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Yesterday’s theories no longer apply in today’s higher education marketing reality. You need practical strategies you can use now — whether you’re up against demographic shifts, rising competition, shrinking budgets, federal student aid decreases, rapidly changing prospective student behaviors, or all of the above. Our hosts from VitalEDU break down everything from innovative paid ad strategies to creative approaches to stopping the scroll and boosting conversions. You’ll come away from each episode with at least one practical change you can implement immediately to drive results, or your money back. Just kidding, it’s free. (And it works.)
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English (US)
01:00:00.080 — 01:00:18.559 · Speaker 1
Our conversion rate before was 4.2%. Our conversion rate after was 6.3%. So that's a 50% increase in our conversion rate. And our cost per inquiry came down pretty much on par with that. We had a $148 cost per inquiry, and it dropped to
01:00:20.160 — 01:00:21.400 · Speaker 1
$67.
01:00:21.440 — 01:00:22.320 · Speaker 2
That's incredible.
01:00:22.320 — 01:00:45.560 · Speaker 1
So that's a drop of 55% for that specific program. Welcome to Apply Now, the podcast where higher education marketers explore strategies and insights they can put to work today. Each week, we cover everything from innovative approaches to paid media to the ways to reach the right students more effectively so you can make smarter marketing decisions and drive measurable results.
01:00:49.600 — 01:00:55.560 · Speaker 1
Something that I think is cool for both of us is that we're both have family vacation next week.
01:00:55.560 — 01:00:56.280 · Speaker 2
We do.
01:00:56.480 — 01:01:01.060 · Speaker 1
Um, we're both out. Where is your family vacation?
01:01:01.100 — 01:01:09.100 · Speaker 2
Our our family vacation is a little beach town up in Maine that we go to every year for the past 20 years.
01:01:09.140 — 01:01:16.220 · Speaker 1
20 years. Um, yeah. That's awesome. I know this year you're doing two weeks, split up.
01:01:16.220 — 01:01:21.500 · Speaker 2
Two weeks split up. Usually we go back to back. We're going to split it up. We're going to go July. End of August.
01:01:21.540 — 01:01:23.660 · Speaker 1
Okay. So a little mix up this year a little.
01:01:24.140 — 01:01:25.540 · Speaker 2
Not much. Not much.
01:01:25.580 — 01:02:41.330 · Speaker 1
Not not part of the plan. Um, well, my family trip this year, we usually do, um, Cape Cod for just five days, like 5 to 7 days. A couple families live down there year round. So then other people go and they rent a house. And then this year, I decided to just drop a land mine into the family group chat in December and was like, what if we did something totally different and you guys came to Portsmouth instead?
Um, and there was some arguments and um, not super well, People started booking hotels during a snowstorm when other people were out of power, and then that got a little tense. But we have arrived. Everybody is actually officially arriving into town today. Um, but I thought it was interesting thinking about because my sister was like that.
So, Julia, to change the family vacation that we've been doing for six years. Like it works. Why do you have to propose something different? And then it gave me some pause thinking about your family trip, because I know you do the same trip every single year. Because at work I think we are completely the opposite.
We are, which is very interesting. So why don't you tell people, how do you operate professionally?
01:02:41.850 — 01:03:01.390 · Speaker 2
Uh, so at work I definitely bias more towards big ideas and changing it up. And what if we did this? And what if we did that? Um, and I know that's very different from how you like to work. Yeah. You're more of our our consistent let's let's do it the same way.
01:03:01.430 — 01:03:24.990 · Speaker 1
I hate that. And I'm going to look at the audience for that. I hate that I am like, we know what works. We have a process. I want this all to get done with as least friction as possible. Please, can we not change the script up? And you love one day before something to be like, I think we're going to change the whole script on what this project looks like.
01:03:26.190 — 01:03:44.870 · Speaker 1
Um, but we came up or you told me really helpful language that I feel like has gotten us so far working professionally together. So hopefully this is, um, helpful to people listening who are in a same kind of friction with someone they work closely with. Um, about flying the plane and landing the plane.
01:03:45.270 — 01:05:03.520 · Speaker 2
Yeah. So, yeah. Okay, so that's, uh, Patrick Lynch, Guyanese, uh, working genius book. And it talks about the altitude of conversations and the altitudes of conversations goes your head in the clouds, you're flying the plane. Big ideas. And if we're having a conversation together, if I want to be talking about big ideas, I want you to be talking about big ideas, too.
And we have a conversation up there. Eventually, you got to get out of the clouds, and you have to start to try to land the plane. So you have to start to bring it down and bring it down, because while it's good to have big ideas, it means nothing if they never get done. And so you need someone to eventually start asking questions saying like, how are we going to do that?
And when is that going to get done? And who's going to pay for that, and what's the plan and what's the timeline. And so, you know, the altitude of conversation is like, okay, if we're having a brainstorming meeting, you know, four weeks out from a dead like four months out from a deadline, great. We can be at 30,000ft cruising altitude.
Love it. Eventually we have to move that conversation down and someone needs to say, okay, now we're done with big ideas. We're done with brainstorming. This is the idea we are now going to Execute where you and I got into trouble. And I think lots of teams get into trouble is trying to have two different altitudes of conversation where.
