Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
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.)
We took their branded search budget from 40% of their overall budget to 5%. And then everyone just had to kind of be really patient and trust the process. And by the end of kind of that first six month window of working together, despite our cost per inquiry being up, the number of applications had actually doubled. 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.
Julia:I'm Julia.
Chris:I'm Chris.
Julia:And we are both digital marketing strategists at Vital who specialize in higher education. Alright. So with this being our first episode, I think it would be fun for our listeners to get to know you a little bit better as a marketer and as a professional.
Julia:And I think a nice little story to encapsulate this is we had the privilege recently of going to the NAGAP conference in Baltimore, and we got to drive to the airport together. And we get into your car and you start it, and I'm expecting radio, music, podcasts, but it's an audiobook playing. And what I think is such an interesting insight about you is I immediately comment on the audiobook. Instead of pausing it, you just turn the volume all the way down. So the book just stays playing on our whole drive to the airport, and I'm watching it play, and it's never paused.
Julia:So explain to everyone why that doesn't bother you at all.
Chris:Clearly, it bothered you. It doesn't bother me at all because I reread and relisten to books a lot. So I've been a big fan of the idea of reading less number of overall books and trying to get to a number of very impactful books that I find to be impactful, and then I will listen to them or read them several times over. And so whatever audiobook I had played in my car, I definitely had already listened to that two or three times. And so it was fine for it to just cruise because I've already read it, but, there's always stuff you pick up.
Chris:There's always stuff you pick up on the second time or the third time you go through it. Especially if it's a really impactful book, I like to try to make myself, like, master whatever the subject matter is in that book. And so for me, it's a mixture of listening to it or reading it several times. And then after I read it the first time, I try to apply it in my working life where I try to use the lessons and apply it. I, you know, six months later, listen to it again, and I'm like, oh, hadn't learned about that point.
Chris:So anyhow, probably seemed like a psychopath, but was fine letting it go. I probably already listened to that two or three times.
Julia:And, yes, I guess it probably goes without saying that this was not, like, a fun fiction audiobook to repeat it yet. This was a marketing audiobook, a professional development audiobook that you just are running on repeat on the drive to work. But I think that's really cool, and I do it it has given me a lot of pause. But I think one of our conversation starters in our department meeting recently was, you know, what's a book you've read recently? And I think you wanted to pivot the question to be like, what's a book you've reread recently?
Julia:And I, yeah, had this moment of like, oh my gosh. I am not revisiting any texts that I love because I'm just always out trying to find more things that I love instead of, yeah, kind of obsessing and digging into things that I know that I already found value in, which is why I think we were picked as the host for this podcast because I think, yeah, you and I both have this really curious, obsessive nature. We're also in the office a lot. Yeah. I think that's That helps.
Julia:Probably a factor too. But, yeah, the goal of this podcast is for us to be able to kind of go in-depth on some of these more niche and just really specific tactical higher ed marketing strategies so that hopefully we can add more value to our own university partners that we work with, but, hopefully, other partners that are just listening. So today, our topic today, we're talking about branded search and branded search terms and why spending too much on branded search ads might actually be hurting overall efficiency even though it might be looking like it's helping. I wanted to start though at a really high level, Chris. Can you just talk about what is a branded search term versus what is a non branded search term?
Julia:Sure.
Chris:So when we talk about branded search, first off, we're talking about Google Search. So when we're talking about Google Search ads and we're talking about when our ads show up. And so a branded search term would be if you Googled the name of the university, say University of Massachusetts. That's the branded search term. You just typed in the brand name, branded search.
Chris:Non branded search term would be someone looking for, an MBA in Massachusetts. They haven't said the brand name. They haven't said a university by name, which means they haven't selected a specific institution, but they are looking. So since it doesn't include a brand name, it's nonbranded.
Julia:Alright. And so when we're talking about bidding on branded search term versus nonbranded search terms, can you just kind of talk to me about, like, what is the value of bidding on each of those and kind of yeah. What types of people are searching each of those terms and what value does that have for us?
Chris:Sure. So, with the branded search terms, again, is people who are looking for the brand name, which we can make the assumption they're already familiar with that brand. They are already aware of the University of Massachusetts, and they are doing a search for them to learn something more about them. And so though that that audience is familiar with the brand already. That's the assumption.
Chris:Nonbranded, the assumption is these people do not know about my brand yet.
Julia:Mhmm.
Chris:They are looking for, let's let's say, an MBA in Massachusetts. They haven't said a name yet. And so the intent for us is very different. There is this bucket of branded people who they know about me already, And then there's this bucket of nonbranded people. They don't know about me, but they are looking for the thing that my institution offers.
