Hi everyone - I'm working with our admin team and our board to update a performance dashboard for all areas of our school. In my area, we track website visits (homepage and admission pages), social media metrics, re-enrollments, inquiries, applications, and net promoter score. While I have posed this question on various association listservs, I have not gotten many / any firm responses. How you would recommend we measure what I'd call impressions for lack of a better term, i.e. how our various marketing investments generate a measurable impact on current and prospective families? Carrie Lott, Director of Marketing and Communications, Davidson Day School

A: CAYLOR

Great question. Many times, schools engage in customer satisfaction surveys. Those can include surveys to current families, families who chose to go elsewhere, and new families. The timing is what is important since you can see progress metrics from start to current to graduate families.

Those can be done in various ways, but Typekit and SurveyMonkey are great tools. You'll want to use both qualitative and quantitative methods for the questions, and keep the questions consistent over time.

I hope that helps.

A: WADDINGTON

I'm sure the Gurus could put their heads together and write a book (or series of books) with lots of viable tactics to answer this question. To simplify it, take 10 hours and dive deep into Google Analytics, particularly the subsection for Conversions. If you tag and pixel your website correctly and create cloned pages or landing pages, you should be able to track most if not all of the impressions and how they are or are not interacting with your school. Here's a great place to start - https://analytics.google.com/analytics/academy/

A: MAJOR

Great question — and something that after 7 years in lead generation I still haven't totally cracked. And for a good reason: There usually isn't "one thing." For most families, there are often a variety of touches that influence a final decision. For example, they may see your social media posts, open your emails, and then inquire. They may also just directly inquire. For donors, they may need numerous touches across various mediums before they finally take action. In today's digital world, the average is at least seven touches before taking action. That being said, sometimes it's hard to pinpoint your efforts to "one thing" or say if one is working better than another because in many cases, everything is working in tandem.

I do agree with Trevor that getting your website tagged appropriately is key — and the resource he provided is great! Getting those goals set up will help you determine WHICH mediums are actually helping you reach those goals. For example, if you set a goal as "complete inquiry", you'll be able to run a conversion report on HOW people got to that page, therefore identifying which mediums may be most influential for certain conversions. One of my favorite Google Analytics reports is the attribution report, which is a visual representation of every touch someone had before they finally met a goal. Sometimes, there is over fifty! You can find it at the bottom of the GA navigation under "Attribution Beta."

Instead of just trying to measure the overall impact, I'd recommend setting specific goals as well. You need overall strategic goals (such as new inquiries) as well as tactical goals (such as increasing website traffic). Then, you need to create a plan as to how your tactics can help you achieve your specific goals. If you haven't set goals in relation to your overall strategy, website traffic, social media engagement, emails, virtual event attendees, and website engagement (I.e. form fills) that would be a good place to start — as you can't measure impact without goals.

I hope this helps! It's a tough question!

A: CAIN

Mia is exactly right. There usually isn’t one thing to count.

What I’d recommend is to figure out what your end goals are for investing in marketing. You might consider creating what we call a Brand Scorecard. If your goal is for better general awareness, you can track your web traffic, click-through rates, time spent on website, shares, rankings, etc. If it is enrollment specific goals you can track all of those touch points in the enrollment management process. And you can do the same for engagement specific goals, retention goals, reputation goals, donor goals, etc. Don’t make it too complicated. Track what you know you can keep track of enough to see improvement over time. And if you can track any uptick to specific dollars like full-pay tuition or a rise in # of donors or moving up in giving levels that’s great too.

Great question.

A: CLAEYS

You asked about discovering "how our various marketing investments generate a measurable impact on current and prospective families" which is a multi-level investigation, and depends on your goals, as Kathy mentioned.

"Impact" is a broad term, but there are a few tools that can give you an idea of how your efforts and investments are working.

• I agree with Trevor and Mia that Google Analytics is a great tool - full of valuable, measurable information about your website traffic.

• If you are investing in Google or Facebook ads, you can also get good reporting there to see how the ads are performing, which will tell you if prospective families are engaging.

• If you send an email newsletter to prospective families, those who have attended Open Houses, etc., you can also look at email newsletter open rates to see if people are opening and clicking on specific links.

Ultimately, of course, the best measurement of the impact of your efforts on prospective families is enrollments! If you are not getting enrollments, that may indicate that your marketing efforts are not working (other circumstances also impact enrollments, so it isn't necessarily a marketing issue alone).

If you have a lot of inquiries and no follow-up from prospects, that tells you perhaps there is something not working further down your funnel/process or that your prospects are not finding what they need/expect(follow-up surveys can be helpful here, as Bart notes). If you are not getting any inquiries, that tells you that something near the top of your funnel needs to be changed, such as your messaging, target audience or engagement - a different approach or investment might be better.

Data can be helpful, and also very time-consuming. But it is important to look at the data to help make adjustments to strategies to help reach your goals.

Good luck!

Want to continue this conversation? Join the InspirED Facebook group!

More Guru Q and A

Got a Question?
Want an Answer?
Ask an Expert!

Want More
Brilliant Ideas?
Sign Up!