The client

Leading Canadian University

Goal

To increase applications and enrolment by 300% across 45 different programs university-wide.

Challenge

Competition amongst universities looking to attract new students has never been higher, and there is increasing pressure to show strong ROI from advertising campaigns.

EQ’s solution

The University had the advantage of a full-blown CRM system that tracked the student lifecycle from start to finish – from research and consideration to graduation. For maximum results, we integrated our capabilities into their existing system. To be able to track our efforts and attribute results directly to the campaign, we tagged each advertisement with UTM parameters and placed our retargeting pixels on over 50 landing pages created for the campaign.

Over 50 landing pages were created to meet the needs of the campaign, which was separated into three separate sub-campaigns, each representing a phase of the recruitment lifecycle – Recruit, Accept, and Choose.

Audiences were created based on existing personas obtained from the University, with continuous optimization based on where traction was found. Ads were served on a carefully curated whitelist to ensure relevancy in traffic, extending to programmatic, Facebook, search, and even Twitter.

Outcome

66,000 visits were generated to the landing pages, of which 1,462 were converted into leads – a 22% visitor to lead conversion. Out of these leads, 50% were generated in just two months (October and November). 46% intended to begin their university education in the following fall, and 24% the year after. The careful targeting and whitelist curation generated quality applicants, with an average GPA of 81%. 56% of all applicants received offers of admission, and 24% of those with offers accepted.

Next steps

The success of the campaign resulted in a 3-year extension of the University’s partnership with EQ, with a 40% increase in budget. The University will now be extending EQ’s efforts to pursue both international student applications and pathways marketing to promote transfer to the institution.

The client says

The results we’ve experienced working with EQ have far exceeded our expectations! Their insights have translated into the highest digital recruitment rates we’ve ever had, and thanks to that success we now have a much bigger budget allocated to our digital team.