Another great couple of Days at TCS in Chicago. Thank you Joel, Hamza, Andrew and Colin, for hosting us.
Category: Education Marketing
On Tuesday Oct 10th, at the Princeton Club on 43rd Street, we spoke (along with Sparkroom and Google) to the board of TCS Ed System regarding the State of Digital Marketing in Higher Education.
We started at 9:00, when Rachel Schulties from Sparkroom talked about trends in big data.
Google spoke at 11:15. Aurora Vintilescu wowed everyone with insightful data and analysis.
We closed out the day, giving context to the changes. As usual, Ms. Julie Eydman was the best.
Obligatory selfie
The Wall Street Journal reported that Purdue University is buying Kaplan, hoping to reap the benefits of the Kaplan brand, and to create a viable online presence.
Purdue President Mitch Daniels said “We took a long build-or-buy analysis and came to the honest recognition that we would be very unlikely to succeed building it ourselves.”
This makes plenty of sense for everyone. Purdue gets a ready made online business and Kaplan gets the brand equity of a world-class University.
I predict that this is the first wave of this, and that we’ll see plenty more not-for-profit-/-for-profit M & A.
A few observations:
- The purdue team has a steep, steep learning curve ahead of them. Get ready for a world full of acronyms, Mr. Daniels. CPA, CPL, CPO and CPE are about the become the most important words you know.
- I have to think that this would not have happened in a Clinton Administration, for better or worse.
- One wonders about Purdue’s endowment. One suspects that it is shrinking, and that this acquisition is a bold move to turn that tide.
Today we’re launching the first in a series of articles about Paid Social Media Marketing, specifically as it affects higher education marketing. In this post, we’ll take a look at some hard data. We compare baseline metrics in the two dominant online marketing platforms, Facebook and Google, to see how they stack up for a group of our .edu clients. “Schools who choose to not advertise on Facebook, are choosing to ignore the exact people that want to buy what they sell.” – Emily Clifford, Senior Account Manager, Social Media.
We took a look at 10 .edu’s – a mix of for-profit and not-for-profit, online and ground, and compared some key metrics. This data covers 90 days. Metric Google Facebook Take Away Cost per Click: $1.82, $.71 Visitors cost– 39% of what Google costs. Click-to-lead %: 1.24%, .82% Google converts clicks into leads 52% better than Facebook. CPL: $145, $86 Facebook leads cost 59%, compared to Google. This is just the jumping-off point, and we’ll get into the people and .edu’s behind these numbers next week. For now, here are the key take-aways: 1 Facebook costs an astounding 39% of what Google does. For every $1,000 you spend on Google Adwords, you can get the same amount of visitors from Facebook for $390. 2 Google does convert those clicks into inquiries better – – – but not by enough of a margin to win in a head-to-head competition. 3 Because the cost per visitor is so much lower, Facebook’s average Cost per lead is 59% of Google’s.