Dive Deeper on the Slate Stage with Waybetter: What the Ping? How to Leverage Ping and UTM in Your Slate Instance

Well, it looks like real life. How everyone?

Good afternoon everyone and thank you for taking the time to join us for today's session on this late stage.

We're going to wait a little bit just here to let everyone join in.

But welcome everyone.

Very excited to have our friends from way better marketing joining us to talk about leveraging Slate Ping product with UTM's.

My name is Elizabeth Taylor and I'm a product manager here technicians and I'll be your moderator for today. My colleague family will be here in the background moderating the chat. In case you have any slate related question.

Before we get started, I wanted to share with you housekeeping items. The first is this webinars being recorded and will be made available for viewing within 24 hours for police Lake Festival passholders and will remain available until July 31st.

I'd also like to bring your attention to the icons in the top right corner of your screen. Closed captioning can be enabled by clicking the CC button. Chat can be hidden by clicking on the chat icon and full screen can be enabled by clicking. The expand icon. Should you need to reset your audio or video, just refresh your share window. And if you have any questions, just please post those to the chat and will try and get them answered.

With that, I'd like to turn it over. It's new again. Our steam presenters Ella Shriner Anrich wiki from way better marketing.

Take it away guys.

Thank you, thank you Allie. Can you hear me alright?

Yes, I can hear you great.

Who we are. Little technical difficulties there. At 159 before we logged on, so let's start with the way you always want to start this so quick intro. Some of you have heard U.S. chat before. Ali and I she's the dynamic part of this duo, so real quick. I'm president. Way better marketing. We started the 2008 we're going on 14 years now. All you want to do a quick intro for you.

Sure everyone only trainer better. About four years you know senior account manager here and really dedicated to helping our current partners and perspective partners you know really make the most of their slate instances. So prior to that I had proven to be impractical. Pyrotechnician for five years working in their audience Development Regulation Department. I always say it was great there to kind of learn about all the problems in missions.

Enrollment marketing moment. Professional space. But today now kind of helping institutions tackle them head on.

Sorry, I need to be here.

In our alleys are leader for our slate work, and she's fantastic, so real quick about way better. We've been at it for this is our 14th year, so we've been working in marketing automation and platforms and and.

All things marketing for it for a long time now we have 6.8 million students an campaigns we host today that is above the work we're doing in Slaton and schools instances. That doesn't count that, but those are in our own campaigns. Today. 75 higher Ed clients, right? Dozens of dozens of slate audits, projects, marketing automation flows, ping, you name it, all things slate.

Ultimately, two way better, right? You know, we're really good at three things.

We're really good marketing automation and making people or learning things about people learning data. Using data to drive interaction and relevancy. We're really good at that were really good enrollment. We understand the enrollment cycle we live and breathe it with you with all our partners, day in, day out, and the third thing that we're able to bring in the table is best practice from outside. Hired an inside higher Ed, an we combine those three things to really focus on.

Ultimately, on deposits in this last little thing, here is countless classes built. If the project involved project involves deposits were interested right, we drive enrollment. That's what we love to do. So thank you much for being here today. We're grateful to we have several clients on here. We're grateful to those clients as well, and we're grateful to all of you that you're here joining us. And we're also grateful that.

You know the last 15-16 months have been rough in here we are in the summer and hopefully the worst is behind us. So what do we get done today? Allie want to jump in this time, so this is a very tough.

Tough webinar, tough talk to do. I've done a lot of these in person for slave for whoever right. This is a tricky one. This involves ping and what the ping, right? It's a. It's a big topic. It's a technical topic and so we're going to try to deliver a really good 45 minutes to an hour that are on based on things that will be helpful for you. We want you to be able to take something out of this that's helpful and we're going to try to boil down a big topic into something that is bite size.

Right, so we're going to start some basic definitions. OK, line out things we're going to talk about. What do they mean to find them right? We're going to talk about how to set up paying for attribution purposes. We're going to talk a lot about attribution attribution, meaning where do they come from? Right attribution, meaning, hey, now that we've got three years worth of data, let's begin to use that. What they're doing. How people, what journey people are taking to ultimately deposit right? And let's use some attribution models to score and do other things so.

Attribution will be something we talk a lot about. We're going to talk about Maturate.

How to ensure a healthy match rate? If you have a lot of ping data but it's not matched to an individual, all you have is a lot of data that no one will look at. They'll look at it for like a month. They'll be like, that's cool. And then after that it's over, right? So we're going to talk about match rate matching it to an individual person. That's what matters, right? And then the good stuff. So hang in there, we're going to talk about 7 marketing strategies that you can use specifically with pink, right? Will give you 7 ideas. You can use it to do.

X Rite will explain. Will explain those as we go. Finally we have. I think. I think Allie calls this our dear dear Santa letter, so we're going to give a dear dear slate letter of wish lists we've like. We would like to see added into this into this piece of the product for slate. So the beautiful thing about this presentation is Allie's going to do most of the hard work.

I'm just kind of the sideshow, so Allie Are you ready?

Are you ready? Are you fired up?

I'm ready, let's get going, yeah.

Alright, let's go.

