to invest in data mining requires consideration, as it requires cooperation across the institution to decide on which data sets – and questions – need to be addressed, and then hiring qualified people to perform the analysis.

The UK’S University of Derby is one example of how an institution got going on data mining. Student experience project manager Jean Mutton realised the institution wasn’t using the information it already had (such as National Student Survey data) to best effect. She commented to Times Higher Education:

“We asked ourselves, ‘Can we capture this information, do we capture it already, would it be easy to start capturing it, or is it not capturable at all?’ Then we talked to our lecturers and asked what would help them in their pastoral, personal tutor role. They came up with a range of factors they would like to know that would help them to enrich the dialogue they have when meeting students one on one.”

Data mining also enables schools to measure and evaluate both agency and student performance, as we explore in a recent șÚÁÏčÙÍű Monitor article, which notes various ways in which both institutions and recruitment agencies can rate student performance, as well as essential steps for measuring results and continually improving.

As higher education institutions across the world are having to think much more like private sector businesses than they did even ten years ago, it seems inevitable that a growing number of the most ambitious will be considering some degree of data mining to refine their operations, improve the student experience, and compete more aggressively.

In closing, we’ll sign off with this attractive infographic on “big data” from :

The post Could you improve your recruitment results and student services through data mining? appeared first on șÚÁÏčÙÍű Monitor - Market intelligence for international student recruitment.

Of course these days, the institutional website is a key recruitment tool, which is why we’re devoting this post to best practices in website analytics as they relate to measuring and improving conversions (defined as any desired outcome of your online marketing). We’ll be basing much of this post on articles written by Scott Duncan on the ; the articles are excellent so our advice is to use this post as an entry point into them and we encourage you to read them in full.

Strategy first

It bears saying right up front that the key to optimising one’s website for recruitment goals is as much about strategy as technology. For example, you will want to make sure you have:

• linked website operation to overall operational goals (i.e., the website must be in the service of the overall operation – so its mission must be seriously linked to the overall goals of the institution);
• set up reasonable goals for website performance via measurable KPIs (key performance indicators);
• established a data capture system that will let you know what you need to know regarding those KPIs (i.e., you don’t need to know everything a website can be measured against – only those analytics that relate to your KPIs);
• created a data reporting and analysis system that is not overwhelming but again, linked to KPIs so you have a clear sense of what’s happening.

Using Google Analytics to track website performance

Given the expense of so many marketing initiatives, it’s reassuring to know that there are best-of-class analytics tools freely available from Google for measuring website performance, lead generation and conversion. The trick to using them properly is to translate website KPIs into Google Analytics Goals.

Higher Education Marketing’s “” notes that you can begin with as simple (and informative) a metric as page views of your “Thank you for registering in this course” page, but Google Analytics Goals can go much further than this:

“Let’s say, through careful tracking and analysis of the recruitment funnel at your institution, you know that inquiries from engaged, prospective students for detailed information about financial assistance is an extremely good indicator of student’s interest and their propensity to register. So your Google Analytics goal might become tracking and increasing the number of requests from prospective students for information on financial assistance. You can quantify this action by tracking the number of visitor page views on the financial assistance page on your site. As a final step in this process, set an expectation for what your baseline activity should be.

So to summarise:

Business objective = increase total registrations
Google Analytics Goal = page views of financial assistance page
Monthly goal = 50 page views of financial assistance page

Now that this goal is established, you can repeat the process and apply it to your other main business objectives to produce 5–10 Google Analytics Goals. By focusing on 5–10 KPIs, you should see improved results.”

Once you’ve set up your Google Analytics Goals, establish a good tracking system complete with regular opportunities to change things up if need be. That’s the beauty of website analytics: you can always switch which goals you’re tracking for a better sense of how your website is helping to encourage prospects to become students.

The whole picture: analytics that capture the complexity of the conversion process

As any education marketer knows, the journey of turning an international prospect into a student can involve many steps – particularly if the students are using multiple channels to engage with your institution.

Thankfully, Google Analytics offers ways to analyse this journey and thus, an opportunity to both shorten conversion processes (e.g., by setting up more effective navigational paths on websites) and understand how the various elements of a recruitment strategy are working together.

Again, Higher Education Marketing provides a helpful article on this topic: “.” The article demonstrates how Google’s Multi-Funnel Channels can:

• show how much various channels (e.g., paid search, referral, direct, organic search, email) are contributing to ultimate conversion;
• visualise the extent of each channel’s overlap with others in the conversion process (e.g., students used both paid and organic search to engage with the institution, ideally to the point of enrolling);
• determine and rank (in terms of contribution to conversion) the paths students are taking in their engagement with your institution (e.g., searched for a programme, found your institution via organic search, provided email to request further info, books a visit to your school) and orders them in terms of First, Assisting, or Last Interactions;
• assign monetary value to various steps in the conversion process;
• identify how much time is elapsing between steps of the conversion path, and how many steps are involved.

CRO: Conversion rate optimisation

Another very exciting tool at hand for marketers is conversion rate optimisation, or CRO, which is defined by Wikipedia as “a method of creating an experience for a website or landing page visitor with the goal of increasing the percentage of visitors that convert into customers.”

In short, CRO involves regularly tuning and testing the content on a website (far more often than a website redesign) to make sure it is optimised for conversion.

A pioneer of CRO, explains the questions to ask in order to change content for the better via a short and handy three-step formula:

• Relevance – Are you relevant to my wants/needs/desires (search query)?
• Value – Do I know why you are the right solution for me? Have you explained your value proposition/offer well?
• Call to action – Is it obvious what I need to do next? Have you given me the confidence to take that action?

Once you have made adjustments according to this formula, the next step would be to check the performance of old pages to the new ones you have created via Google Analytics .

±á±đ°ù±đ’s of how one CRO initiative, changing a “Submit” button to a “Get Info Package” button (and changing the colour of the font) yielded vastly superior conversion results:

“Over 6 days the new button produced 29 leads; the old button produced 13. Conversions increased by 121%.”

Further on the optimisation mission

This post has pointed to Google Analytics Goals, Multi-Channel Funnels, and CRO as essential elements of the education marketer’s toolkit, but of course it’s important not to forget the basics. From a 2012 șÚÁÏčÙÍű Monitor article, here are some essential bases to cover in making sure your institutional website is driving conversions:

• Step 1: Appeal – Look good; have great, inspiring copy; make sure all essential info is on your homepage; be optimised for mobile viewing.
• Step 2: Intrigue – Make the student want to explore your site further; ensure you provide clear and easy navigational cues; do not confuse in any way, shape, or form; include excellent explanatory features (e.g., well-made video, clear explanations of what things mean and how to proceed to find out more).
• Step 3: Invite – Include prominent invitations to phone or email, or possibly include a live-chat feature with a genuine representative from your organisation for immediate questions.
• Step 4: Follow-Up – In the event a student does proceed towards conversion (by applying online, registering for an open house, requesting info, making use of “contact us,” or registering a proïŹle), follow up immediately in a friendly, professional, non-pushy but very helpful manner. Make it abundantly clear how important the potential student’s interest is to you, and offer to answer any questions he/she may have in any form they would like (e.g., emailed info, personal phone chat, etc.)

All our best to you in 2013 as you work on optimising your website for international student recruitment! We will continue to post articles this year designed to help you achieve success in this goal and other best practices in international student recruitment.

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