Refocused Goals and Core Practices Drive MBA Recruitment

The Challenge

The brand needed to increase enrollment within a market requiring long cycle times (as high as 1 to 5 years), possessing limited customer data, and legacy marketing focused on awareness and low-value intermediate goals.

Insights

Arcalea assessed current programs, platform configurations, and existing data to identify opportunities for immediate tactical remediation and longer-term strategic improvements. Ad platform analysis revealed counterproductive keyword strategies, including redundant keywords that could favor weaker conversion rates, global negative keywords that blocked strong query matches, and keyword organization techniques better handled by native platform AI. Arcalea documented the high volume of configuration changes in order to systematically transition to best practices without disrupting value from interconnected parameters.

Across all ad platforms, Arcalea shifted focus away from awareness goals toward goals more directly predictive of enrollment and revenue. Intermediate goals were evaluated for relevance, and changed from awareness-focused conversions (e.g., “time on site”) to conversions in which prospect information is exchanged.

For example, programmatic had been purely an awareness effort for the years before Arcalea's involvement. By shifting from user experience metrics to actual lead conversions, Arcalea achieved a cost per acquisition lower than the prior cost per user for awareness. After programmatic network targeting refocused on more meaningful goals, all sources were analyzed in order to eliminate those with expensive conversions or no conversions at all.

Analyzing each lead source for volume of cost-effective conversions allowed the brand to shift resources to the most effective networks. Intentionally expanding to effective publishers beyond Google allowed the brand to reach new audiences through a broader collection of relevant blogs and media companies.

In order to gain maximum impact of programmatic ad networks, Arcalea implemented an advanced AI that analyzed contextual relevance of the target placement pages and the contextual relevance of a visitor’s browsing history. In short, the AI analyzed content on the pages where ads are placed and on the pages a prospect recently visited. While this toolset was only recently applied for the brand, prior implementations improved matches and conversions.

Finally, analysis of the brand’s data landscape revealed gaps in both legacy results and customer information. Because the brand’s degree programs require a long customer journey, data relevant to customer actions over long tracking windows are critical to understanding the customer, creating aligned messaging and interactions, and measuring efficacy at each touch point. Fidelity of legacy data was unclear due to data capture outside of platforms, so intermediate conversions were not available for analysis. Critically, customer data infrastructure is lacking, allowing no insights into the number of unique prospects moving through each part of the funnel from awareness to enrollment. To address these gaps, Arcalea began validating existing customer data with the goal of an eventual Identity Resolution process.