Paid search for higher education
Student recruitment through paid search, across markets, with a buying cycle that runs for months and a lead that has to become an enrolment before it counts.
Sectors / Higher education
What makes it different
Higher education is one of the few sectors where the sale takes six months and the customer is often in a different country from the institution. Paid search has to work across markets, languages and intake dates, and the number that matters is enrolments, not leads.
The other change is AI search. Prospective students now ask ChatGPT and Gemini which course to take. If the institution is not in the answer, it is not on the shortlist.
Where the money is lost
- Optimising to leads. Lead volume is easy to buy. Enrolments are not. Accounts bid to the wrong target because the admissions data is not connected.
- Market by market chaos. Each institution or market runs its own account with its own agency. Nobody can compare cost per enrolment across the group.
- Missing the intake cycle. Budgets flat across the year when demand is not.
- Brand terms across the group. Institutions in the same group bidding against each other.
What Joseph does
- Connects admissions data to media data, so bidding and reporting work to enrolments.
- Builds a group-level operating model: one set of standards, one reporting view, one plan per intake.
- Measures and improves AI search visibility for the courses that matter.
- Sets governance and QA so the agencies in each market are held to the same standard.
See the higher education case study.
Talk to Joseph about your account
A thirty-minute call. You describe the account, Joseph tells you what he would look at first. No deck, no pitch.