Where Have All the Cookies Gone?

Recently, big news came from Google that rocked the marketing community – a loss of the impact of marketing cookies. How will it impact your enrollment strategy? How will you serve up information for your leads now?

It’s become commonplace to utilize 3rd party tracking cookies to monitor the online activity of website visitors and then retarget them for your advertising elsewhere on the internet. To increase user’s right to privacy, Google will begin removing the ability to utilize these digital advertising tactics on direct and individual level look-alike audiences. Efforts to execute digital advertising to build demand (whether done by your in-house marketing team or from an outside partner) will be heavily impacted, both in the work they can do and the insights they can still provide.

1st Party Is First Priority

You’ve bought your lists from your data vendor of choice, so the real focus should be on nurturing those prospects to help them better understand and identify with your institution and community. They need to learn about your people, customs, services, requirements and they need to be able to feel confident in the answers they receive. With the removal of cookies to follow them around the internet, you need to focus on your content and how to best drive your audience to it.

Building your own data, keeping it scrubbed, and using it properly to propel enrollment efforts will continue to set institutions apart. What information are you storing in your CRM, how are you maintaining it, and how are you leveraging it to build your class? Focusing on your first party data will reap benefits throughout your enrollment funnel.

Conduit, Not Cookies

Conduit’s robust reporting and completely university-branded platform allows you to track student engagement with your content through QTokens and NOT marketing cookies. It’s then easy to use this information to continue to forge meaningful relationships with them as you nurture and support them through the recruitment funnel, best utilizing your admissions team’s skills and time. Through SFTP or CRM integrations, this valuable data is individual student level and easy to review for engagement patterns and actionable strategic efforts to let you better predict who is likely to enroll and who needs more of your staff’s outreach to get them over the hump.

Conduit provides data points tied to your student and, most importantly, does not share that information with your competitors. Additionally, they do not become part of a population other schools can drive ads to when they engage with your platform. Your audience only sees your branded content.  

Re-Imagine Marketing Efforts

No longer can passive comm flows be enough to bring along your audience from Inquiry to Matriculation. Loss of cookies and the granular data they can provide means that attribution modeling is now more difficult than ever. 

Utilizing third-party marketing cookies to build, target and retarget your top of the funnel audiences will be replaced with authentic and genuine displays of your institution’s brand and value through properly segmented communication flows like Convert, an increase in internal reporting, and data-driven strategic decision making. 

A holistic strategy includes continuous engagement and wielding reporting data to segment your own data. And, most importantly, a strong marketing and recruitment strategy must include ongoing testing to learn about your audience and serve them the information they want – in the way they want it – at the time they want it. Coordinate the data you do have, use it to qualify the leads you’re working with, and track the ROI on your various communication flow efforts. Tools like QTokens help you keep that neat and organized as you display the effectiveness of your efforts along the various parts of the funnel.