Chris:That's the difference.
Julia:Okay. And so I want you to jump in and correct me if I'm wrong, but some of the value of bidding on branded search terms, so people who are already asking for our university by name, value of that being just taking up more real estate on the search engine result page. I know we talk about that a lot from an organic perspective. Like, we want you in a blue link. We want you in the people also ask.
Julia:We want you in the AI overview. So one benefit of bidding on your own branded search term is just even more real estate. You're now in another position on that search engine result page. And then another benefit being being competitive and making sure that you're taking up that spot so that other people aren't bidding on your branded terms and trying to take your audience.
Chris:Yep. I think those are those are both correct reasons why people do it. Again, you wanna own the most real estate, and then we've you know, I I think with the institutions that we talk to frequently, they're actually not as concerned about the real estate. They're much more focused on, like, defensive positioning, reputation management, where they want to show up. They know some competitors might be bidding on their brand name.
Chris:And that's that's most of where the focus is when we talk to institutions about branded searches. Well, our competitors are bidding on our name. We wanna show up. We wanna make sure when someone's looking for us, they see us at the top.
Julia:Mhmm. Okay. And so, obviously, yeah, that's an important part of it. If someone is sitting down and they're asking for our university by name, there's gonna be, yeah, five or links up at the top. We wanna make sure that we're up there.
Julia:But we don't want what we don't want is to overspend on branded search, especially, yeah, if you're a university that already has huge brand awareness and you have a lot of people searching for you by name, if you're just kind of are letting your branded search budget out the door, you might be spending a ton of your money there. So when we're talking about budget allocation between branded search and non branded search, what is like do you have a rule of thumb that you tend to recommend to universities?
Chris:Yes. But before I say it, I think the important thing to know when you're talking about the the budget allocation between the two is what are your goals?
Julia:Mhmm.
Chris:So you have this budget that you're gonna use in Google Search. What's your goal for that budget? Because we just talked about these two different buckets. There's a defensive reputational play. You can say, listen, my goal is I'm just trying to make university shows up whenever anybody is ever looking for us.
Chris:For us, it's a brand awareness play, it's a reputation management play, it's a defensive positioning play. That's one goal. I just wanna make sure that I'm always there when people look for us.
Julia:Yeah. It's
Chris:not attached to any other metrics really. Just a visibility metric. A different goal is I'm trying to go out and introduce my institution to people who don't know about me and try to get new students and get new applications and new enrollments. Very different goals.
Julia:Yeah.
Chris:And so the first thing to answer the budget question is, well, what are your goals with that budget? That would then help me understand what type of allocation you want. A lot of universities, when they come to us, they're biasing towards the I need new students bucket. They're saying that's their goal. I don't have a lot of institutions saying, have to defend my brand.
Chris:I'm hiring
Julia:an
Chris:agency to run ads just to defend my brand. While it's nice to have, that's seemingly not the goal that we deal with universities about a lot. Their goal is usually, I want net new students. Yeah. And so if that's the goal, then our rule of thumb is probably get your branded search budget less than 10% of your overall budget.
Chris:Oh. Somewhere in that bucket, 10% or less of your overall budget because that is what most aligns with your goal. 90% of that budget will be spent trying to find you new students.
Julia:Mhmm.
Chris:And then 10% of that is defensive, brand defensive, things like
Julia:that. Mhmm. Okay. And I know that so okay. So we have that breakdown.
Julia:We want about 90% of our budget going towards our non branded search terms. Right? So we're getting in front of people who aren't asking for us by name. We're saving about 10% for our branded search terms because like we talked about, there's value there in taking up real estate on the SERP and also kind of defending and owning your own name. But I do know that there is a little nuance, right, in how you organize an ad account so that you are spending that 10% correctly.
Julia:And so I'm hoping that you have a really clear way of explaining that because I feel like it can get a little a little lost in the sauce sometimes.
Chris:Yeah. So here's the challenge that a lot of universities have with how they organize their accounts. So within Google Search, so we're talking about within the dashboard of how you organize your campaigns and your budgets within Google Search, you can have basically campaigns and ad groups, and they help you organize budgets and keywords. So you could have, you know, campaign for just branded search with a dedicated budget just for branded search and a campaign just for non branded search that breaks out into a whole bunch of different ad groups. But essentially you're controlling your budget and you're also measuring those groups separately.
Chris:So you've organized them into a, you know, branded search ad group, and then you have the other ad groups that are not branded search.