We as Rich said we're going to start with the basics and it's so great to see so many of you kind of commenting in the chat and see a lot of our leverage. Said a lot of our current partners. Hello to you all and really is just evidenced by you know who's on the call all the different institution types, all the different kind of roles for those logging in. So just to make sure we're all speaking the same language, just to make sure we're all on the same page, we're going to have a quick kind of definite definition, an glossary of terms as it relates.

The website analytics and of course you know as it relates specific to your instance.

So paint obviously riches what the ping, it's why we're all here today. It's technicians own web analytics service that basically tracks web page views by capturing and storing a user's unique IP address and cookie. And it allows you to be more than just hyper personalized look, we love you know first name personalization, dynamic content you know related to major of interest. That's great. You should be doing that. But now you can be hyper relevant, hyper, relevant to what the student is doing.

Right now, to digital behavior to action and ping does this by basically matching that activity to the record. But as the slide indicates, sometimes it happens. You know when the match event occurs, which will talk about. But this day anonymizing page views is really paying's greatest strength and their steps that you need to do in order to take advantage of this trick.

But let's first talk about ping pong. If you think about paying it about being the the data that they think about it being the gas ping pong is really the vehicle to get it moving. It allows you to go beyond just insights and put it into action. You with ping pong, you can build popups. You can display forms, you can display certain content on your website, you can run and execute scripts and basically you can do this all right from your instance without the help of web.

Your webberi team and not to knock any books on the call we love. We love website folks, but really a slight users. It allows you to get done quicker. It allows you to do it right within your instance.

So with pay you really we can't talk about paying without talking about UTM, they need to happen in concert with each other. And you know really the urgent tracking module are parameters that you add to the URL string. They're basically you tell Google Analytics you tell your web analytics service a little bit more about the URL you're telling them you know what marketing campaign it relates to. Marketers use it to track effectiveness of their campaigns.

Across different sources and across different media.

UTM parameters are made up of kind of five key variants, as you'll see here. The stars obviously do note.

Hey Ali can you can you give them the UTM definition that you give like the slow old people like me real quick.

Yes, when I was talking to rich about this, I was like the best way to describe utn is use the acronym not urgent tracking module but you tell me you're telling Google Analytics you're telling Slate what this is. You're telling them what link it is and where it came from. So just think about that and you tell me and what you're telling them. Is these five parameters.

So you have medium, it's required it's the broadest category, it's the type of link that was used. Campaign is also required, and it identifies obviously the campaign. The strategic promotion that that you're using. The source also required, and it identifies the site that sent the traffic. In layman terms, it's the refer. These other ones are nice to have and it just depends on your use case content, otherwise known as keyword sometimes.

It can specifically pinpoint what brought the user to the site, so an example can be. It can help distinguish between an AB test of variable you know. In this case we have some version term can identify the audience.

So if you're doing if you're doing ads right, your mediums ads your campaign can be application, right? Your source can be slate, right? Or your source would be the ad. What would the source be there Ali?

So the source. So the broadest category that would be kind of, you know, the the digital advertising. Yeah, the meat or the medium. Sorry the broadest category would be medium.

Content would be. You could test multiple images of of of ads right and then term again 1st Gen Transfer International right you name it.

Primary secondary markets. Yeah, it really helps define who the audience is.

So now let's see it in action. As you can see here in the URL bar at the top of the screen or at the top of the slide deck, all the UTM parameters are coming over again. We're telling exactly how to categories, how to file this information. If you think about like a file folder structure, and really you and your digital marketing team need to sync up, get together and decide a standard naming convention and really hone in on a strategy for how you're going to employ these across all your campaigns.

Because the guiding principle you need to keep in mind is that if you have a lot of unknown traffic, I'm sorry to say, but you're doing it wrong and it's not to worry. Just take a couple steps back, go back to that team and make sure that you're not missing any campaigns and sources and that you're properly applying UTM to all all active campaigns.

In most of you right will have a lot of unknown traffic. OK, it's OK.

You're not going to fix that overnight, so you just want to chisel away a little bit here a little bit. There is how you'll get better doing this, right so?

We expect when we go into instances where an instance all the time doing audits.

Most people have a lot of unknown traffic, right? It's OK little bit at a time, little bit at a time is how you win this race.

Definitely end, and once you have that data, you're really now ready to make it usable. So now the question is, what do we do with it? It's truly a treasure trove of information you have so much at your disposal, but how you use it will ultimately determine its value, like like so much. It's like your CRM, you get into it. What you put out of it. Good data in is good, data out and it's the same. It's the same with pinging with website analytics.

So with Paint 2 main use cases, we want to drive home use paying for better insights. Use paying to drive action.

Better insights directly relates to attribution.

Then once you have these insights through, then you're ready to get dangerous. You're ready to start using it. You're ready to impact the one to one student relationship and make sure they're moving along in the final. But again, first start with insights, and that comes with that tradition.

Attribution in the most simplest of terms is what's working and what's not what's generating results. What's driving action and look? There's no shame in admitting that you're going to do things that are going to fail. You know, not every new platform is going to work for your school, or for your perspective student base. There's always going to be the new tech talk you know, and it's not always going to work. You're going to try different ad creatives, different designs, displays, and they're not all going to be home runs.

