From Ads to Insights: Understanding the Power of Attribution

Attribution is critical for marketers in higher education to gauge campaign success, but no single strategy works for every university. Learn about the different types of attribution tracking and how to make sure your marketing efforts are paying off.

There’s much more to reaching potential students than making a series of ads and hoping one of them breaks through the noise. Good marketing requires strategic decisions about which platforms to use, which demographics to target, which creative assets to use, and several other factors that ultimately determine whether your campaign meets its goals.

But how do marketers know which strategies are working and which need a fresh look? That’s where attribution comes in. Marketing attribution gives university marketers a clearer picture of how every campaign performs at every touchpoint, allowing them to iterate and adapt to best appeal to students. However, no single attribution marketing strategy works for every university and every campaign, which is why a comprehensive understanding of the concept is so important for modern higher ed marketers.

Why is Attribution Important?

Realistically, prospective students will interact with your institution numerous times before enrolling. For higher ed marketers, following prospective students through their decision-making journey — from initial awareness to enrollment — is a necessary part of the process. You need to know how you’re capturing the students’ attention and encouraging them to choose your school.

Marketing attribution is essentially taking the temperature and gauging the success of your campaigns. Attribution connects conversions to the marketing touchpoints that led to those results. Think of attribution as the how, where, and when of prospective student interactions with your university. It lets you know which individual channels, creative messages, and overall strategies are generating the most return on ad spend (ROAS), and which ones aren’t driving more student engagement.

Understanding attribution advertising is beneficial in many ways, including:

  1. Better use of marketing spend: Attribution allows you to allocate your budget more effectively by optimizing spending toward proven channels and strategies.
  2. A personalized approach: Help prospective students through the enrollment funnel with personalized touchpoints tailored for individual students.
  3. Better creative: Creative assets like logos, images, and videos are expensive and time-consuming to create. By analyzing the results, you can discern the most effective combination of visuals, copy, and calls to action.
Accurately targeting and measuring campaign outcomes is crucial for developing a sustainable and reliable enrollment model. With tighter budget scrutiny, it’s essential to understand the true impact of your campaigns to ensure every dollar is spent wisely and generates the most significant returns. By effectively tracking and evaluating your advertising efforts, you can optimize your strategy and achieve the best possible student recruitment and engagement results.

What Is a Marketing Attribution Model?

Attribution might sound simple on paper, but incorporating it into your marketing strategy is where things get complex. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to marketing attribution; instead, there are several different approaches or marketing attribution models. Broadly speaking, these models fall into two categories: single-touch and multi-touch.

Understanding Single-Touch vs. Multi-Touch Attribution

The student journey described above is exactly that: a series of stops along the path that starts at brand awareness and concludes at the university’s desired endpoint, typically enrollment. Single-touch attribution measures the performance of a single stop along that journey, often at the very beginning or very end. Multi-touch attribution, on the other hand, tracks conversion across various touchpoints, which are often weighed differently — more on that later.

Each category has its pros and cons. Single-touch attribution models are generally easier to design and optimize. The most popular examples are first-click and last-click. First-click attribution gives credit to the very first ad a prospective student sees. For example, if the student views a TV ad, social media ad, and in-stream ad before finally enrolling, the first click model attributes the conversion to the TV ad.

Last click does the opposite by attributing conversions to the last touchstone along the student journey. This strategy is best implemented when trying to figure out which element of your campaign is driving the most conversions. For example, if you’re analyzing the last-click attribution of your marketing channels and find that most conversions happen after viewing a TikTok campaign, it might be worth expanding on that campaign.

To learn more about how to most effectively utilize the last-click attribution model, read the full article: The Invisible Threads of Influence: Exploring the Impact of Last Click Attribution

Types of Multi-Touch Marketing Attribution Models

Linear vs. Time Decay Attribution

Let’s go back to our earlier example of the student journey. If a student views a TV ad, social media ad, and in-stream ad — in that order — then linear attribution tracks each of those touchpoints and weighs them equally. This gives universities a more balanced approach than either of the single-click models, giving appropriate credit to each part of the process that led to the eventual conversion.