01:05:03.520 — 01:05:04.320 · Speaker 1
Turbulence.
01:05:04.360 — 01:06:18.420 · Speaker 2
Turbulence is the turbulence. It pulls us up and down, where if we're having a 30,000 foot meeting four months out and I'm saying, let's do this, and you're saying that'll never work because we don't have enough budget, that'll never work as this. We have to do this. What about this? What about this? What about this?
It's all tenacity. It's all like I want to land the plane, so I don't want to land a plane yet. We're trying to come up with ideas, and so we're going up and down. We're having a hard conversation. Reverse is also true, which is the example that you and I have lived through multiple times. You've lived through it more than I've had to live through.
It is okay. Two days before the presentation, this plane should have been fully landed. We are right there. And then all of a sudden here I come and say, what if we did something totally different? Or what if we changed this at the last minute? So the plane's almost on the ground and all of a sudden pulled up to 30,000ft again.
And that feels awful as well. And so I think you and I just being able to adopt the same language to understand like, oh, okay, you're trying to land the plane right now. I'm not trying to land the plane right now. Where are we at this? And what's appropriate for like, the level or the timeline of this project?
So I think we've come a long way and understanding that. And we even did a full team training for all our managers on that too, so that we could all work better across departments. But yes, we we, you and I bias towards different levels of altitude in this.
01:06:18.660 — 01:06:48.780 · Speaker 1
Um, we're probably it's probably been like a year and a half since I think we had this conversation. And like it is truly a moment for me professionally. Like I remember exactly where we were sitting. We were in Springfield sitting like corner at the big conference table, because the second you explained it, it was just so obvious.
And like all of the tension dissipated out of the room and I it was just like, oh, duh. Like we actually do like we collaborate really well and we really like working together. But we were having two separate conversations.
01:06:48.820 — 01:07:06.290 · Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah. At the at the wrong times. But really those things work great together. Yeah. If you can harness those, you can get the ideas and the brainstorming, and you can get someone to like tenacity, get it over the finish line and execute it. That's what you want. Yeah. That's the team that you want to build.
You have people who can do this and people who can do this. It's just you can't do it all at the same time.
01:07:06.330 — 01:07:48.810 · Speaker 1
Yes. And I think it's probably an entirely different podcast where we figure out why you want to land planes for family vacation, and I want to fly them high and change plans, but professionally, where the opposite. I don't think I could figure that out today, but I do want to talk about because I bias towards getting work done in accomplishing stuff.
It's so helpful to have you always bringing new ideas and always kind of pushing me and all the strategists on our team to try new things. And I know a Chris Getman rabbit hole deck that I have sat through from you is PPC landing pages, and that is what we are here to talk about today.
01:07:48.850 — 01:07:49.610 · Speaker 2
Awesome.
01:07:50.330 — 01:09:21.130 · Speaker 1
So we're having this conversation today because we see a lot of universities spending so much money, and we know budgets are so tight and so important in higher ed marketing, and they're paying to drive traffic to pages on their website. That's just hurting their performance in a lot of ways, wasting their budget.
So sometimes these pages are program pages, sometimes they're department pages. And those live on the main site. Um, and sometimes they're actually a paid landing page. So they've been designed for pay per click, but it's for an entire area of study rather than a specific program. Um, and I think we've heard so much justification and rationale for why this is, I think, you know, when universities are pushing to a program page, it's like we spend so much time making these and we just redesign them.
And everybody's agreed on what that copy says. Like we want to use them. Um, and we so hear that. But, um, they're not ideal. And then I think the thought behind sometimes driving to an area of study page is like, but we don't have the budget to support every program, so we need to just push the area of study or its we have to promote all of the programs equally.
So we want them all to have a shot on this one page. And so what we're going to talk about today hopefully, is, um, providing universities with good rationale of why program pages aren't cutting it and why area of study landing pages aren't going to cut it either. Awesome.
01:09:21.130 — 01:09:22.090 · Speaker 2
Cool, cool.
01:09:22.370 — 01:09:32.130 · Speaker 1
Okay, Chris, can you start with just talking to us about what a landing page is? I think that can even just be like a vague, weird, confusing word for some people.
01:09:32.170 — 01:10:25.240 · Speaker 2
Sure. Yeah. And so ideally, what a landing page is, is literally if someone clicks an ad, this is where they land. And so it's a page that's dedicated to a certain action that comes before it. So it could be an ad. It could also be a CTA on a website. But they click some sort of action button and then they need to go to a dedicated page that is supposed to basically force that action.
And that page typically is, um, is a is built to just get to that action. So it removes a lot of exit points. So typically on a landing page you wouldn't have a main navigation. You wouldn't be pulling them off in 10,000 different directions. You'd really just be trying to focus them on on filling out the form.
And so that's that's what it is. It's a page dedicated to an action where they land after they click a CTA of some sort. A lot of times for this conversation, we're talking about the CTA. Is the ad.
