While the GA4 interface may seem complex and overwhelming at first, it has become a powerhouse of a tool that requires much less manual work to get your analytics off the ground. Its increased automation gives you hours back to your day and allows you to use its pre-built components to start connecting your data and reporting it in one fluid stream.

You can slice and dice your data however you need to showcase it, because GA4 has the pre-built templates you want to get your data analysis started. It also has the customization options to allow you to start dreaming big. The Analysis Hub is where you’ll find a variety of reports to start out with. For example, GA4 includes a custom report for “Funnel Exploration,” which enables you to see a user’s interaction with steps they took before submitting an inquiry form or starting an application. “Path Exploration” is another report that will show you a user’s pathway through your website; where did they come from, and what path did they take to peruse your website?

“Free-form” and “Cohort Analysis” reports will help you answer other important questions, such as:

• What types of visitors are coming to your site—traditional high school students, adult degree completers, or graduate prospects?
• What pages are users looking at before taking an action?
• Is there a common thread in the customer journey between landing on your homepage to submitting an app?

You can start to answer all of these questions with the report customization options within GA4.

Bounce rate, the trusty, yet one-sided metric that tracked the number of visitors who navigated away from your website, has made its own exit from the new Analytics. Replacing it is “engagement rate,” a more useful measure of time spent on your site. Unlike bounce rate, this new metric doesn’t just show you how many users leave your site, but it dives deeper, considering one or more actions, such as being active on the website for 10 or more seconds, engaging in two or more page views, and/or a conversion event firing. This is a favorable update if you’re looking to squeeze out as much information about the user experience on your website as possible, since it exposes more than just the fact that some users leave, or bounce. Now, you can look at how they enter the site and better understand whether your website content is engaging for your targeted audiences.

Now that Google Analytics has upped its game, it’s time to leverage this tool as your (not-so) secret weapon to evaluate your website’s strengths and challenges. Having so much analytical power at your fingertips can be overwhelming as you start to explore the tool (it does, after all, have a completely new look), but it will be worth all of your marketing dollars to invest the time to learn the tool’s insights for your institution’s website. If you don’t know where to begin, we can help you get started. Reach out to learn more about how we can help you leverage the force behind GA4.

Spark451 partners with several elite graduate schools across the U.S. to design and execute robust, personalized marketing campaigns. One such school, a client since 2015, partners with us on managing their prospect nurturing campaigns. Through the use of a segmented prospect communication strategy, Spark451’s campaigns with this institution typically yield average email open rates of 40%+ and click-through rates of 5% or higher.

On their own, these results are impressive. Over the last year, however, Spark451 implemented a Behavioral Marketing email campaign targeting website visitors, which blew these results out of the water.

The team at Spark451 are experts at delivering the right message to the right person at the right time; Behavioral Marketing is a methodology of doing just that. Spark451 created and implemented an email series triggered to send to visitors (tracked via a pixel) to a select group of pages from the university website. After 24 hours, a communication was automatically sent to the website visitor sharing additional, personalized information from the pages viewed while visiting the institution’s website.

Implementing trigger-based web visit communications yielded:

What may surprise you is that many of the major factors impacting international student recruitment are not new. While the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the decline in the international market, several other factors have been fueling the fire for almost a decade.

1. Most widely known, the increased political and social unrest within the United States has painted us in a negative light for many students looking to pursue a degree here. This has also led to increased confusion around the rules and regulations within the United States, muddying the decisions for those considering to study here.
2. Many foreign countries have long provided their students’ government-funded scholarships through national scholarship programs. Recently, many countries, such as Brazil (through their Brazil Scientific Mobility Program) and Saudi Arabia, have defunded these scholarship programs, making an education in the United States largely unaffordable.
3. Over the past several years, the value of the U.S. dollar has increased substantially, again making it harder for international students to afford a non-funded education in the United States.
4. Large pathway programs are beginning to emerge, making it harder for many U.S. schools to compete in this arena. These programs create partnerships with select universities in the United States and encourage International Student Recruitment Agents to send their students to the finite set of U.S. schools with which they have agreements.
5. The competition within the international market has grown substantially and students are finding they have more options on where to pursue their degrees. Many countries, such as China, India, and Germany, which were once large exporters of students, are beginning to retain more of their own citizens. Additionally, countries such as Australia, Canada, and even the United Kingdom are enhancing their long-term visiting student options and making it easier for students to obtain a visa, placing additional strain on the international market for the United States.
6. Finally, rankings continue to have a heavy influence on the international market, leaving a heavier burden on the smaller, more regional institutions.

At first, it’s easy to be bearish on the short-term future of international student activity when you consider the points above. However, we believe there’s an international renaissance on the horizon. Allow us to point out a few important facts that may help sway your opinion:

According to an iie research study published in November of 2020 40,000 students deferred their enrollment from Fall 2020 to a future semester.

When you factor in a combination of these deferments with the traditional new-student application activity we’ve already seen for Fall 2021, as well as what you can expect for Spring 2022 and Fall 2022, signs of growth begin to show.

The U.S. is trending ahead of many other nations in its ability to administer vaccinations.

U.S. colleges can begin to work with the U.S. government and those in other countries to offer vaccinations for incoming international students who otherwise might not be able to get vaccinated in their home countries or even in other competing countries.

The idea that an incoming student can test negative prior to coming here, test again upon arrival, and then get vaccinated can prove to be both career and life changing.

