Enrollment and institutional leaders are increasingly expected to make decisions about digital strategy, recruitment investments, and marketing performance. Yet conversations about digital marketing are often filled with terminology that can make it difficult to understand what's working and where opportunities exist.  

We’ve seen it again and again: time-strapped institutional leadership has to make digital marketing decisions, but the jargon can be confusing and defeating. If you’ve:  

• Been unsure exactly what you’re getting from digital marketing,  
• Gotten frustrated trying to derive meaning from digital marketing stats or  
• Left a conversation wondering how your digital marketing efforts are influencing inquiries, applications, campus visits, or enrollment outcomes  

This guide includes the key digital marketing metrics that higher education leaders should know, as well as some specific questions to ask your marketing team to spark discussion.

1. Conversion

• A conversion is an action a prospective student takes that signals engagement with your institution and movement through the enrollment journey. Your analytics platform tracks conversions. All paid advertising should be tied to these conversions.  
• Potential student leads, warm prospects, and application starts are common conversion actions worth tracking on your site. Below, we’ve outlined a list of common actions that indicate a user who has engaged with your organization and is valuable to your enrollment success. 

Micro conversion (less value) → macro conversion (more value).

What to ask your team:  What conversion actions are we measuring, and which are most closely tied to enrollment outcomes?

2. CPA

In higher education, CPA may refer to cost per inquiry, cost per application, or cost per enrollment, depending on the institution's goals. 

• Cost per acquisition (CPA) is the amount spent to get one conversion. 
• A lower CPA is better, but evaluating all your marketing tactics solely on CPA might miss the mark. Awareness tactics like online video may serve an important role in introducing people to your brand, but not result in many immediate, direct conversions. See “attribution” section below for more information on crediting awareness channels. 

What to ask your team: Which marketing channels generate the most qualified prospective students at the lowest cost?

3. ROAS

While businesses often use Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) to evaluate advertising performance, colleges, and universities may instead focus on outcomes such as inquiries, applications, enrollments, or net tuition revenue generated relative to marketing investment. 

• Return on ad spend (ROAS) is a metric used to show the effectiveness of your paid marketing efforts. ROAS above 1 indicates you are making more from your efforts than what you spend in working media.
• It’s similar to ROI, but ROI generally captures other spending outside of just working media, like creative production or time costs.
• To use the ROAS metric, assign a value to each of the conversion actions you’re tracking. ROAS is a better metric than CPA if you have multiple conversion actions on your site that are valued differently – it allows for optimization toward the highest-value conversions. 

What to ask your team: What is the average ROAS for our campaigns? How would those improvements affect our ROI? Which marketing investments are generating the strongest enrollment outcomes relative to cost? 

4. Attribution

Imagine a prospective student first encounters your institution through a social media advertisement. A few weeks later, they attend a virtual information session, visit your website multiple times, receive an email from admissions, and eventually submit an application. 

Attribution helps determine which marketing channels contributed to that application and how much credit each should receive. 

• Attribution is the system of giving credit to different channels, content or audiences for a specific conversion. An attribution model is a chosen framework for allocating that credit. 
• For example, if someone sees an Instagram ad that is general recruitment in nature (Instagram ad impression), performs a Google search about the specific program they’re interested in, visits the website (organic traffic) and identifies a potential program they like, leaves to look at other comparable programs at other colleges, then returns to the site by typing the college name in the URL (direct traffic) and clicks Apply to start their application. 

There are multiple attribution models to choose from. Your selected attribution model should align with your business goals. 

• Institutions seeking to expand awareness among new student audiences may benefit from attribution models that place greater value on first-touch interactions. For an organization focused on aggressive growth, a first-interaction attribution model assigns 100% of conversion credit to the first channel that introduced someone to your college. In the example above, you might expand your Instagram advertising efforts to introduce more people to your organization. 

What to ask your team: What is our default attribution model? What channels/content introduce people to our organization? Which channels lead to more leads for our recruitment channels? Note: Google Analytics defaults to a last non-direct interaction attribution model. Which channels introduce prospective students to our institution, and which most often influence applications and enrollment decisions? 

5. CTA

• A call to action (CTA) is a short statement telling a user what action should be taken as a result of viewing an ad, visiting a webpage, viewing a video, etc.
• Examples include Apply Now, Learn More, Request Information, Explore Programs, Contact Us, Schedule a Visit, and Attend an Information Session 
• Your calls to action should align with your customer journey. If someone has never heard of your business, a “contact us” CTA might be too far-fetched. If they’ve been to your site a few times, it might work better. 

What to ask your team: Are our calls to action aligned with where prospective students are in their college search and decision-making process?

Understanding these five concepts won't make you a digital marketing expert—and they don’t need to. What they can do is help you ask more strategic questions, better evaluate marketing performance, and strengthen alignment between institutional goals and recruitment efforts. The most successful enrollment and marketing teams share a common understanding of what success looks like, how it's measured, and how marketing investments contribute to enrollment outcomes. 

With an understanding of these five terms, you’ll be prepared for your next digital marketing analytics regroup. You can arm yourself with questions for your team and more closely align your business goals and digital marketing strategies. Need high-level expertise? Give us a call , and we’ll put our four decades of media strategy, planning, execution, and reporting to work for you.