But what if weighing each of these touchpoints equally isn’t the most accurate representation of campaign success? Then you’d want to use a time decay model. Time decay also attributes conversions to multiple touchpoints, but each of those points impacts the model differently. Ads closer to the eventual conversion are weighed more heavily, while those at the top of the funnel get less credit.

Think of time decay attribution as a more complex version of last click. It doesn’t completely discount the contributions of ads that appear at the top of the marketing funnel, but it gives more credit to the final steps. It’s a useful model, but like linear attribution, time decay is not perfect in every scenario. In some cases, assigning more credit to the last touchpoints might lead marketers to make incorrect assumptions about the effectiveness of earlier ads…

View-Through Attribution

View-through attribution, or VTA, credits all conversions during a specific period to ad impressions. Those conversions might be inquiries, applications, website visits, or actual enrollments—no matter how the prospective student gets to that endpoint, VTA assumes they started that journey after viewing an ad. This way, universities can more accurately gauge the results of their campaigns; after all, rarely does a student apply immediately after seeing an ad.

Here’s how VTA works: Begin with determining the specific period you want to measure, perhaps a month or two after introducing a new campaign. Throughout that time, track your key performance indicators like applications, inquiries, event sign-ups, and website visits and compare them to the previous month’s numbers. This method reveals any increases during the chosen period.

View-through attribution can be a useful strategy because it allows universities to measure conversions that come from channels without a click-through option. However, it’s best used when combined with data-driven methods to give a complete picture of marketing performance.

Read: Unlocking the Power of Cross-Channel Marketing with CTV

Data-Driven Attribution

Unlike view-through attribution, which requires marketers to make assumptions about ad performance, a data-driven approach pulls relevant information from all your student tracking platforms. Using machine learning technology, data-driven attribution looks at all applying and non-applying students to determine how each touchpoint drove them closer to or further from enrolling. The more data you have, the more accurate your machine-learning model will be.

This in-depth attribution strategy allows universities to measure ROI more accurately and optimize spending. By feeding the relevant information into a sophisticated machine learning algorithm, universities can gauge how each touchpoint affected students’ odds of conversion. This provides a clearer view of the channels, campaigns, and keywords making the biggest impact. From there, universities can tweak campaigns accordingly.

There are a few best practices for using data-driven attribution that all universities should know:

  1. Set clear campaign goals: You can’t gauge success if you don’t know what success looks like. Determine what you’re trying to achieve, whether that’s an increase in applications, website visits, RFI’s, or any other important metrics. Pick a specific target you want to achieve and focus your efforts on that goal.
  2. Build out tracking and measurement: To grow your data model, you’ll need high-quality information from a variety of sources. You can set up an Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) parameters via Google Analytics 4 and determine the most valuable data points. Every campaign should have its own unique identifier so that when you’re reading the reports, you know exactly what you’re looking at.
  3. Review the reports: You could have more data than you’d ever need, but that doesn’t mean anything if you’re not analyzing it. Be sure to regularly review attribution reports to identify high-performing touchpoints and adjust low-performing elements of your campaigns.

Make Sense of Your Data with AmbioEdu

Understanding campaign performance is vital for universities, but without the right data, you won’t be able to use attribution to track your progress. At AmbioEdu, we deliver radical data transparency and insights. With Ambio’s advanced measurement and attribution capabilities in your marketing toolbox, you can track the entire prospective students’ journey, take your ad budget further, and deliver the desired results.

Want to know more about how AmbioEdu can supercharge your higher education marketing efforts? Let’s chat!

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If you’re interested in learning how to get started with Performance TV for higher ed, download the Essential Guide to CTV for Higher Ed Marketers.