01:10:25.280 — 01:10:42.080 · Speaker 1
Yep. Okay. Perfect. And just to kind of like juxtapose that with just a website page. There's plenty of pages that I land on on a website I've clicked around. But those are not a landing page where I am really trying to push someone to take an action.
01:10:42.120 — 01:11:14.660 · Speaker 2
Yeah, from a usability standpoint, most of the pages on the website were made to be. You can get there from lots of different places and they serve a lot of different purposes. They serve top of funnel purposes of just general education. They serve bottom of funnel purposes for Ahrefs or apply now. They serve just a lot of different goals.
Just general education about the program. Um, and so those your program pages, they just serve a lot of goals. And we have a very specific goal with a landing page, which is why it's been created. And that's why we use the cool.
01:11:14.900 — 01:11:19.620 · Speaker 1
Um, and I think you would like to teach me something about attention ratio.
01:11:19.900 — 01:13:27.390 · Speaker 2
So the magic of landing page is if you take a step back and you just think of, um, user experience in general, if you look at user experience guidelines, there's this, uh, principle called attention ratio. And attention ratio is if I have a page, there are so many numbers, there's a set number of things I want a person to do on a page.
But then there's if you look at the page, it's how many things can they possibly do. so a landing page is a great example. So on a landing page I have one goal. I want them to fill out that form one goal. And then if I look across the landing page I say, am I asking them to do anything else? And I can literally count it up?
And so on a landing page, if you remove all the exit points and you don't link out to anywhere else, then it's I'm asking them to do this one thing. That's my goal and I'm not distracting them with anything else. So my attention is one for one. I want them to do one thing, and there's only one thing they can do on this page.
Compare that to let's say I link them to a program page for my ads. Okay? I want them to do one thing. I want them to fill out the form. However, the program page has the main navigation. So that in itself introduces at least, you know, I don't know, 20 extra things they could do by clicking all the different things in the main nav.
Okay, so now I have 20 possible I have one goal and there's 20 things they can do. Just having the main nav there. Now let's count up everything else on the page. What the page also says. Let's go look at faculty. Let's go look at curriculum. Let's go look at financial aid. Let's end it just there's so many competing things.
We're like, well, I want to do the one thing, but I am offering them to do about 50 other things on this page. So the attention ratio on that becomes very, very low. Um, and so you have a low attention ratio. And so I think generally in user experience on websites that's a, that's a, it's a principle that we talk about or like what I wanted to do.
Okay. I wanted to do this one thing. I'm asking him to do 50 things. What if I only asked them to do the one thing and only allow them to do the one thing? I bet you I would get to my goal much faster. So the the idea of attention ratio really backs up landing pages, but I think is also just a helpful principle to have in mind when you design any types of pages on a website.
01:13:27.430 — 01:14:18.530 · Speaker 1
Yeah. What's coming to me instantly is our CRO audit that we do, um, when we are designing websites, but then when we're also onboarding a new university, um, is one of the items is does the home page have fewer than five CTAs? And I think in a lot of cases when I've presented that, um, the audience is always like, well, of course there's less than five.
It would be crazy to have more than five. But once you get into it, there's usually a request info. Visit us. Apply now. Donate. Learn about our history. Meet the faculty, explore degrees like it does. It gets unwieldy fast. And if you've landed and maybe aren't exactly sure what action you want to take yet, your attention is immediately divided 7 or 8 ways rather than focused on one action.
Yep.
01:14:18.730 — 01:14:24.530 · Speaker 2
Yep. And that that's that's why landing page is generally work. Well when we test them against other pages, which we'll get into.
01:14:24.570 — 01:14:30.490 · Speaker 1
Okay. Do you want to ask me the hot pink note in here that I told you to ask me?
01:14:30.530 — 01:14:31.970 · Speaker 2
I do, I do. Um,
01:14:33.130 — 01:14:49.590 · Speaker 2
so there's just a note in our script here that says Chris needs to ask Julie about airports and museums, and I asked you about this ahead of time. What is this? And you wouldn't tell me, but you swore it was relevant to this part of the conversation. So I'm dying to know. What are we talking about with airports and museums?
01:14:49.630 — 01:15:45.950 · Speaker 1
Yeah. So it's not that cool. Um, we've overhyped it, and I didn't come up with this. This was via me chatting with AI. So I am not taking any ownership for this really awesome thing. Um, but just to kind of help juxtapose a website page versus a landing page, an airport is designed with a lot of signage and in such a way that you are supposed to arrive and get to your gate.
The whole setup is to funnel you to one place, whereas a museum is set up to make you explore and to wander. So there are signs, but there's a lot of open ends and places where you can choose and split and go upstairs. And I just thought that that was like the clearest distillation of a website page. We want you to land, we want you to wander.
We want you to explore, see what interests you versus a landing page. We want to get you to your gate. We want you to submit a form for us 100%.
01:15:45.950 — 01:16:04.860 · Speaker 2
I love that. That's a great comparison. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. And I think we probably could use that more with, uh, with our clients of like, hey, are we doing we design a museum, we design an airport right now. And for me, that all just comes back to goals, too. What's the goal here? We're creating a museum experience where they're supposed to wander, or we just trying to get them to one specific thing.