Failure really is almost inevitable, but that's not your biggest challenge. The biggest challenge is you. You can't even learn. You can't learn what's not working. If you can't see it.

Yeah, I just talk real quick about failure. I've always learned more failing.

Right, I think if you adapt a mindset.

Right, that failing is actually a good thing.

Then it it makes it a lot easier for you to fail, right? And then you need to know that you need to know as much what's not working as you know what is working right. And we always talk here, right? And there's a saying I stole it from somebody, but we say success is never final and failure is never fatal. OK, so don't be afraid to fail. Track it so you know when you're failing, failing repeatedly and not learning that's failure, right? So get that mindset.

For sure, and I think too when it comes to attribution, we would be remiss if we didn't talk about our lie, because really, you know, attributes and helps you place that top priority that emphasis on your bottom line on your budget. It helps you answer. It helps you defend your return on investment so you know when in any day budgets are looking to be, you know, slashed when it comes to, especially your digital advertising campaigns. You know you can say look, it's not only you don't have to rely on, just impression and click through rates. You can say, well, it's driving this action. It's driving this conversion.

And attribution will help you. You know to defend that.

So I think it hopefully we've you know, we've talked a lot about attributions. You know, if anything, answering those questions, what worked? What didn't you want to put a lot of thoughtful strategy behind it. But there's one other big use case, and I think it might be. I don't know about your budget. Might be the two most fear words in higher Ed admissions and it's stealth apps.

The old stuff happened so.

Yeah, for no other reason that you folks don't, you know, start using paying a little bit better than then I stopped getting the question about your 30% stuff apps. That would be that would make me happy. And if you guys could make me happy that would be a win for me. So let's make this all about me, but still fast. Everybody asks us about stuff, apps all the time, right in.

Forever, I've said, I don't believe in many stealth apps. I just believe that it's it's very hard for school to track these soft interactions, right? You have some things working against you with this softap thing. Number one, you're talking about 2 1/2 year sales cycle, three year sales cycle. That makes it difficult, right? #2, you're not overly staffed on the university level with data analyst technical people it folks.

So that makes it hard to track and #3 there really hasn't. There's been products out there, but there hasn't been as a product like a ping that's sitting in your lap to be able to track it, right? So that's why over the years you've seen people talk about stealth apps as much as they are, there really aren't that many stealth apps, right? And the other thing you hear me talk a lot about, and I'll talk about it later, probably is having a leaky funnel. So not only is a long sales cycle, it's difficult, 'cause you don't always have the right personnel. All schools really have a leaky funnel. Alright, so you're not tracking all those interactions.

Even when there there easier to track right? So those two things have led overtime to this whole stealth app phenomenon where the first time they show up is when they started an application and that just, quite frankly, isn't true. OK, so as you get ping right up and running.

Right, you'll be able to some point. Believe me, right? So so I think this is a huge huge use case here for another for no other reason right to tackle this problem right?

Sure, and I think you just the slide here kind of indicates are kind of sample student journey and as the the contents of the slide here say their students are likely having hundreds of touchpoints with you over the course of their high school careers has rejected such a long kind of sales process and cycle it just up to this point, you're not tracking it.

So hopefully we've made our case for attribution Ann and the importance of it. But now let's talk about how do you go about fine tuning strategy really accustomed to to your needs? And when it comes to attributions, there's really kind of two main considerations, external and internal. Now I know when you think of attribution depending on everyone's familiarity, your mind probably goes to externals. Definitely remind goes, and as it should, it's kind of. It's the hardest, and it's the most important source to get insights about so.

Well, let's just we'll go ahead and start there because external allocation really helps you control costs. It helps you allocate those dollars to the highest performing campaigns, and instead of again as we talked about, just relying on those engagement metrics within your ADS manager accounts, now you can base your decisions on strategies on results on conversions.

But it's also important not to forget about internal attribution. You know, think about anywhere where we can flow from from an internal property, such as an athletic site. You know, here it's you know, whereas external attribution is more focused on on the dollar on the monetary kind of resources you're putting behind those campaigns. Internal is more about your personnel, your manpower, your staff, where you're allocating those resources from an internal attribution model, you could see that one of your internal properties, maybe an athletic site, is.

Is driving a ton of activity, but maybe you really haven't ever put the time and attention to really optimize it the best in the best way you could now kind of reallocate those resources you know just to make this student like cycling process as best as possible.

So.

The important thing is that our internal and external attribution. But when we talk about models today, we're going to talk about first touch to Lash touch, but just know and I'm sure you know this, that attribution models can get complex very quickly and it has nothing to do with slate. It's important to note too that no one model will give you the whole picture to do this right, you need to really employ several different models.

And again, to keep things simple, for the sake of our conversation today, you know obviously just a 60 minute presentation here we're going to talk about first touch last touch. It's a good place to start, and it's a good place for you to start with. Set up in your instance.

