Education Digital Marketing: What Can You Actually Track?

There is a common assumption that when it comes to digital marketing, one can "track everything". In reality, the ability to track marketing data and attribute a relationship of cause and effect is nearly entirely dependent on the marketing/data systems your institution uses.

Unfortunately, the education industry relies on many systems that do not allow full marketing attribution. The majority of front-end education technology products are designed to facilitate enrollment, but capturing marketing and source data is often an afterthought, leaving many schools in the dark when it comes to understanding how their marketing—digital or analog—is impacting enrollment.

What can be tracked?

Any digital agency should have very good insight into the top-line metrics that are provided by the ad platform.

Google:

• Impressions

• Clicks

• Ad-specific conversion (think phone calls and directions)

• Video views, watch rates, etc.

Social media:

• Impressions

• Reach

• Clicks (ad engagement, clicks to site)

Tools like Google Analytics can provide further insight into how these traffic sources behave once they are on the site.

• Landing page

• Time on page

• Session duration

• Pages per session

• Pages visited

• Bounce rate

• New, returning visitors and sessions

What about conversions?

The ability to record and track conversions is completely dependent on the systems you use. For example, if your student application form is hosted on a web domain that you don’t own, you will not be able to connect an application with it’s traffic source. This also means you cannot tie a new enrollment back to how that person found and engaged with your site. Custom goals can be created to track button clicks, however if you do not host your forms and their data, it will be nearly impossible to tie marketing activity to that record.

Some systems do allow you to track full attribution. We’ve achieved this on Slate and Hubspot, although both require a significant amount of investment in order to attain this level of tracking. We’ve also seen products like Halda be helpful in filling in the conversion gaps.