Julia:And just to jump in quickly. So if you jump into a Google Ads account, like, the highest level and you were just to say, I wanna put every single keyword of mine into one campaign, The problem in that you could totally do that. The problem in that is then you only have one budget line item. And so then Google is gonna auto optimize your spend based on where you're most efficient and what you're getting the most clicks on. And so that's probably going to be your branded search terms.
Julia:All of your money is just gonna get sucked there. So that is why we break spend out into all of these different campaigns. So even when we're talking about different degree programs have different goals, so they have different inquiry and enrollment goals. And so we wanna be able to have separate campaigns for every single budget and line item that we want so that we're not overspending on the MBA program, which actually already hit its enrollment goal. But the PA program's actually a little soft still, so we wanna heavy up spend there.
Julia:That's the benefit of having these separate campaigns. So we discovered what some of the positives of spending money on branded searches. Can you talk to me? Are there negatives of spending money on branded search? Are there downsides of spending money on branded search?
Chris:So I think there's a misunderstanding when people are spending money on branded search. And it's it's a nuanced point, but I think it's very important to make. And it's that most times with branded search, when people are googling your university by name
Julia:Mhmm.
Chris:They're looking for you for a very specific reason. They're they they they want to learn more about you for a very, very specific reason. They're gonna get to your website no matter what. If your ad's not there, if they wanna know about, you know, application deadlines or whatever they're googling about you, they're gonna get down to your website Mhmm. And they're gonna they're gonna get there.
Chris:Mhmm. And so when you report and you say, well, Branded Search got us twenty twenty new students.
Julia:Mhmm.
Chris:You're probably gonna get those 20 students anyway.
Julia:Got it.
Chris:And so if you're getting those 20 students anyway, like, let's say you weren't running paid ads Yeah. And then you run a budget Mhmm. To get those 20 students, then sure. The report will say we got 20 students, but you're gonna get them anyway. Yeah.
Chris:So it wasn't a net addition to your overall enrollments.
Julia:Yeah.
Chris:That's why we found with some schools where we've changed this is that we were able to increase net new enrollments
Julia:Mhmm.
Chris:By moving from branded search to non branded search within the same budget. So somehow that same budget shifting from significant branded search to non branded search got us net new enrollments as a whole. And so that's the nuances. Generally, you're gonna get them anyway even if you didn't bid on it because they're just gonna find you organically because that was their intent was to find you. And so they were gonna find you.
Chris:And so all we're doing is saying, okay. Those are easy. We're gonna get those no matter what. We don't need to spend extra money on them. Let's just take them for free, and let's take our budget, move it over here, and let's use that to get people we were not gonna get for free and use our budget on that.
Julia:Yeah. Which, I mean, that seems so obvious when you explain it like that. Right? Like, somebody has already searched for my university by name. They sat down.
Julia:They put in University of New Hampshire or University of Massachusetts. Yeah. They're probably gonna scroll right by those ads or whatever's up there, and they're gonna click whatever that first organic blue link is. And so, yeah, I would way rather have our budget be focused on people who don't know what school they wanna go to yet because that's someone who I can probably really affect still in their journey.
Chris:Absolutely. So I think we've done a great job laying the foundation for the differences between branded and non branded. I think you have a university you've worked for where we actually ran into this challenge recently. Can you tell us about that?
Julia:Absolutely. This was such a scary scary situation for all of us. So we were bringing on a new university. It was a really exciting university to start working with. And the second we got into the Google Ads account, what we found was that they had all of their campaigns broken out by the three or four degrees they wanted us to be supporting, and we said, oh, this looks really awesome.
Julia:And then once we dug a little bit deeper into those campaigns and started looking at the keywords inside of them, we found that those campaign specific, that those program specific campaigns, so a masters of public policy campaign, a masters of public administration campaign, were actually filled with branded search terms. So there were some search terms in there that were master's of public policy, you know, MPA degree, but then there were those same search terms, MPA degree, that had this university's name at the end of it. So it had that kind of modifier on there where it had the university's name in there. And we said, oh my goodness. This is a very scary situation because it looked like they were generating so many inquiries for their masters of public policy and for their masters of public administration.
Julia:But, actually, what was happening was what you said earlier is that they were spending all of their money on people who already wanted that degree from that school. And so those people were probably going to find the exact degree page we wanted them to find on Google in the organic result, but instead, the previous agency had been paying to get all of those people, which made it look like those campaigns were really, really efficient.
Chris:So scary situation. How do you talk about this with the client? What do you do next?
Julia:I think the first thing was we just kinda needed to, like, wrap our hands around it and figure out, you know, kind of what was the extent of this. So, you know, this is pretty normal when we're onboarding an account is we do start looking at not just the budget allocation by campaign, but the budget allocation by keyword because we wanna see, okay, what keywords are working the hardest for us? Is there anything that we should maybe turn off? Do we think there's any that we should add? So once we dug into it and started looking at the budget allocation by keyword, we found out that 40% of their budget had been spent on branded search, and they had no idea that they were spending any money on branded search.