01:16:05.940 — 01:16:36.860 · Speaker 1
Love it, love it. Okay, cool. Um, so the next thing we're going to talk about on here is what are the key elements of a landing page? Um, I will address the audience again. We have an outline that we put together ahead of time. And I wanted to keep this part of the outline of surprise. So I put it in white font and emailed Chris seven times and told him to not highlight the document because I did not want him to accidentally reveal, um, the acrostic I've made.
01:16:36.900 — 01:16:38.500 · Speaker 3
Oh, for the key.
01:16:38.580 — 01:16:39.020 · Speaker 1
Element.
01:16:39.060 — 01:16:39.700 · Speaker 2
I didn't look.
01:16:39.940 — 01:16:40.820 · Speaker 3
Like a landing.
01:16:40.820 — 01:16:52.560 · Speaker 1
Page, so I will now highlight the font for myself so I can read it. So key elements of a landing page All landing pages need to have focus.
01:16:53.280 — 01:16:53.720 · Speaker 3
Love it.
01:16:53.760 — 01:16:55.320 · Speaker 1
Once again for the camera.
01:16:55.360 — 01:16:59.920 · Speaker 3
Oh, wait. That's that's the that's. That's the cross stitch. All right. All right. All right, I love it.
01:16:59.960 — 01:17:00.800 · Speaker 1
Focus.
01:17:00.840 — 01:17:01.480 · Speaker 3
Focus.
01:17:01.520 — 01:17:05.000 · Speaker 1
Okay. First one. Do you want to guess what the f is? Or do you just want me to tell you?
01:17:05.000 — 01:17:05.880 · Speaker 3
I just want you to tell you.
01:17:06.120 — 01:17:44.360 · Speaker 1
Okay. Um, the F is my favorite, and it is first impression. And I also like that it comes first. Um, the page must match the user's query. I get so irrationally mad. And this happens on the Serp. Going to an organic listing too. I get so irrationally mad when my search matches the headline or matches the SEO title tag, and then I land on the page and none of those words are there.
It is like I go back and I'm like, did I click the wrong link? So can you talk to me a little bit about first impression and matching a page as close as you can to the user's query, and why that's so important?
01:17:44.400 — 01:17:45.760 · Speaker 3
Yeah. It's so this.
01:17:45.760 — 01:17:54.590 · Speaker 2
Is a mistake that happens a lot. Um, especially with higher end marketing where they have a lot of programs to advertise for, is
01:17:55.670 — 01:18:08.230 · Speaker 2
at its very basic. We have to start all the way back with the user. So you have a potential student and they're searching for something. They type it into Google. They say I'm looking for a, I don't know, an online.
01:18:08.510 — 01:18:09.350 · Speaker 1
Business analytics.
01:18:09.590 — 01:18:18.870 · Speaker 2
Or online business analytics. Master's great. They type that in. They see an ad. Ideally this is the first part of pattern matching for them. They see an ad in the ad says.
01:18:19.510 — 01:18:21.150 · Speaker 1
Business Analytics miss.
01:18:21.190 — 01:18:21.430 · Speaker 3
Yep.
01:18:21.470 — 01:18:44.430 · Speaker 2
And you're like okay, perfect match okay. This is what I wanted. This is what the ad said. That's for me. Click. I'm going to get a high click through rate for that. Ideally because your keyword matches your ad copy very closely. Feeling good? Get to the page. You want that to happen again. So they want to land on that page.
And the first thing they should see should pay off what they thought they were going to get.
01:18:44.470 — 01:18:46.130 · Speaker 1
Business analytics Mis.
01:18:46.170 — 01:19:20.490 · Speaker 2
Business analytics Mis. That's what it should say. At the top of the page, it should pay that off. And you say I landed in the right place, which it seems very basic. And if you do it, if you change your head to like product marketing real quick, it would be egregious to not do this. If someone says, I'm looking for, you know, red running shoes, and they click an ad that says Red riding shoes, and they land on the page and it's hiking boots, you'd be like, this is not for me, I'm out of here.
But for whatever reason, with a lot of these higher ed landing pages, it's okay to dump them into some other place.
01:19:20.530 — 01:19:20.930 · Speaker 3
That.
01:19:21.010 — 01:19:21.930 · Speaker 2
Has nothing to do with.
01:19:21.930 — 01:19:22.170 · Speaker 3
It.
01:19:22.210 — 01:19:41.490 · Speaker 1
Or a page that just is. Explore our business degrees, right? That as a user I'm like, well, now you lied to me because it looks like you don't have a business analytics mis because if you did, surely I would be on that page. And so instead you're serving me up a dropdown menu of all the other degrees I can explore.
01:19:41.530 — 01:20:45.340 · Speaker 2
Well you're asking yes. And you're asking the the visitor to do more work. Yeah. Which is something you never want to do again in basic user experience approach. You want to reduce friction. Everything in user experience is about reducing friction. And so you don't want to ask them to take four steps when they can only take one.
