Leading Higher Ed Institution Recaptures over $1.47M using Multi-touch Attribution

The Challenge

The brand needed to increase targeted acquisition and revenue through marketing mix evaluation, eliminating unproductive paths and increasing ROMI. However, the brand had no insight into marketing efficacy beyond default Google Analytics and Google Ads reporting. As a result, the brand was blind to the number and structure of current and prospective student paths, true costs and ROI per channel, or even top acquisition sourcing.

Insights

In order to measure channel efficacy, the brand required customer journey visibility and quantification across the ecosystem. Arcalea began by implementing a Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) solution to uncover true customer path attribution for the institution. Capturing website and marketing channel first-party data, Arcalea passed current customer activity data into the brand’s CRM and MTA Dashboard. Through at-a-glance visualizations by channel, path, conversion, and revenue, customer journeys were filtered by over a dozen new dimensions, revealing insights unavailable through traditional analytics.

While paid media appeared to provide the greatest raw number of opportunities, when MTA was implemented, organic traffic was immediately revealed to source far more revenue-producing customers by a factor of 3:1. 

Paid media delivered significant target customers; however, the number of paid media paths outnumbered the revenue-producing paths over 20:1. By revealing the actual productive and non-productive paid media customer paths, the brand was able to identify specific ad elements to eliminate extraneous landing pages and optimize revenue-relevant content. 

Additionally, among the multiple customer targets, the highest value targets’ paths had the lowest Quality Scores of the customer base. As a result, the brand had been paying a premium on paid media channel acquisition for the majority of their least valuable leads. The paid media channel path visualization identified the specific landing pages and path elements to optimize moving forward.