Leveraging a great website experience could be the key to universities achieving a higher ROI on their marketing efforts.

In this blog post, we bring to the fore aspects from our Research study that highlights areas universities need to leverage and the reasons they should do so.

When it comes to deciding on a course, prospective students prefer websites that (Figure 1):

• Can be navigated through easily.
• Display course information prominently and facilitate simple comparisons.
• Have full information about the university itself and go above and beyond what their prospective students want.

(1)

After understanding what prospects looking for on a university website, let’s see how closely these needs are being met by different universities (Figure 2) :

Our research study reveals that there is still quite a bit of work to be done. A few prominent issues that have been identified by prospects on university websites such as UTS, Monash and Wollongong are: (Figure 3):

1. Excess information on university websites leads to confusion among students when they are looking for specific information (10% of prospects concluded so).
2. Difficulty in navigating through the excess information on the website. This often elongates the process of locating the information required by prospects (15%-25% prospects concluded so).

(3)

3. “Cluttered” information on university websites. When looking at the course page of CQU, several prospects pointed out that the information displayed tends to be “Cluttered” (Figure 4).

(4)

So, how can you change things around?

1. Provide a seamless and smooth search path on your course Journey.

• Example: UniSA –Figure 5 (i) and Figure (ii).

5 (i)

5 (ii)

2. Give your prospects ‘Takeaways’ and ‘Next Steps’ during the Journey to Courses navigation path (Figure 6).

(6)

3. Offer Tools to Help the Evaluation and Shortlisting Process (Figure 7).

(7)

4. Offer specific search ability by assessing your website hierarchy:

• Help users navigate your site and search by providing helpful filters and a guided choice.

– Example: La Trobe University- Figure 8 (i) and Figure 8 (ii).

8 (i)

8 (ii)

• Use search headers to help users get where they need to get quickly

– Example: London School of Economics- Figure 8 (iii)

8 (iii)

• Offer a needs matching tool to help potential students narrow their research choices.

– Example: University of Melbourne – Figure 8 (iv)

8 (iv)

The key to achieving success lies in tailoring your website to match what your prospective students are looking for. For a more detailed explanation on this, you can watch the recording of our Higher Learning Webinar.

Global Reviews specialises in helping top brands worldwide convert more of their ideal customers online, through the use of the most advanced research methodologies. To find out more about how we can help you and your digital teams, or if your brand would like to be included in our next round of our research, please contact: 

Darren Watson – Senior Commercial Director
T:         +61 3 9013 0531
M:        + 61 413 017 959
E:         darren.watson@globalreviews.com

Tony Carveth- Senior Commercial Director

T:         +61 3 9013 0531
M:        +61 438 081 496
E:         tony.carveth@globalreviews.com