And you don't want it to be a choose your own adventure like, hey, I got you. You said you wanted this degree. The ad said I'd have this degree for you, and then I'd drop you on this page and say, go find it. Yeah, go figure it out on your own. It's a very empathetic thing to do as a marketer, because this person wants the specific thing and you're saying, go figure it out.
It's probably in here somewhere. I'm sure you can find it in the dropdown. And so like that is where we see the friction because we're not being empathetic to the user. And we're just saying, yeah, I'm sure they'll find it. We have a lot of degrees. Not a big deal. And then that's where you lose people. That's where you have the drop off.
They're going to need to go find it. And they get distracted by some of them. Maybe they want this degree. I didn't really want that degree. Do they have it? I'm trying to piece it together. You're just asking them to do too much work, which is just UX. Know. Know.
01:20:45.380 — 01:20:52.900 · Speaker 1
Exactly. Okay. Um, going back to focus, that was our f our second letter. Our o
01:20:53.940 — 01:21:04.180 · Speaker 1
offer a strong offer with clarity. So do you want to talk about offers on, uh, university paperclip landing pages?
01:21:04.220 — 01:24:09.370 · Speaker 2
Yeah, I think that's very important. So we already talked about this tension ratio thing where we say, hey, really, you should just have one goal and allow them to do one thing and that one thing. And the one goal should be to take you up on whatever the offer is. And so crafting a compelling offer is really important.
And this is an area where we see, uh, higher ed have some challenges as well. So typically what we're going to see on most landing pages is an RFI form. Um, but sometimes you're going to see apply now or sometimes you're going to see a lot of different offers if you dump them into a program page, and there's going to be a lot of like request transcripts or like whatever, you're going to have a lot of different offers there.
And so what you want to have and what you really want to be thinking through of your landing page is what is the most compelling offer that's going to get someone to convert at the level I want them to convert at. And so I think that's just a part of the decision making that you need to go through. I think most universities are going to fall into an RFI offer, and that's where they're going to stop.
And this is what we see all the time. RFI requests for more information. Just fill it out. No one takes the time to say what's the information they're going to get. They don't make that offer more compelling because RFI on its own could mean anything to anybody. I don't know what I'm asking for, and if I don't know what I'm asking for, I don't know how much I value it.
The offer generally should be like you're trying to tip the scales because the offer you have to fill out a form. The form is going to ask me for my personal information, and I value that there's a value to that. I don't really want to give up my phone number or my email or whatever, so I value that. The offer needs to tip the scales and say, well, know the value you're going to get from this is more than the value then more than you value your personal information that you're going to give up.
And so the offer needs to be compelling in that way. And where I think RFI is fall short is they don't sell what the RFI is. They need to break down to try to make that more compelling. Like, listen, if you fill this out, we're going to provide you with program overviews, you know, a scholarship information, financial aid information like we do what's called offer stacking where you say, okay, the offer is RFI, but you're actually going to get this and this and this and this and this.
You're going to get all these things when you when you fill out this form. All of a sudden the value of that becomes much more tangible to me. Before Black Box, I don't know what I'm going to get RFI. Who knows? I do an offer stack. I say, nope, this is what you're actually going to get and all these things have value.
All of a sudden it's like, okay, now it's clear and it's tangible. What I'm going to get. I value those things. I actually am very interested in what those are. Now all of a sudden you can see the balance of like, okay, I guess I will. I guess I will fill out this form and give up my, some of my information. So they offer is is critical.
01:24:09.410 — 01:26:09.090 · Speaker 1
And also I mean like B2B is they're like they don't have request information. They have requests to quote get an estimate, see a proposal. There's clarity in those offers. And so yeah, when we're talking about university marketing request info. Yeah. Get tuition get more information about curriculum.
And so I think kind of the last point I want to make too is it also doesn't even necessarily need to be that offer stack you just talked about of we're going to give you, you know, these five different things. It can also just be an enrollment advisor will contact you via text, via email, via phone in the next 24 hours, or in 3 to 5 business days.
Like, I think the most important piece here is the clarity because I get so frustrated. Yeah, when it's just a random request info, we'll do another episode, definitely about alternatives to request infos, because I think we could be doing so much more there. But I do think request info has a place in paperclip landing pages, because you can't put everything on the page because we just talked about attention ratio.
And so there is importance in encouraging people to request more, but just be clear about it. What is the more I just gave up my cell phone number, is someone just going to call me out of the blue? That's scary, but maybe I'll at least be prepared for it. Am I going to get a text? Should I be checking my emails?
So offers with clarity is our. Oh, now we're on to see credibility, social proof and evidence. Um, I really like this one. I think this can come in so many different ways. I think one really strong way is just written testimonials. So if you have, you know, a survey that's gone out to alumni or current students and you have kind of written tidbits, if you filmed testimonials at graduation, you can grab a quote out of that and just park it in a text box.
Or you can embed a video so we can actually see a live person from your program talking. Um, that's our see. Do you have any other social proof or evidence you like? I like testimonials.
01:26:09.130 — 01:26:17.370 · Speaker 2
I think testimonies are great. Uh, it depends if my undergraduate or graduate, if we're talking about graduate degrees, you know, placement rates work really well.
01:26:17.490 — 01:26:19.130 · Speaker 1
Salaries after graduation.