So first touch. It's obviously as it sounds, it gives credit to the first touch. The first tracked interaction with the student. So a quick example. Let's say you license the name from College Board. It's been inserted in told way better search campaign. The student goes through our campaign. They respond there loaded to your slate instance as an inquiry, and then over time they finally apply way better. In a first touch attribution model would be credited. You know, with that because we drove the brand awareness and Glasgow way better.

We are credited with that first touch.

Last touch though. As you can imagine, is exactly the opposite. It gives credit to the last touch point right before the conversion, so in that same example, that way better responder that came through and is now in great. Let's say there are part of an incomplete app campaign. They receive emails. They finally pay attention to one they don't procrastinate anymore, and they apply.

In that case, the incomplete app email they received the credit because they're the last touch. They are the one directly before the conversion, so those are the important considerations. First, touch driving brand awareness. Last touch, you know, really driving that conversion.

So Next up, we're going to talk about the set up. What are the steps that you need to take in your instance today in order to build out these attribution models in order to build out these insights?

And I have some good news. 99% of you, hopefully 100% of you. We do a lot of the audits were always happy to see this. That you have ping enabled. If you have ping enabled, it automatically tracks.

Information are automatically tracks and data on this late sites. Inherently taking it a step further, ensure that ping is configured on all your other sites. Think really about anywhere where leave can flow from you. Know again, search partner sites you know athletic sites and I know you're probably thinking another athletics mention I guess so quick sidebar I should mention I'm a daughter of an athletic director, so my mind is always thinking about athletics, thinking about students coming from that kind of channel.

But really, for you and customer institution, just think about anywhere anywhere I leave can flow from.

So.

Did you say 99% of them have it set up Ally?

I would certainly have 100%.

Yes.

It's automatically set up, Allie, come on. Don't be a wimp, right? So congratulations, everybody, take the rest of the day off. You set up an enabled Ping right right. So that is a nice feature that it is already set up. There's going to be some other things that need to be set up which I was going to go through that we actually have some help for those as well.

Yeah, it's it's just like everyone enables it. It's a quick toggle. I see some people in that. Yeah, it's not automatically, but it is. It's the first step. You go through Launchpad so I know most of you have taken it. So now it's time to get a little technical. You know how do we build out the first touch and last touch data? How do we get that data into your instance in a usable way? So to build out the first touch attributes, you're going to want to use configurable joints and configurable joins are like the new kind of shiny functionality was a new, but the thing that people are paying a lot of attention to these days.

And are making use of and with this configurable joint, you're basically going to marry the PIN data to the person data you know in a query and then for easy access to this for all site users we recommend creating as you see here. It's a little small in the screenshot, but UTM source medium attribute so that anyone with configurable joins access can add this to a person based query and I know it's a mouthful, it's not for me to say it's the screenshots here trying to depict it, but good news as you can see it.

From the screenshots we've already done the work for this and we'd be happy to share it. So just reach out will provide the brief case ID for you to kind of load right into your instance. You can really make use of this first touch data.

So Next up is last touch, so last touch you know in order to have this data directly feed into the model you are going to want to capture UTM data on every form submission.

And I can tell you inherently you're not. So let's talk about a kind of a sample student journey. And then what are the solutions to kind of go about fixing this so you do collect it on every works mission?

So the simple student journey. This is from a digital ad campaign. You serve them at Facebook ad and you do exactly what you're supposed to do. You have all the correct UTM parameters in there, and a student clicks. They engage. They then go to your website.

They land on a program page, want to learn more about biology and now your website has done its job. It now hooks the student they are pulling them in their learning more about financially. Their morning learning more about student life, and even better, they want to learn even more. So they allow your RFI. They fill out your request for information.

But the only problem is all of this browsing the UTM parameters have now been lost.

So there are a number of solutions to solving this, but here's what we think is easiest.

Add in JavaScript code to the page to collect the UTM data and store it in a cookie. Then as the user is browsing, it persists with the student and you'll be able to. Then when the student fills out the form, the UTM data is is submitted along with all the student responses.

To add this code will recommend applying it through Google Tag manager. Other tag manager that you use that should cover both your docmay.edu and your slave sites, and I did the biggest benefit to doing it this way is that then the UTM fields are universally applied to all of your forms. There's no need to apply them individually, which like I said we're in a lot of slate instances every day and I can't imagine you know users having to do that, so that's why we recommend this solution. It will be kind of the quickest and easiest way for for you to implement it.

So now I'm breaking a promise. I said we were going to keep things simple. I said we were going to focus on first touch last touch, but I needed to give the kind of times the ultimate goal is multi touch models. Multi touch attribution. If you've reached this point, congratulations, you are at the finish line and it's really where it's the ultimate goal because you're not just focused on first touch. You're not just focused on last touch, your focus on the entire student journey and all of the interactions you know.

That that it takes in order to convert that student.

But to do this is obviously very complex. As we said, you basically need to put you ping UTM data into origin sources via interactions and then this will allow you to kind holistically include all of your digital channels into those origin sources in groups. It will greatly reduce stuff apps, but it's not for the faint of heart. It requires a really, really strong data strategy, and that's why we recommend start with first and last touch. These are similar methods to not only kind of wrap your head around from a strategy perspective.

But also to set up with in Slate.

Stop.