Based on recent reports, many U.S. admissions officers are feeling more optimistic about their ability to attract students from abroad, now that the new Biden administration is setting a more welcoming tone for international students than we’ve seen in the last several years. For example, in one recent article, Xiaofeng Wan, Associate Dean of Admission and Coordinator of International Recruitment at Amherst College in Massachusetts, told Inside Higher Ed that he believed families are beginning to feel more comfortable sending their children to the U.S. again. Also, according to Forbes, a recent poll by Morning Consult found that global opinion of the U.S. in general has improved quite significantly in the months since President Biden took office.

Historically, domestic enrollment trends have always been a strong indicator of where the international recruitment market is headed—though you can expect roughly a year of lag time. As vaccinations take effect and further empower U.S. institutions to return to fully in-person and on-campus environments, Spark451 strategists are hearing overwhelmingly optimistic outlooks on domestic enrollment for Fall 2021 from enrollment managers across the country—at institutions of all sizes and types.

By and large, enrollment managers are satisfied with their Fall 2021 classes, and considering where they were just 12 months ago, they are bullish on the future for their schools as they re-engage domestic recruitment plans for Fall 2022.

In spite of some recent interruptions in the market, international students remain a critical component of the ecosystem at most U.S. colleges and universities, and we expect that to continue well into the future. As the pandemic continues to recede and our nation’s political leaders continue to reestablish a more welcoming tone for foreign students, the Spark451 enrollment strategy team can’t help but feel especially hopeful about all of the new and emerging opportunities in this arena. In fact, we’re already hearing positive rumblings from the institutional leaders from across the nation with whom we speak daily.

We began suggesting a more effective solution to help the school significantly grow their prospect list. After more than a year of discussion, and a campaign launch in Fall 2020 that produced a grand total of 14 leads from September through December, our partner finally conceded. They took us up on our offer to build a campaign-specific landing page based on our industry best-practices approach, reallocating the budget for the remaining media spend to create a site that would make a greater impact on the audience.

We launched the new landing page in January 2021, utilizing powerful techniques for engaging students. Within one week, we had matched the total leads generated in four months on the prior page. The campaign just wrapped up, and the new page has produced 85 leads—a 500% increase in the same amount of time. And, since no additional money was spent, the cost per lead plummeted from more than $1,400 to just $250.

Our partner institution is thrilled with the changes we incorporated and with the improved results—which they had been convinced simply weren’t possible for them. We are preparing to begin a new targeted campaign this spring, and the first question they asked was whether we could create a version of our landing page specifically for this campaign, as well!

We’d love to help you achieve a similar outcome. Reach out if you’re ready to discuss strategies and tactics we can implement to support your enrollment goals.

Graduate enrollment managers are seeking new ways to provide access to graduate education for more students, but especially the underrepresented and people of color. One example of this trend is the use of holistic graduate admissions practices, as presented by Joseph Paris, EdD of Temple University. This involves the evaluation of the whole applicant, beyond typical GRE scores and GPA, to include attributes such as professionalism, concern for others, and multicultural competency. In a NAGAP survey, 95% of GEM professionals indicated a stated commitment to DEI from their institution was very or extremely important to them.

Of GEM professionals responding to a NAGAP poll, 69% met or exceeded their enrollment goals for Fall 2020, with most of those opportunities being created online. GEM professionals reported using financial aid aggressively to increase headcount, given the current climate.

As a result, underperforming graduate programs were targeted heavily, and 19% of GEM professionals reported the elimination of such programs.

Budget cuts, layoffs, and financial instability at their institutions are sources of anxiety for many in the graduate admissions area. Moving ahead, uncertainty in the ability to recruit students is also a cause for concern. In fact, 45% of GEM professionals indicated that their working situation is very or extremely stressful.

NAGAP survey findings also showed that what students say they value is often different than what GEM practitioners think they value. Practitioners tended to over-emphasize “successful job placement” and under-emphasize areas such as “accreditation” and “modern, state-of-the-art academic facilities.”

In Fall 2020, the number of international student applications increased, but enrollment substantially decreased. Additionally, institutions reported that over 40,000 international students deferred to a future term. Travel advisories from the CDC and state-mandated restrictions all played a role in this trend. International graduate enrollment managers (iGEMS) will need to manage the situation carefully, bringing in students from abroad while balancing health risks and post-graduation opportunities.

The vast majority of affordability and student debt discussions center around undergraduates, but the implications are enormous for graduate students, who owe a whopping $71,318 each, on average, with roughly 66% of that being directly from their graduate studies. In fact, graduate students borrow 37% of all federal student loan dollars. Institutions need to ensure that their students receive the appropriate value from their degrees to be able to repay those loans. Thankfully, the student loan default rate (at 9.7% for all students) is much lower for graduate borrowers.

GEM professionals embraced digital marketing more than ever, with 60% indicating an increase in digital marketing spending over the last year. With its efficiency of targeting and trackable analytics, budget-challenged graduate admissions offices are embracing social media marketing, search engine marketing, and the full continuum of digital presence.

In our partner session with Element451, we discussed how we use personalization, behavioral targeting, and automation to create more timely and relevant communications. These techniques yielded a doubling of engagement rates from 40% to 80%. You can access the Spark451 NAGAP 2021 webinar, The Rise of Behavioral Analytics and Personas in Recruiting, here.

The overall mood of the colleagues I spoke with was an appreciation for the convenience of the online conference, but an overwhelming preference to be in person at next year’s enrollment summit. So, with that… I’ll just say I hope to see you all in Chicago at NAGAP 2022 for some deep-dish pizza and a live, in-person experience.