01:26:19.170 — 01:26:39.720 · Speaker 2
Salaries after graduation, showing um, companies graduates work at. So like literally logo bar graduates of this program work at these impressive companies. And what we're doing with the the the social proof part of it from, from a UX perspective again, is risk reduction. We're saying
01:26:41.200 — 01:27:44.700 · Speaker 2
with this program be more or less risky for me, if I was to commit to this program, what can, um, what can this program tell me that makes this more of a sure thing? Like, I'm gonna spend a bunch of money on this. I'm going to commit years of my life to this. Is it going to turn out okay? And what we want to do is reduce the perceived risk to them by saying, listen, here's all these successful graduates.
Look at them. They're living these great lives, or they work at these impressive companies or their average salaries or the these impressive numbers. And so if you think about it, devoid of that stuff, you're like, I don't know about this program. It's not telling me anything that happens on the other side of this.
And that feels risky because there's unknowns to it. But if you can make it, if you can reduce the risk by saying, like, listen, this is this is a straightforward thing. You do this program, you get these results, my risk is reduced and risk is a friction point again. So we're talking about friction over and over and over again.
That's another place that they run into friction. And that's where we need to proactively address it.
01:27:44.740 — 01:29:02.010 · Speaker 1
Yeah. Another stat that I really like for credibility is and I ask every university this, how many living alumni are there because I think that's so compelling of, you know, there's 3000 living alumni or there's 80,000 living alumni, if you're someone you know, huge like Penn State. Um, because I want to know, are there other people who are out there in the world who have had my experience?
What kind of tribe am I joining? Am I going to bump into these people at places of work and have this awesome networking connection? Um, so I think that's another really easy stat to. Yeah. All right. Onto the you. So we've got folk down. We're on to you and you is user centered copy. Um, so I think this one is a little bit kind of more specific to graduate marketing than to undergraduate marketing.
But I think in graduate marketing, we talk a lot about how people aren't buying your school. They are buying their future. So we need to talk to them about what they're going to get out of this degree. And we just kind of talked about that in credibility, too. But this is a slightly different lens on that of we want to show how the how the user, how the student is going to benefit from this program, not necessarily, you know, who our faculty are, who our you know, how our facilities are.
It's all about what they're going to get out of it. How is their life going to transform?
01:29:02.050 — 01:29:31.810 · Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah. And I think some of that is is skill based. Like you're going to pick you don't have these skills and now you will have these skills. We already tied it to the end result. So you know what the end results are going to be. But it's very important for them to also know as a person and as a professional, I'm going to come out with I learned this, I learned this.
Maybe there's internships, maybe there's work studies, maybe there's like different independent studies that they could be doing to to show them like, wow, I'm going to have all this experience. And that's going to make me much more like 4 to 5 professional coming out of this program.
01:29:31.850 — 01:30:30.310 · Speaker 1
Yep. And yeah, my only asterisks there for undergraduate marketing is I do think undergraduate students are buying the university a little bit more than. Graduate students are so undergraduates, they want to know dining halls. They want to know dorms. They want to know about sports, whereas graduate.
They're not necessarily there for all those amenities. They're really they're about for developing their own life. Yeah. Okay. Last one s simple design. All right. Um, so no nav, no footer, no chat box, no exit points. Um, and I think this really just comes back to that attention ratio that you were just going on.
Um, we want people focused on our one mission, which is submitting that form, which is taking the next step with us. And so the we want to eliminate as many things from the page as we can so that they are focused on just that one action. Yeah.
01:30:30.590 — 01:30:31.390 · Speaker 2
Makes sense.
01:30:31.430 — 01:30:49.330 · Speaker 1
Um, so let's just kind of quickly, now that we've kind of run through this focus framework. Let's just kind of put program pages through it. I think this might kind of be a little bit repetitive, but I want to put it through this focus lens. So why don't program pages work is a good landing page. What are they missing in focus?
01:30:49.730 — 01:32:01.960 · Speaker 2
I mean, everything in focus. They are lacking any focus because they serve so many goals. It's not that program pages are great, very important. It's just we have to zoom out and say, well, what's the goal? What are we trying to do with this? And so yeah, too many goals. Yeah. Asking people to do too many things.
Uh, navigation is wide open. So it's a museum museum like experience. They can just go wherever. Yeah. Um, but when we're paying for paid ads and we have a very specific goal, and we're bidding on, let's say we're bidding on keywords that are like low funnel keywords that show high intent, where someone is looking for this program and they might even then modify it, maybe in a certain state, like, yeah, there'll be enough modifiers with this that you're like, okay.
This is like a high intent, low funnel keyword. I'm going to put them into a page that's going to meet that intent. Program pages. Um, or area study pages or college pages. None of them. They serve too many other goals. Yeah. And so there's just too many distractions. And I think now that I have this museum vernacular, I think it's just a museum experience.
Like, that's what you're you're inviting them into. And that doesn't meet your goal as a marketer.
