In this industry you will find many people who say, “If a lead doesn’t convert within a certain window of time,” it is not a quality lead. They might also allude to the phone number being wrong or email being bad as a sign of a lead not worth working. I would say that this view as it pertains to quality is narrow and unrealistic.

We work in an industry where the student is non-traditional, many times not immediately ready for school and frankly a bit unsure if they want to commit to a life change at all. So the phone might be their cousin’s, and the email their friends. What does this; or rather what are they as students, saying to us? They are saying that we need to rethink our definition of quality and change the methodology that we use in working with our leads. We need to meet the student where they are and be willing to take them with us to where they, deep down, want to go.
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We are all very well aware that the online space would not be moving at the pace it is today without this remarkable tool called tracking. Tracking and accountability in the realm of online advertising is arguably the leading concept that has moved many advertisers (and traditional ad agency’s for that matter) into the space.

Accountability by one definition, is defined as “A is accountable to B when A is obliged to inform B about A’s (past or future) actions and decisions, to justify them, and to suffer punishment in the case of eventual misconduct.” This form of accountability has been taken to the next level at EDU Interactive.

Our proprietary “Lead to Acquisition” report tracks the amount of time it takes individual leads to progress through the multiple milestones that make up a schools unique enrollment process. By weighting and averaging this time variable for each lead/milestone combination, a complex algorithm is used to calculate an overall quality score. This quality score is then used to instantly and accurately measure the lead quality for every vendor/school combination.

From a media planning and buying perspective, this report has proven to not only allow us to create the most effective and efficient online lead generation campaigns, but has also increased enrollments and return-on-investment at each of the institutions we partner with. Just imagine, at a glance, we can understand the effectiveness of our campaigns by school, vendor, placement and/or date range for each of the particular milestones; thus producing results for our Clients promptly and punctually — just in time for classes to commence.