{"id":2763,"date":"2016-09-12T16:52:00","date_gmt":"2016-09-12T16:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nortonnorris.com\/?p=2763"},"modified":"2016-09-12T16:52:00","modified_gmt":"2016-09-12T16:52:00","slug":"6-challenges-inquiry-attribution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nortonnorris.com\/6-challenges-inquiry-attribution\/","title":{"rendered":"6 Challenges of Inquiry Attribution"},"content":{"rendered":"
In the \u201cold days,\u201d lead reporting looked something like this: A TV spot ran, a prospective student called a tracking phone number, and someone at the campus worked the lead and then added a tally mark on the white board to keep track of total leads. Technology has evolved over the years, changing everything we know about reporting and attributing leads to their original source.<\/p>\n
Attribution has become a combination of exact data and opinion or judgment. However, to effectively compete in today\u2019s education marketplace, colleges and universities must improve marketing strategies and measurement to help target specific audiences, and then understand what efforts offer areas of improvement or what sources to continue that are actually providing conversions. \u00a0To make matters even tougher, marketing budgets for many institutions continue to decline, or remain constrained, so the importance of understanding what\u2019s working (or not) has become even more important for marketing teams in reaching business goals.\u00a0 So, why is reporting on marketing benchmarks so challenging?<\/p>\n
Prospective students have countless ways to do their research on a school. They no longer have to see a commercial on TV and call the only school they happen to see an advertisement for.\u00a0 They can search online; a friend or family member may recommend a school; or they may read reviews on social media, hear something on the radio or Pandora, or see a sign along the road.\u00a0 The clutter is everywhere, but if a prospect has education on their mind, and your brand stands out, they will do their research.\u00a0 And, that research may or may not come in through the source where they originally encountered the brand. With mobile usage continually on the rise, prospects have information at their fingertips 24\/7.\u00a0 So, they may be watching TV, or see an ad for a school, then check it out on their phone in a search or on social media.\u00a0 They may hear a commercial on Pandora that asks them to click a banner for more information, but at that time, they can\u2019t click on the banner, so they remember the name and perform a Google search later.\u00a0 The multitude of touchpoints make it very difficult to gauge the original source for a lead.\u00a0 Most institutions rely on \u201clast-click attribution.\u201d \u00a0This method of lead tracking gives credit for converting the lead to the most recent channel used, but not always the best, because that attribution doesn\u2019t recognize all the points that user had before converting. And what do you do when students inquire more than once?\u00a0 Capture both sources? \u00a0Stay with the original? \u00a0Or use the last?\u00a0 That\u2019s a good question to ask your marketing director \u2013 since probably 20% of prospects inquire more than once, AND the students who inquire a second time are much more likely to enroll.<\/p>\n
Years ago, a colleague at another institution recommended asking students at orientation or the first day of class how they heard about or became aware of the school. His point was that capturing source at the time of inquiry was detrimental to the sales process and also meaningless.\u00a0 He believed that asking\/surveying later in the process yielded more accurate results as to the foundational source for motivating students to choose an institution.\u00a0 We are not aware of any schools that utilize this approach, but as marketing professionals, we believe this approach has merit, and to this day, encourage clients to ask this question once students are on campus.<\/p>\n
Another challenge marketers often forget when analyzing reporting is all of the external factors that may impact accurately attributing leads, including the human factor. Attribution does not take into account seasonality, the economy, and in our industry, government regulations. Touchpoints such as open houses, career fairs, etc. are also not well accounted for, and often lumped into a referral lead source bucket.<\/p>\n
Speaking of personally developed inquiries and referrals, do you have one category for these? Or two?\u00a0 We continue to encounter schools that lump these together.\u00a0 For starters, separate these categories.\u00a0 On the human side of things, many smaller schools don\u2019t have the marketing automation tools in place to accurately and automatically track inquiry sources.\u00a0 Instead, they rely on busy front-desk staff to capture the source and record it in the database.\u00a0 The results are often inconsistent and unreliable.\u00a0 Worse yet, we\u2019ve encountered many schools that create multiple categories that essentially mean the same thing.\u00a0 Here\u2019s an example:\u00a0 A few years back we started working with a school and asked for a lead report by source.\u00a0 The source fields in CampusVue included Internet, website, Google, organic web, and web form.\u00a0 And guess what?\u00a0 There was no training or any guide for admissions on how to classify inquiries.<\/p>\n