For colleges and universities, media success isn't measured solely by clicks or conversions, nor are we measuring ad campaigns as profitable in the traditional business sense. The ultimate goal is to enroll the right students while maximizing limited marketing resources. No single metric can fully capture the influence of every touchpoint along a student's journey.  

The questions you want to ask of you and your team: 

• Did this investment generate qualified inquiries?   
• Did it increase applications?   
• Did it influence enrollment decisions?   
• Did it improve net tuition revenue?   
• Was it the best use of our limited budget?  

That’s where metrics like ROI (return on investment) and ROAS (return on ad spend) can be viewed as complementary measures that help institutions make more informed budget decisions rather than definitive indicators of success. We advise colleges and universities that the smart play is to track both. Analyzing them together with other enrollment and institutional success metrics gives you a much clearer overall picture and can help inform your marketing strategies, media spend, and more.  

What’s the difference?

In general, ROI calculates the profitability of your campaign, while ROAS calculates the effectiveness of advertising tactics like media. In higher education, ROI helps institutions understand whether their marketing investments are contributing to broader enrollment and revenue goals, such as increased applications, enrolled students, or net tuition revenue. In other words, how marketing investments contributed to institutional outcomes such as enrollment growth, program demand, retention goals, or tuition revenue.   

ROAS measures revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising, like a gauge of effectiveness of online advertising campaign tactics.  

The three key benefits to look at both ROI and ROAS.

1. Checks and balances for spending:

If you base decisions solely on ROAS, you could be arbitrarily increasing advertising expenses across all channels without truly understanding the incremental impact on your institutional performance metrics. And conversely, if you base decisions solely on ROI, you won’t truly understand which of your channels drives the bulk of engagement, interest, application and enrollment activities.  

 2. Multi-touch media and non-linear customer journey:

Marketers can still get funnel vision and stay too focused on tactics like paid search that drive immediate ROI at the bottom of the funnel. Unlike many consumer purchases, students often spend months researching institutions, visiting websites, attending events, interacting with counselors, and discussing options with family before applying or enrolling. Measuring only immediate advertising results can underestimate the impact of upper-funnel awareness efforts. We know that audiences interact with media all throughout the funnel. Measured alone, ROAS does not measure the true impact of one channel on another, such as display’s impact on search, or offer an understanding of the incrementality of media dollar investment, which the ROI metric provides.  

 3. Business decisions and the role of marketing:

Marketing and enrollment leaders are constantly asked to do more with finite resources. That’s why we all have to make comprehensive decisions on the most effective and efficient spend every single day. While neither ROI nor ROAS tells the entire story on its own, together they can provide valuable insight into how media investments support institutional goals. By evaluating both advertising effectiveness and broader enrollment outcomes, institutions can make more informed decisions about where to invest, where to optimize, and how to maximize the impact of every marketing dollar.   

If you’re still unsure about how to interpret these metrics to make informed decisions, drop us a line to discuss strategies that can help.