Open days are a crucial point in a student’s pathway to making an application and also a key action to demonstrate that the prospect is seriously considering attending the university.
Great efforts have been put in by higher education institutions across the country to shift this experience online, with digital open days attempting to simulate the in-person open day via online chat, webinars, and content rich user experiences.
So far, this has proven to be a real success with the clients we work with. Yes, it’s a different experience to the traditional open day, but it’s one that could still fit into the recruitment cycle even when social distancing restrictions are eventually fully relaxed.
This means that the journey to conversion has a new step – the digital open day – and one that needs to be sign posted to those with interest in making an application, boosting registrations and attendance.
Cues.ai is an app that constructs a dynamic “smart funnel” onto a university website. The app assesses whether the user is a prospective student with an interest in applying and makes recommendations in the form of a popup “cue” to the user as to what the most important next step they could take would be.
The cues.ai app gives prospects a clear route through an often complex website, ensuring they view key website content and undertake important actions towards applying.
One of these key actions is signing up to attend a digital open day.
The cues we serve are targeted only at those who have registered an interest in applying to study. So, this means we have gathered a clear view as to where messaging should be placed on the website to encourage the prospective students to take action.
On to the data…
The graph below highlights the click through rates per key section of a university website across the higher education sector at undergraduate level. We have omitted the homepage as our focus is on users who dive deeper into a university website. The homepage is nearly always the highest trafficked page, and click through rates for key calls to action will naturally also be high.
With an average CTR of 15.99%, course pages are a clear winner…
In our estimation, course pages are the most crucial part of a university website. This is where users naturally browse to in order to find out information about the course – they will be visiting these pages at all stages of their journey: from initial research to final confirmation – and will have the highest propensity to click a call to action to attend an event.
Following this are pages around fees and funding – highlighting the importance of what university will cost ahead of participating in an open day event.
General course listing pages (e.g. views of faculty course listings or entire course listings) come third with a 3.86% CTR and very shortly after are pages related to accommodation at 3.85%.
After this we see CTRs drop slightly, with “student life” sections at 2% and “how to apply” at 1.47%.
To us this highlights how students might be thinking about applying – and ensuring the user experience of the website reflects the various pathways to finding information and making a decision is important to increasing conversion rate.
Cues.ai can deliver targeted messages to the right users at the right time. This tailors the website experience to the user’s needs as they browse – subsequently making users perform key actions quicker and increasing their engagement.
Want to learn more and how you can reduce bounce rates by 70% by using cues.ai? Give us a call on 01273 955877 or email sales@twentythousandleagues.co.uk.