Yeah, I think the key is in why we're starting first touch last touching you touching it. You gotta walk before you run, right?

It's gonna take you awhile right? To ultimately get into a scoring model, right? That actually represents something factual. If you will, right? We you can make up a scoring model today, but at the end of the day you made it up right, and so it's going to take you awhile. You gotta walk first to run, and if you try to run first, you'll never accomplish anything. And that goes for anything you try to build inside of Slate or any CRM tool.

Right walk first right, we always say do do something right. We want to do something rule to make it better. So start with these simple simple things right and then you'll grow into the rest. You'll get more curious. You'll see more. You'll see more learnings along the way. You'll come up with more ideas and you'll take bigger risks. You'll try more right? So just keep it simple in the beginning and that will take you a long way to the end.

For sure, and I will say that we've reached now part of the deck. Rich were through the Super technical stuff. It's behind us, but before we get to the good stuff, another roadblock and it's one we talked about before. Remember Ping's greatest strength D. Anonymizing page views. It matched the web page view to the person.

If these things aren't connected, all you're getting is insights. Again, you're not able to impact the one to one student relationship because, again, to reiterate, back to this, slide ping is 2 main use cases to drive insights to drive action.

But in order to be able to drive action and I need to have a good mattress, you need to be able to identify what you do the page view to the person record to be able to communicate with them in a marketing kind of automated way.

The other data without a match is, like I said, data that people look at and say, well, that's cool and they look at it for about 3 weeks and then that report that you deliver to him with that data in there. That's the one they never look at it again.

Right, so if you're really proud of that report, remember, probably nobody's looking at it. You start delivering a report with.

Ali did this. Rich did that right. Ken did this. Tim did that. They'll keep looking at that because there's value in there, right? There's value in how you use it. There's value in how you report on it, right? There's value. And how you learn what journeys take the student journeys they take to ultimately deposit or to apply, or to come to visit, or to fill out a FAFSA, right? That's what matters.

The rest was just noise.

Sure, an I would say with Matrey it's we're not going to sugarcoat it. It's going to be hard work because it's going to be long work. It's just going to be something that you're going to continue to work on overtime. This snapshot below shows like kind of dropping UTM data from a single day so you can see it's 14,000 unique events from a single day. So when looking at it on an annual scale from a 12 month perspective for the same partner, it was 3.5.

Million events, and I think we just need to like let that sink in. 3.5 million ping events over the course of 12 months.

Of those 3.5 million events, 500,000 events were matched, so about a 15% match rate.

And then something that's not on the slide, but just to take it, break it down even a step further of the 500,000, about 10,000 were matched to a person record. So when you really think about it, 3.5 million events whittled down to just 10,000 records in your instance.

So I think you can guess what we're going to talk about next. How do you improve this? How do you improve battery? And I think you know we're going to talk about strategies. We're going to talk about things you can do, but know this that you know this current metric for this current partner is 15%, the next 15% will be easy. It's going to be a lot of low hanging fruit. The next 15% is going to be harder and harder and harder after that it's incrementally going to get harder, but again, it will be this never ending journey. But overtime you will improve match rate and you will be able to.

You know, affect consumer can make communication more on a 1 to one level.

What happens when you start to do it right? You then that seeps into your brain. So when you go to run the next campaign or or use another source of info.

Lead generation or whatever right? You put up a new landing page once you start thinking about it. That's part of your thought process at that point, that's that's part of muscle memory. You say? Oh, OK. Well, how am I going to try to track this? I'm going to try to match this right? And so you begin never to forget to do that, right? So then all of a sudden you take your match rate from 15 to 20 to 25 to 30 and it just becomes part of your day today just becomes part of the way you work. Part of the way you think.

Right mindset mindset ultimately change everything right? So start start with one thing. Start with email like the next slide she's going to talk a little bit about email being able to do an email that's not very hard. Start there and then away you go on the journey you're on your way.

Yes, so let's get right to it. How does a match occur and occurs by a form submission? I'll click in an email and logging into student authenticating themselves to your instance. Think your app portal status page is essentially the student raising their hands, and here I am. I've identified myself and the good news is it will then backfill all of their historical pageview information to the person record. So all that information when the match occurs, what will now be available?

And you know, given these match events form submission, click on the email login. You can probably guess what student statuses inversely instance today have the highest match rate. So Elizabeth thanks so much just dropped a question in the chat. There a poll question. So if you had to guess, you know of your statuses prospects, increase apps, admits who do you think has the highest mattress?

Or just let them the answers come in a bit.

We need the jeopardy music now we screwed up.

We definitely do.

Right in the background, the font.

Idea?

OK, and it looks like you guys are spot. I know answers are still coming in, but you're absolutely right. Just by nature of the admissions process and frankly by the nature of time you're allowing more opportunity for a match event to occur. Admitted and applied students are having much more likely to have a higher match rates than those kind of earlier on in the final.

Which makes sense. There are always going to be more engaged the farther they go through the funnel. There's more opportunity to them for you to for you to tag them. There's more opportunity than for them to engage and tell you who they are. Like we, I mean, so, you know, like we build up, I'll do a shameless plug here. We build awesome right portal pages. If anybody seen the weather we did on that, those those are incredible. Those kids we already know who they are. They're going to come back over and over and over again. So those admits you should be nailing.

