KPIs and Metrics You Should Be Tracking With Your PK-12 Student Recruitment Campaigns

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

-Jaime Martinez, CEO

In the classroom, students often set goals they hope to accomplish by the end of the year. Before setting those goals, they have to establish where they are now so they can track how far they have come. As a school administrator looking to enhance your enrollment, you also need a baseline to measure your progress. A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a trackable metric to evaluate as you work toward your recruitment goals. KPIs are unique to your institution based on what you wish to achieve. 

At Schola, we are dedicated to improving your student enrollment. Our team uses KPIs every day to ensure that we are moving in a positive direction towards accomplishing your enrollment goals. When you set a significant goal (such as enrolling 15 new students), there are smaller pieces to it that can become your metrics. For example, a student recruitment campaign KPI may be website engagement or tours given to prospective families. So let’s dive into what KPIs and Metrics you should be using to find out what’s working (and what’s not). 

What KPIs and Metrics Should I Use for Enrollment?

Like how schools use KPIs to evaluate their students’ performance, marketing KPIs track how your enrollment strategy is going. For example, you measure your enrollment goal’s progress when you use student recruitment metrics for PK-12 school admissions. 

Without KPIs, it is difficult to determine your success in a campaign. Understanding your benchmarks can be the key to improved enrollment and retention. At Schola, we help schools find prospective families with comprehensive recruitment strategies. We constantly adapt these strategies based on what our metrics show so that we can optimize schools’ enrollment. Here are some of the most important metrics we use to track progress:

• CPL (Cost Per Lead) – Just as the name implies, CPL refers to the cost of generating a new qualifying lead. For Schola, qualifying leads are potential families who are likely to enroll their child in a specific school. CPL is determined by dividing the amount you spent on marketing by the number of qualified leads that the marketing effort brought in. As a simple example, if you spent $1,000 advertising on Facebook and received ten leads, your CPL would be $100. 
• CPA (Cost Per Application) – Since not all leads will likely apply to the school, CPA only considers the students who actually take the next step of applying. CPA is also closely tied to your conversion rate. If you received ten leads from your marketing efforts, and three actually apply, you would have a conversion rate of 30%. 
• Student Retention Rate – This rate indicates the percentage of students that enroll, continue, and finish their academic studies in the same school. This is often overlooked when the focus is on new enrollments but is very important for schools’ overall goals. 
• ROI (Return on Investment) – This describes the profitability of the school’s marketing efforts: For every dollar they spend, how much are they generating back. It is essential to understand the relationship between the costs associated with marketing to help determine if the strategy is working and which marketing activities are most effective. If you are not getting a high enough ROI, you likely need to adjust your method. 
• A/B Testing – This is also known as split testing. A/B Testing refers to an experimentation process where two or more versions of a variable (email, CTA, etc.) are shown to different segments of leads at the same time to determine which version leaves the maximum impact and drives schools’ metrics. While it sounds complicated at first, it is pretty simple to implement with the help of the right EdTech tools.

Partner With Schola for Personalized Student Recruitment Campaigns

Reaching your enrollment goals is a journey, but you don’t have to do it alone. At Schola, our recruitment experts evaluate what has worked for your enrollment strategy and what hasn’t, so thatwe can optimize your campaign. To better serve your school, we assess the best metrics to use in student recruitment campaigns and help you begin to improve them. 

Your school may already have interested families waiting for you in your free School profile on Schola.com. When parents and students search through ScholaMatch™ , they’ll discover what school is the right fit for them and can reach out directly to those schools. Through ScholaRecruiter Pro™, we lighten your load by rolling out ad campaigns and following up with all your prospective families, both in English and  Spanish.

To get started, claim your school’s profile with Schola for free. You can optimize your recruitment even more with a premium partnership. If you want to see how this package can change your strategy and provide results, you can request a demo online.