Commentary

NYU Back To School: Higher Ed Search Terms Rise 42%

NYU Campus

Back to school means more searches on Google related to higher education. At least that's the case at New York University (NYU). But when admissions dwindled for specific disciplines in the Master of Arts (MFA) program, NYU took action by focusing on paid click advertising through Google.

NYU has a great reputation for academics, but declining endowments and funding initially forced the school, along with other higher-education institutions, to look more closely at paid search ads and online marketing. The dilemma is all too familiar to me, since I hold a MFA in creative writing and can remember the pain experienced during a teacher layoff because of a budget crunch.

Spencer Frasher, industry director for higher education at Google, says this time of year searches on Google reveal increased interest for information related to going back to school.

About 72% of college-bound high school seniors found a school's homepage by searching online, Frasher says. Search terms related to higher education continue to rise 42% year over year, which out pace searches for consumer electronics or automobiles. "You have to fish where the fish are," he says. "These students are digital natives and if marketers want to communicate with them they need to fit in that mold."

NYU began using AdWords in 2005. Raymond Croce-Galis, media manager at NYU Advertising, believes NYU became the first university to launch a paid click campaign. Back then he paid about $1 for clicks on targeted search terms, jumping to about $3 today. He ran three campaigns for the first six months, adding 10 more during the first full year. What a difference five years make. The total count this year stands 150 campaigns.

Google makes it easy for NYU to see success. The Mountain View, Calif., company reps work with Croce-Galis to determine the words students search on most. It allows Croce-Galis to identify the keyword and target specific information about the program and environment to students, raising the quality and number of applicants during the past few years by tenfold.

About 85% of applicants who applying to NYU's MFA programs come from Google ads. Croce-Galis has managed strategic marketing campaigns in 17 of the top 20 ad spending categories, and he says none of those categories are as challenging as the education sector, particularly for a global university like NYU. "We are not just looking for recruits out of high school were we would have endless advertising options, we are looking for prospects with very niche interests," he says.

NYU runs between 50 and 70 campaigns simultaneously, focusing on specific keywords like bioethics, cinema studies, playing the double bass, dentistry or dramatic writing, as well as marketing for geography. Each campaign initially gets between 20 and 30 keywords. Croce-Galis reviews all campaigns every three days.

NYU has been successful in staying ahead of most media trends. Since 2006, the school has relied on social media, expanding the digital mix and tapping into behavioral targeting and personalized retargeting and more, but nothing has provided the yield and return on investment (ROI) that comes with the Google paid search ads, Croce-Galis says.

It lets NYU follow-through to determine the exact click that leads the student to the school. The keywords are tailored based on special interests in the program. Croce-Galis calls the ads "micro-targeted" because they must have a specific grade-point average and income to enter a MFA program.

Although the vast majority of institutions of higher-education have not tapped video, a few have begun to rely on YouTube and display advertising to reach students. The University at California, Berkeley, for example, uploads lectures online at YouTube and tries to communicate with student more often through video. It's part of Google's push to support schools through their Docs program in the cloud.

2 comments about "NYU Back To School: Higher Ed Search Terms Rise 42%".
Check to receive email when comments are posted.
  1. Andrew Solberg from Full Sail University, September 1, 2010 at 5:37 p.m.

    Re: "NYU began using AdWords in 2005. Raymond Croce-Galis, media manager at NYU Advertising, believes NYU became the first university to launch a paid click campaign". Not to burst anyone's bubble - but there were quite a few schools doing PPC (Google and Overture/Yahoo) well before 2005. Our university started in 2003 and there was already quite a bit of competition from other folks in the education space.

  2. Daniel Riveong from e-Storm international, September 7, 2010 at 11:35 p.m.

    I'm with Andrew. We've done National University's paid search program since the days of Overture (fna Goto.com) back in 2002 or so. Overture was later bought by Yahoo and become the basis for their paid search marketing program.

Next story loading loading..