An extremely high rate, right? So in the prospects, not so much right? Unless you can get him in an email if they click in an email in the prospect level, maybe fill out a form.

But they're still going to do that at a low rate, right? Because they don't even know you exist. They don't know if they like you, they don't want you to know who they are, right? So the farther you go down to the funnel, your success should should grow, and the other beautiful thing is, right. Once you get, if you think about this two years down the road, right of two years worth of data. Once you get him as admit, let's say it's going to backfill.

Right, it's going to backfill all those other interactions, right? Which is fantastic. So even if even if you are in a cycle and you haven't done a great job up until the very end, it's still worth doing it then. It's still worth trying to get that match, right? And that's really what's going to help you multiple years down the road when you're really going to get smart at this right? And you're really going to start building true scores, not like an email. Open is worth X right? True scores.

Down the road at some point that you're going to work into every aspect of your life into your financial aid model. Maybe who you let in, right? Maybe how you talked to him over summer.

Right, that's going to take years to get to, but just keep trying to get those matches. Keep that in your mind all the time.

And let's talk about how you improve mattress. So you couple of your comment about that in the chat. So we're going to focus on mastery upstream. Again, applicants and admits you know already be covered by just by nature of the admissions process. So let's focus on increase. We're going to focus on the click again, form submission. Click login for inquiries. Focus on the click and I know you might be thinking to yourself. Well, every purpose of an email is to get the click. But again, as which had kind of retrain your brain and have a specific strategy.

Battery the emails that really are looking to improve battery should have a very low ask, you know. Use video in email. You're not asking the student to thought along form, you're not asking the student to commit to an event on a date and time. You're asking them for 30 seconds of their time to learn more about your institution via video.

The other thing that we love is offer. We love a good offer. We love a good giveaway sweepstakes in this example from Wilkes. They were giving away a free kind of ski or snowboard pass on to a nearby mountain resort and it's just a great way perspective. Students love free swag. Everyone looks free swag. They also did a countdown timer here in the email again to drive urgency to drive that click, and I think the you know, the kind of ultimate goal here. If you can tie it to a larger admission.

Admissions initiative great because you know they're already in the area they get this skier snowboard pass. Have them swing by or for a campus visit so it's good when you can kind of make that marriage of the two initiatives.

The beautiful thing about this, right? Both of those examples.

Forget about matching for a second, that's how they should be done anyways, right? An email is only supposed to give you enough information to get you to the next step, right? So you saying in my mind, well, I want to make sure I keep it short and sweet to give him something engaging him, some easy to click on. Still fits what you should be doing no matter what you're doing. Same thing with offer right every direct marketing campaign. There's two main things that matter, right? Data? Am I talking to the right people and offer? Alright so not only will you be doing things that will help you to match kids.

And I think to something that's not included here on this side universe mentioned, not just email thinking about your forms, I think it's a good good time to take a hard look at your forms. How long are they? Are you asking just enough to get the information you need? And are you asking one question too many 'cause if it's one question too many if you're having form abandonment, you're not getting records updated into your instance and the match isn't occurring. You know we even see a lot of smart strategies with working with the short form first.

So having students come to a program page and filling out just first name, last name, email, and the entry term, and then overtime collecting more information and frankly, just that strategy alone, we could go on and on about an another shameless plug were actually are going to go on and on about it next Tuesday in the Innovation festival for kind of ultimate guide to Super Smart. And so if you're interested, come check for tonight out for that, we'll be talking more about it.

But now we're really kind of ready to get on to the good stuff you now. Like I said, have this kind of treasure trove of data and insights. What do you do with it? What are your strategy? What are your next steps and to take you through some sample use cases? We're going to focus ones that you can use today right now, and once you use tomorrow and again, it all has to do with Matri because we assume that you know, like our like our partner, like we've seen in many other instances that your mattress is going to be best for those applied and admitted students. So those are the things we're going to focus on for today.

And then give you some kind of further initiatives to look for it through tomorrow.

So Mark in new case number one for today. Birdnet consider tracking page views to their portal page and making it visible to the students. So in this case student visits the page they see they visited page 32 times. You may be wondering why are they doing that? Why are they making that visible? And frankly, we hope the student has the same question because they get pulled in. They learn more. Oh, the enrolled student with the most portal page visits. They get the ultimate prize they get in this case in our example it's free football season tickets.

And these portal pages is rich. I can do a lot of work with them. We want them to be sticky. We want the student to come back again and again. We want to train the behavior. The portal page is your one stop shop. It's a nice confined environment that you can serve up next steps pink and help help make that page sticky it also.

Did I blow my dad blow my portal page plug and do it early alley?

No, that's OK, it was perfect. It's both places good. Love portal.

No, no, I did it. I blew it. Yes, we've got great portal pages. We want people to come there. Giveaways are perfect, right? This is an easy way to do that tracking. You could do it even other ways, but this is an easy way to to practice and do it. Sorry, I screwed your whole thing up.