01:32:02.000 — 01:32:25.040 · Speaker 1
Yeah. And so they have a really strong first impression. They definitely have a really strong credibility built into it. But yeah, I think they're lacking a really strong offer with clarity. And I think they're lacking a simple design. Um, why don't area of study landing pages work? So why doesn't it work to send somebody to a business landing page, to a health landing page, to an arts landing page?
01:32:25.520 — 01:32:42.580 · Speaker 2
Yeah. The reason it doesn't work is, again, if we go back to the they typed in, I'm looking for a business analytics degree. they click add that says Business Analytics degree, and then you drop them into an area of study page where it might be it's in there somewhere.
01:32:42.620 — 01:32:43.300 · Speaker 1
Yeah.
01:32:43.940 — 01:35:04.270 · Speaker 2
It's friction. It's just too much. You're asking the too to to do too much work. Yeah, that's all it is. Just user experience wise. You're asking them to go figure it out, go find it on their own. That's not what they were looking for. They said a very specific thing. They clicked a very specific ad, give them a very specific landing page.
If you ask them to do too much work, you're going to lose them. And that's why the area study pages don't work. And then on top of it, if you want to get a little bit more technical, Google Search ads has a score called Quality Score. So they grade, uh, actually your keywords on several different quality score metrics.
And one of the metrics is called landing page experience. And so what they're doing is they're grading the keywords that you're buying against the landing pages that you're sending them to. Because Google in the algorithm and they know what they want is they want high conversion rates. They want high like high relevancy.
And so when Google sees, hey, you're buying this business analytics keyword and you're sending them to a page that when I as Google scanned the page, I can't find a lot of mentions of business analytics. I see a lot of other stuff here. I'm going to say it's a bad match. I'm going to give you a low quality score.
So that's like a real score. That's in Google search ads, dashboards. And it's going to say you're getting a low quality score here. When you have a low quality score, Google is actually going to make you pay more. They're going to make you pay more per click because they're going to say you're having a lower conversion rate.
You're not doing a good job serving our users. Google considers them to be their users, and they want their users to go to high converting places, because they want everybody to have a very relevant experience on Google. They don't want. If you zoom out and like every Google ad, took you to someplace that wasn't relevant at all, people would stop clicking the ads.
Because every time I click an ad on Google, it just takes me to, again, I want running shoes and it keeps taking me to hiking boots. Like, this is this is garbage. And so they penalize you for that. So if you are dumping people into an area of study page when they are clicking, when their keyword is very, very specific to a degree, you're going to get a low landing page quality score.
Google will then make you pay more, and sometimes they'll even stop showing your ads. You can log into the Google Ads dashboard and it'll say rarely shown due to low quality score. They'll they'll take it as far as like we're not we're going to barely even show this ad because you're so irrelevant in matching your keywords to landing pages.
01:35:04.270 — 01:35:20.390 · Speaker 1
And that's not, um, that's not it. That metric, the quality score metric, doesn't just kind of like live. When you sign into the Google Ads home page and you're in campaigns and you're kind of drilling down into ad groups, it's not there. It's on a different screen. You have to kind of.
01:35:20.430 — 01:36:00.050 · Speaker 2
You gotta add more columns. Yeah, usually it's not there. By default, it's going to be on your keywords, um, your keywords list screen, because they're going to either the quality scores attached to the keyword. But you're going to have to go into the add more columns and you're going to have to custom add it.
They're not going to be added by default. But this is. This is like the next level. Yeah. This is your next level pay per click marketing for higher editor. Everybody has that data. Yep. People don't usually look at it. Yeah but it's a it's a real good cheat sheet for if you need to know. Do I need to knock out more custom landing pages.
Google will tell you. You can just look at your keyword list and anywhere you have a low quality score, they're saying at least a low landing page quality score. They're saying we don't think your keywords match the landing page as you're sending them to.
01:36:00.090 — 01:38:56.120 · Speaker 1
Yeah, and I say that because it's not necessarily obvious to find that score, but it is really easy. So once you know where to look you can just pop it in. If you work with an agency, if any of these universities work with agencies, they can just say, hey, would you mind, you know, exporting a list of our landing page quality scores, like and let's talk about that and during our next status call.
So easy. Um, I have some data that I would love to tell you about. All right. Because I'm a reporting nerd. And I think numbers, of course, are the most important part of all of this. So being able to actually make an impact. Um, we onboarded a university who had didn't have degree specific landing pages. They had really healthy budgets, which is why it's so exciting.
And we were like, we got to make more landing pages. Um, and so we were sending people to program pages, which really wasn't going well. Um, and we were sending people to area of study landing pages. So I have some data that just is going to compare what our conversion rates were and what our cost per inquiries were for the area of study landing page versus the program specific landing page.
So we have the data for six months before and then six months after. So we're looking at a pretty clean year of data. Um, so starting with there was a psychology programs, um, area of study. And so you landed there. The H1 just said explore our psychology programs. And then within the form there is a dropdown menu where you self-selected what degree you wanted to go for.
So we broke that out into degree specific landing pages. Um, and so this one is specifically for a psychology PhD. It has a specific concentration to, um, so a really specific degree. And our conversion rate on the area of study page was 6.1%. And our conversion rate on the degree specific page was 7.8%.
