Using Career Data to Transform NC State's Student Recruitment Strategy

Ultimately, our project yielded:

• 3.76% conversion rate (974% increase)
• $7.96 cost per conversion (93% decrease)
• $0.25 average cost per click (84% decrease)

How we got there involved a lot of learning… and an interesting twist. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

In 2018, NC State University began a collaboration with Lightcast (formerly Burning Glass) and Verified Studios of Durham, NC. The objective: to recruit more students by embedding the high-quality, comprehensive career data provided by Lightcast into NC State’s online and distance education website. 

The Problem

Just like everyone else in the industry, the marketing team was under pressure to produce:

• More applicants—and higher quality applicants, at that
• Higher matriculation rates
• Better retention rates
• Lower marketing costs

The Marketing team for NC State’s Online and Distance Education program (also known as Distance Education Learning Technology Applications, or DELTA) observed that over time, prospects applying to their programs were becoming more selective. They weren’t willing to enroll in higher ed programs unless they knew that their investment would pay off in the form of tangible career opportunities.

So the team reached out to Verified Studios and Lightcast to create a solution, and that launched this project. The assembled team agreed to focus on three types of prospective students:

1. Students who need credentials in order to establish their careers
2. Professionals seeking career advancement 
3. Career changers

As we worked through the mechanics of embedding Lightcast data in DELTA’s website—no small task indeed—we came to understand that this alone was not going to get us to our goals. Something was amiss, and all evidence pointed to the program pages on the website.

Sure, DELTA was using pay-per-click (PPC) strategies to drive prospects to their website, and they were quite good at using analytics to help understand the performance of those strategies. They even had designated pages for many of the programs for which they wanted to recruit. These are all standard operating procedures for a modern university, right?

However, a closer look uncovered some unforeseen challenges. It turned out that some of their programs did not have a page, and many existing pages were out of date and full of inaccuracies. And very importantly, few were crafted to effectively engage prospects and guide them to action. 

The lightbulb came on: simply driving traffic to existing program pages would not produce the desired results. We’d have to rethink the pages themselves. 

The Solution: Focus First on Program Pages, Then on Careers

Simply adding career data to the existing website and adjusting marketing protocols was necessary, but not sufficient, to achieve our goals. We needed to build a bridge between Lightcast’s compelling data and DELTA’s prospective students—and the program pages were the foundation of that bridge. 

If we moved forward with the existing program pages, the bridge was going to collapse. Strengthening it would require an entirely new approach. So we designed a five-part solution that has delivered meaningful, measurable results: 

1. Enhanced program pages using defined templates to standardize the client’s web presence and remove barriers to prospective students’ explorations on the site
2. Updated, professionally written content with a consistent voice
3. Data-rich career profiles and a searchable career database integrated into the entire web experience
4. Best-practice PPC digital ad campaigns that leveraged the enhanced program pages to spotlight programs and related careers data—complemented by web analytics that help maximize results
5. Remarketing ad campaigns that showcase career data related to programs in which prospects have shown interest

If you have a minute take a look at NC State’s Online and Distance Education site. Note the consistency of format and information on the various program pages. This allows prospects to explore possibilities without having to search out details and read content that isn’t tailored to their needs. Then, check out the Careers listings. 

Now for the big question: Did it work? Happily, the answer was a resounding YES.

It worked so well that NC State’s noncredit continuing education group chose to implement the program for their offerings. View the McKimmon Center solution.

The Results

The end goal of our NC State project was to fill student seats with better qualified applicants, of course. However, those are slow-moving metrics, and we needed to dial in adjustments right away and continuously. 

So we focused on conversions for feedback. Conversion is a commonly used measure that quantifies the impact of strategy, messaging, and other components of recruiting. It’s basically a measure of how well paid-advertising performs, as quantified by number of conversions and cost per conversion.

Over the course of three years, from 2018 to 2021, the effectiveness of the PPC advertising for the programs in this project almost doubled. Very importantly, this happened while the budget fell 60%.

In summary, this strategy:

• Generated 12.6 million impressions
• Increased conversion rates by 84%
• Decreased the cost per conversion by 92%

And The Twist? 

We learned that building the website’s capacity to present quality career data would, in itself, provide a competitive edge. And we learned how to make that happen. 

But what we didn’t see coming was the value of leveraging those data connections to create and deliver dynamic ads for nurturing and remarketing campaigns.

When we ran paid remarketing campaigns (ads that follow the student as they browse) for a group of programs, we achieved some unexpected results. Over the course of the three-year project, we experienced:

• 525,215 clicks (5,382% increase)
• 12,460 conversions (15,475% increase)
• $0.25 average cost per click (84% decrease)
• 3.76% conversion rate (974% increase)
• $7.96 cost per conversion (93% decrease)

Kay Zimmerman, Retired Associate Vice Provost for Marketing & Partnership Development at NC State University summed it up this way:

“. . . We have opened new doors in program-level marketing, from site building to cutting-edge marketing strategies, and the development of new enterprise-level marketing initiatives to meet the competition for successful student recruitment within approved timelines and budgets. Verified Studios (working with Lightcast) helped us find solutions, develop extraordinary new marketing strategies, and implement new technologies—and then turned those ideas into realities that delivered results."