No no, no, no. Web portal pages love talking about then I think too for paying. It's important for the counselor to tracking portal pages visits again. If the student you see it's a high visit count but they haven't taken that next step. Time for the counselor to pick up the phone. You know. Reach out with a call or a text.

Next, use case one again today and this is, you know, to build a query of your first and students. You know ping an UTM and you inflate in concert together. Allow you to get ultra granular. You can build ultra defined segments, so if you see it first and student is repeatedly visiting your admissions page to learn more about like what are the steps to enroll like what are their requirements? You can reject them with resources with information you know, events that might be coming up that might be helpful for them. Give them the tools.

Give them the knowledge they need and you're really your segment. Your query is being driven by pain. It's a micro targeted strategy that's being driven by a ping data set.

So next use case and this is something that you know. I think we're all too familiar with the pandemic and that is your virtual visit. Offerings. With the pandemic you had to get creative. You had to have, you know ways for students to visit you in a virtual way. So take advantage of that. I don't think you know a lot of the partners we talked to. I don't think the appetite for those is going to go away and frankly leverage all your hard work that you did this past year with as it relates to ping. Create a query, create a population that targets.

Uhm?

You know students within script editor students within your secondary market, because then you can serve up those virtual options to them and trigger communications to them. You know, in a targeted way for all of your virtual events.

And then taking it a step back when it comes to fast. So we talk about all these key KP eyes. We talk about Portal page visits, you know we talk about in this case fast. But it's a key flag for you to consider. It's you know if they don't file the fasfa, the likelihood of them enrolling is just is lower. The ability for you to package is is limited, so send them a real time dedicated trigger email with fast instructions. It's a real time alert to the student at the same time, trigger an alert to your counselor.

And that way they can follow up the multi touch point at this point in the process is absolutely key there. At this point there there your student to lose and it's important for you to have kind of that multi touch approach.

And This is why This is why you have a CRM. This is what marketing automation is. I've been doing this for.

Over 15 years I've seen every major marketing automation platform.

Released in used in practice at places in 99% of the time, people that buy these tools, they buy him and then they send out blast emails with. That's not the point.

OK, the point is to talk to specific micro groups in specific ways. The point is to trigger lead notifications through the right people to solve business problems.

Right to solve marketing problems right?

That's what they're there for. OK, so this is a perfect example, right? You've got a population of 100 kids that have been admitted.

75 right 75 I've given you faster 25 habit you only have one person they can't call everybody, right? I guess in this let's make it 10,000 and 775 hundred. There you go. They can't call 2500 people right? You already got email that's going out and it says other things, right? So how do you find that 500 people that haven't done the FASA. OK but are kicking the tires and looking at your a page online? 'cause those of the 25?

100 that haven't done it. Those 500 are probably the ones that will do it if they get some coaching.

So you're going to use your tool, your slate as your tool, and you're going to overlay this strategy on top of it. That's it, says ID. These people for me trigger these two events and email an A notification to a counselor to pick up the phone.

That's marketing automation. That's why you invest the money. That's how you return on the money invested. OK, it's important to remember these things. It's important to learn these behaviors along the way, right to derive value.

And a lot of people just don't do it because they get busy. But you can do it.

And I think it's important all of these strategies that we talked about it really comes back to one guiding principle. Think if your entire.edu, then give your entire website as a big shopping cart. If a student comes to a page that they were supposed to take certain action, a visit page, inipi page a deposit and confirm your enrollment page and they don't follow up with them, send that cart abandonment email that we're used to across. You know all other kinds of different industries, so just a good rule of thumb to kind of stick by.

So the next marketing use case here and this is for all the digital marketers in the room and that is to utilize your slate queries and send that data data directly to Facebook. It allows you to obviously getting a lot of good insights, but allows you to target, you know, specific populations, with ads for inclusion purposes for certain person pression purposes and really like we talk a lot about match. This will obviously be much more powerful as your mastery improves, but it's really too good of functionality to pass up on now to save you a lot of time.

You know, it's something that we definitely encourage you to make use of.

It allows you to work smarter, not harder, right? You might be one person with three jobs, right? Use the technology at your fingertips. Spend a little time figuring it out and building it, and you'll be able to work a lot smarter and a lot and not harder, right?

Now we're getting in the use cases for later. Again, these longer term initiatives as your Matri improves, and this when we talked to, you know, are kind of current partners about what they want to use PIN for. I think the thing that bubbles up to a top wishlist item is I want to create an automated role that will convert a prospect to an inquiry. So a little small here on this slide, but this is basically a role that identifies you know the prospect, statuses, prospects we're going to set the status to inquiry, and then we're going to.

You know, use a PIN filter to basically set that rule to make it to make it active. In this case it's really small on the screen, but it's two ping events.

But this will be completely custom to your institution. You know, just depending on you know. Again, all of those insights that you glean from your attribution models. What is the perfect mix? Because you need to have the considerations you don't want to dilute your inquiry pool. You have a great qualified in cripple. You don't want to dilute it and you don't want to kind of negatively impact your inquiry to app conversion rate, but you want to take advantage of the automation. All of your other data sources are defined a way better. For instance, search responder comes in there loaded as an inquiry you want to be able to do that.