So that's going from 6.1 to 7.8. We kind of talk about that as it's more of an activity metric sometimes, like it's a little bit more vanity. And you know we always want to drill deeper than that. So like let's get closer. I think what's really cool is our cost per query went down. So our cost per inquiry went down from $160 to $150.
Again, that's not everything, but that's impactful. Like that's $10 for every single inquiry that we just saved. Um, that can now get reinvested into more campaigns. So that was for that one psychology PhD. We spun out another degree specific um, landing page, again from the psychology area of study page.
Our conversion rate before was 4.2%. Our conversion rate after was 6.3%. So that's a 50% increase in our conversion rate. And our cost per inquiry came down pretty much on par with that. We had a $148 cost per inquiry and it dropped to
01:38:57.760 — 01:38:59.000 · Speaker 1
$67.
01:38:59.040 — 01:38:59.880 · Speaker 2
That's incredible.
01:38:59.880 — 01:39:54.870 · Speaker 1
So that's a drop of 55% for that specific program. Um, and then the last example I have on here, too. We were sending people to a general business area study page. So they were choosing between, you know, accounting, finance, financial risk management, financial wealth management. 7 or 8 different MBAs.
Um, and we spun out just an accounting mis specific dedicated page. Um, we went from and I'm going to preface this with this is in a highly competitive market and its business degrees, which have some of the highest cost per clicks out there right now. Um, we went from a 7.3% conversion rate to a 10.9, 10.9% conversion rate on the page, which is really cool.
That's a 48% increase in conversion rate. And our cost per inquiry came down 31%. So we had a $512 cost per inquiry, and we've gotten it down to a $350 cost per inquiry.
01:39:54.950 — 01:39:57.310 · Speaker 2
Big changes. Yeah, big changes.
01:39:57.310 — 01:40:22.630 · Speaker 1
And we're not done. There are still, of course, so many optimizations to be made. Once we have the degree specific landing page. It doesn't stop there. We're changing the offer. We're changing the text on the submit button. We're adding different types of social proof. And we can see that number hopefully come down even lower.
But huge gains when we're looking at the cost per inquiry, which then hopefully just trickles down through the whole funnel. We're enrolling students more efficiently.
01:40:22.950 — 01:40:59.650 · Speaker 2
And I think that also like it pays for itself. Like knocking out a more custom landing page doesn't is not a huge ask. Like that's not a that's not a high effort thing to do. And then you get these types of gains 30% drop in cost per increase 50% drop in cost per like just for, you know, whatever it took. But like not that much time to knock out those custom pages.
It's just it's such an opportunity. Um, that is so great that we were able to see that here. But this is the opportunity that a lot of schools have that are dropping them into area of study pages or, or college specific pages or even degree pages, but.
01:40:59.690 — 01:41:07.850 · Speaker 1
And so what do you think are universities? Um, who are listening? What do you think is 1 or 2 things they could do this week?
01:41:08.530 — 01:42:04.190 · Speaker 2
Yeah, I think first step just know like let let let's just take a look at the landing pages. Like if you're using an agency ask them to just say, hey, can I get an export of the landing pages that we're we're sending our traffic to? Because it would be great to know, are we using landing pages or are we not using landing pages?
So that's the first step. Like that's the very first thing. Are we? Are we dumping them into home pages? Are we dumping them into, you know, college or area study or program pages? Just first is just know if you're even using them. So that's where I start. That's the first step. And then the second step is starting to apply more of the 202 level stuff that we talked about here.
How tailored are these landing pages to the keywords. How tailored are they in terms of quality score? Um, are they using social proof? Are they everything that we, we just went through. That's the that's the next step is okay if we are using landing pages. Great. Now let's apply the rubric that you and I just talked about.
01:42:04.550 — 01:43:05.540 · Speaker 1
And I think I would say just pick one. I mean, for this university I was just talking about we are truly promoting 80 different graduate degrees. Like we did not create 80 different degree landing pages in one week or one month over the course of a year. We have chipped away at it. But it all started with, okay, we just need one.
We just need this one test case. it's going to be really small. But if we can prove that our landing page quality score goes up, that our conversion rate goes up and that our cost per inquiry gets lower. Now we've got proof of concept. We can, you know, shop that around internally to whoever we need to to say, hey, you know what we need 30 minutes or 1 hour or an hour and a half to duplicate this one landing page we have and then flip over copy to make it degree specific.
So I would say just start with one and get eyes on it. Make sure you have a good enough budget. Um, and once you can see the positive improvements now you have all of the data and justification you need to go do it on a second to go do it on ten to eventually have all of these flipped over.
01:43:05.660 — 01:43:07.900 · Speaker 2
Definitely. That's the way to do it. Build a business case.
01:43:07.940 — 01:43:14.180 · Speaker 1
All right. Sounds good. PPC landing pages. What do they need to have? Focus, focus, focus.
01:43:14.180 — 01:43:15.460 · Speaker 2
I just learned that today.
01:43:15.500 — 01:43:16.020 · Speaker 1
Perfect.
01:43:16.020 — 01:43:16.860 · Speaker 2
So good.