How Rasmussen College Uses Analytics To Better Understand Prospective Students
June 21st, 2013 | Published in Uncategorized
Rasmussen College, founded in 1900, is a private, regionally accredited, career-focused college with 24 campuses in MN, ND, IL, WI, KS, and FL, and online throughout the nation. Rasmussen.edu provides prospective students with information about degrees and other credential programs offered at Rasmussen College, as well as associated tuition costs.
Goals: Understand the importance of tuition in higher education marketing
Rasmussen College wanted to know the importance of tuition costs to prospective students, and if that information was a factor in their higher education selection process. Although Rasmussen College had created a tuition cost estimator for prospective students to use on the site, there was no way to track engagement. This lack of knowledge regarding a prospective student’s use of the tuition estimator tool limited the ability of Rasmussen College to accurately position the value of an investment in a college education.
Approach: Events and offline analysis unlock significant insights
Rasmussen College integrated Google Analytics events and custom variables with the tuition estimator to capture geographic and programmatic information as prospective students interacted with the widget. Specific business questions Rasmussen College sought to answer included:
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Business Question
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GA Solution
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What schools of study had the most price-interested students?
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Custom events, custom reports, custom segments
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Which regions of the U.S. contained the most price-interested students?
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Map overlay with custom segments to show cities where tuition estimations occur
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What is the relationship between tuition estimation and lead generation?
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Custom events, custom variables to track tuition estimations over multiple visits, custom segments to show differences in lead generation rates for tuition estimators, and tracking days from tuition estimation to conversion
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Are students able to find the information they want regarding tuition?
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Third-party task completion software was used to assess usability of tuition estimator
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Results: Price and ROI key drivers to new student inquiry conversion
Rasmussen College exported custom event and variable information from Google Analytics and analyzed the data. They developed price interest metrics across program and geography using the Google Analytics data. For example, they determined students interested in some schools of study were more than twice as interested in price as students interested in other schools.
In addition, tuition estimator users were four times more likely to complete the website inquiry form. Those who went on to perform a separate ROI calculator were 7.3 times more likely to complete the website inquiry form.
As a result, Rasmussen College found a correlation between tuition information and a prospective student’s readiness to take the next steps.
Check out the whole case study as a PDF here.
Posted by the Google Analytics Team