Question for enrollment professionals:

What reporting statistics are the most useful when you’re evaluating the success of a digital recruitment campaign?

Whether you’re contracting out for digital marketing or doing it in-house, I’m curious about the information shared in campaign progress reports. If you’re so inclined, please comment and let me know what campaign data helps guide your decisions.

When I was new to digital marketing, I received reports that overwhelmed me with data but confused me on effectiveness. This experience, in part, lead to the founding of Calculate and is present still in how we report on a campaign’s actual performance.

The truth is, there’s a ton of data available, but it’s not all relevant. Your campaign can boast a million impressions, but that’s the visibility you’re paying for. What really matters are the actions taken by targeted users. The best statistics show a prospect stepping closer or into the enrollment funnel.

For example, here are stats from an undergraduate campaign we are currently running for a private university. This particular campaign includes social, search and programmatic advertising. It ran 13 weeks (90 days) over the fall semester and will resume in February.

When evaluating a campaign’s effectiveness, we focus on actions—that is, what a targeted user actually does in response to seeing an ad. In order of value, these include:

• Primary Actions: These are direct leads that come through the campaign, either submitted forms or phone calls to the admissions office. Ninety-one days into the campaign, we’ve generated 777 leads: 405 forms and 372 phone calls. That’s an average of 8.5 direct leads per day.
   
• Secondary Actions focus on clicks, including clicks to apply, clicks to get location details, and clicks to the institutional website. To date, the campaign has generated 1,028 clicks (11.2 per day), showing a high level of interest.

By focusing on actions, we can also evaluate cost effectiveness via the click through rate, cost per click, and cost per lead. These indicators help guide our optimizations throughout a campaign’s flight.

There’s a lot we don’t know and can’t report on in digital marketing. We target prospects but don’t who they are or what exactly they’re looking for until they enter the funnel and self -report. The strategy is to inspire them with authentic messaging, to retarget when possible, and to track their level of interest via the actions taken.

To me, this approach makes sense, but I’d love your perspective. Let me know what information you look for in a digital recruitment campaign progress report.