The most important digital KPI in student recruitment?

Understanding what’s working and not working in international student recruitment – or your most important recruitment Key Performance Indicator (KPI) – should be an imperative part of every recruitment officer’s strategy. However, sometimes that is easier said than done.

With a wide variety of campaigns, across different platforms both online and offline, things can get complicated when measuring the impact of each activity and evaluating its effectiveness.

Enrolments per Referral as one of your main KPIs

In our experience, one of the most useful KPIs to keep track of, especially for digital marketing channels is Enrolments per Referral (EPR). EPR represents the percentage of students who enrolled at your university after they’ve been referred to your website by one of the marketing channels you are currently using for your campaigns. Knowing the EPR of your programmes and marketing channels can help you develop new insights into what works and what doesn’t and make more informed decisions when, for example:

• comparing the impact of different marketing channels on your student enrolments;
• estimating the marketing cost per student;
• estimating the additional number of students you can reach with a given marketing and recruitment budget.

How to measure EPR?

Take the number of visitors each of your marketing channel generates, and then match it with the number of students enrolling in the coming year. Even just starting with a simple survey among your new students asking them how and where they first learned about your university might be a good first step in the right direction.

However, if your university is more advanced at tracking students during their decision journey on your website, the best way would be to measure the volume of visits generated by each channel and track its conversion to information requests, which are then logged into your CRM system. This allows you to eventually track students from the first time they get in touch with the university to when they receive their confirmation letter and eventually register on campus.

Interested to learn more?

If you’re interested in making it all work, or improving your tracking and measurements, our analytics team supports universities to set-up the tracking for their website to be able to assess the conversion from each marketing channel and their own specific EPR.

We evaluated the campaigns of multiple universities and calculated that, on an average, these universities achieve an EPR of 1-2%. In other words, every 1,000 referrals result in approximately 10-20 enrolled international students.

How’s that for your institute?