Julia:They thought they were just spending money on masters of public policy keywords, masters of public administration keywords, so it was going to be a total surprise to them.
Chris:Oh, man. Okay. So then how do you then communicate that to the client?
Julia:Really delicately. Really delicately, and I think with a lot of transparency. I think we we brought them this information. We had, honestly, this exact conversation that you and I just had where we just kind of explained, you know, here's the benefits of branded search. Here's the misunderstandings of branded search.
Julia:Here's the benefits of non branded search. We realigned on goals, and we all agreed that the goal was to drive more enrolled students in these three or four degree programs. And then it was all about setting expectations. So we talked to them a lot about, okay. Here's what's gonna happen because we knew what was gonna happen.
Julia:The cost per inquiry was going to go way up. And that's what had been being reported on on a weekly and a monthly basis was cost per inquiries, and they looked amazing. So we needed to set the expectation that the cost per inquiry was going to go up. And then we also needed to talk about, you know, looking past cost per inquiry because that really can just be kind of a vanity metric and looking at the full funnel and making sure that our real focus in our reporting was on the cost per enrolled students. So we ended up really shifting things around in the in the, the Google Ads account.
Julia:We almost entirely rebuilt everything. We took their branded search budget from 40% of their overall budget to 5%. We pulled it way back. This is a university that is very well known. They have a ton of brand awareness and just kind of cache in their market.
Julia:They don't need to spend a ton on branded search. And exactly like we predicted, cost per inquiry went up. Fortunately, we had given everyone the heads up. They knew that it was coming. So when we had to have those kind of first reporting calls, nobody was surprised about it.
Julia:And then everyone just had to kind of be really patient and trust the process. And by the end of kind of that first six month window of working together, despite our cost per inquiry being up, the number of applications had actually doubled. So paid search had doubled the number of submitted applications for those degree programs with the exact same budget. So the budget did not go up. Truly, the only thing we changed was making their paid their branded search from 40% of their budget, dropped it down to 5%.
Julia:And within the same budget, we were able to double the number of applications for the programs, which was so huge. And so, yeah, they trusted us, which was really awesome, and we were able to deliver much stronger results, like I said, with the exact same budget.
Chris:Well, I think that points a lot towards why it's so important to have that measurement in place.
Julia:Okay. And so, you know, we just kind of told that story. But if there is another university out there listening, you know, what kinds of things what action could they take this week, to, make sure that their branded search is in check with their non branded search?
Chris:Yep. First thing you do is split out the reporting. Make sure you have separate reporting items in your reports that show branded search and then all your other campaigns. Ideally, those are all non branded search. So then you can see how much budget you're spending on it, and you can start there.
Chris:How much budget am I spending on branded search? Do I even know? And then you can look at the results.
Julia:Okay. And if I'm a university, who works with an agency, can how would I ask my agency about that? Because it's probably it's not me in the ad account. I have an agency. They handle everything.
Julia:What how do I have that conversation?
Chris:Yeah. I mean, first thing, just take a look at your current reports. Mhmm. And maybe they're doing it or maybe they aren't doing it. It should be very clear.
Chris:Like, if you look at your current reports, it'll say branded search, and then you'll have these other campaigns in there.
Julia:Okay. So if I'm looking at campaign level reporting
Chris:Yep.
Julia:Just see if the campaign name calls out branded or not branded search. Because that's okay. Yeah. That's how
Chris:we get last month's report.
Julia:Okay.
Chris:You already have that from agent agency. Pull up last month's report. If you have it, great. If you don't have it, then there's a question to the agency of, hey. Can we have this broken out of could I have my branded keywords broken out in this report so we can measure those those separately?
Chris:And I think it's just a a basic ask. It doesn't have to be anything more than that. And then you'll have your dashboard, and you'll have the the the breakout.
Julia:Awesome. And I will say as someone who so not being on the pay per click team at Vital, but being a, digital marketing strategist who spends a lot of her time, you know, collaborating with the pay per click team, that's something I ask our team often. I'm always checking in on, hey. Can you what percent of our spend is going to branded right now? Like, can we talk about that?
Julia:And so, yeah, that's not a weird question to ask at all. That's not, like, an aggressive question to ask at all. It's certainly something that's kinda always on my mind even with our internal teams just to make sure we have kind of the the right budgets capped in the right places. Alright. Awesome.
Julia:Well, it was great catching up with you today. Yeah. Thank you.