For all those others that are just kind of looking on your website so it's, you know it's definitely something that that we encourage you to take advantage of.

So finally you schemes for you today and again long term initiative back to ping pong. Again, think ping pong the vehicle to really kind of delivering using data to really start because the possibilities are limitless. You can do all of those different things, display forms you know, insert pop-ups where do you start when we recommend creating a query? An look at the top 100 to 500 URLs from your website? What's most popular? What's getting the most kind of hits? This requires a bit of custom.

Equal, it's kind of small here on the screen is you'll see the architect behind this is Lee Carson. These are, you know, people platforms. Here is the brains behind a lot of this, and again, we'd be happy to briefcase this for you, so you can take advantage of it. And then once you have this information, you can then see again. What are the pages that I need to be paying most attention to, and what are the ways that I can really kind of affect change?

So after the recent wish list.

Oh, the dear Santa. OK so dear slate, so yeah, there's not a lot of great documentation on paying, and there's some things we wish that that slate over the next couple of years will develop out. And I'm sure that I'm sure they're on it already. So here it goes with the wish list, I think Allie makes me do this. 'cause there's some things on here I don't even know what they mean, but I think only one I think I'm down to one, no alley only one, but I'm not going to tell anybody that we can make a contest out of it. I suppose right Soaping wish lists.

More Google Analytics type capabilities, right? There's a.

There's a path out there.

Right, let's mimic the path a little bit, take what's best and in the market now, append custom events and data to ping easily. Extract non UTM data from a ping table using SQL more matching capabilities, right example person ID, hash ID, third party in the query strings right? So including their name or an ID in the in the query string.

So yeah, ping pong, wishlist, right regular expression or wildcards within target interface wildcard. Meaning I can, I can easilly tag a group of pages.

I'm going to screw this up with verbage easytag. A group of pages rather than have to tag every page easily, insert user token variables, field merges. Hey, if you know Mary's on there and you want to now pop some information to Mary, being able to use Mary, you know that she's interested in science and she's an out of state student being able to easily insert that would be a great benefit, so that's our dear dear slate there, Santa List. Sure, there's a million other million other great things that you all.

Would come up with in the community would come up with, but those are just a few off the top of my head and yeah, and I'm not going to tell you which one, I still don't know because I think Allie did explain it to me several times. And yeah, we'll just leave it at that. That's why she's the brains behind the operation. I'm just a good looking part of it, right? She's the brains, so we at the end. I think we're at the end right alley? Well.

We made it. We're at the end.

Yeah, real quick. I see people want slide decks, there's the briefcase or asylum by accident times the suitcase. I'd like to start a renaming of it and call it suitcase. Suitcase right now. Seems awesome to me. 'cause that means I would be going on a trip somewhere which I haven't done for 15 months. So join me in calling it suitcases from now but we can get you that information we can get you that slide deck and we can always answer any questions you have. Reach out to us were normal human beings were not looking too.

To sell you anything, most of the time, and we're not going to call you back forever and beat you up. So if you have questions, just reach out. If you reach out to me, I'll probably pass it off to Ali, but now there's a lot of people there that can help you reach out. Don't be strangers. Don't be shy. We love this stuff, right? And then I will give Allie the last shameless plug.

Of the afternoon.

Yes, and it's just for all you sleep. That's obviously everyone here on the call familiar with the Innovation Festival. We have one more spot on this late stage and that will be next Tuesday. So the ultimate guide to student first marketing, we're going to talk a little bit about paying. But really, how to incorporate? You know, all of these practices to deliverability. Custom experiences student across all channels.

And we do have about 5 minutes left. If you like to take a couple of questions.

Yes, let's do it.

Great, so we have one. We'd like to hear about Pinggan consent management and how schools plan to look at this in the future.

Rich, do you wanna? I'll do we take it?

Yeah, I.

Call

I would just say ping is. It's like so many other other things, I think you really just, you know, check with your legal team. Check with your Council you know about what consent rules apply to to your school. You know, for example, like California, Virginia, they have privacy laws that have exemptions for nonprofits. But really, it does all kind of fall under your privacy policy, so it it, it will depend. And you know, ultimately, you're probably change over time.

My thing with it is like keep an ear to the ground. These these things change all the time and some things that get built up to be major deals turn out to be nothing. Something's come out of nowhere and be something right. So when they come up the whole consent piece, don't panic.

Take your time.

Do a little research. It's going to be OK. It's a never ending thing, right? And to be honest with you alot of times when you dig through it.

There's a lot less to be concerned about than there is to be concerned about, right? So that would be my new sense of just slow and steady wins the race. Relax about it and learn and dig in and it'll be fine.

That's great, thank you.

Let's take another. We have separate instances for undergrad and grad. What is the best way to set up ping on our other websites?

That's a great question. It's one that we've run into with with our partners, and I'd say you can easily install the tracking code you know from both instances, and I think the easiest, most common way is through Google Tag Manager Tag Manager. If it's installed. The only caveat to this, and we've seen this with some of our partners, is that there is content blockers that are much more likely to block Ping when it's installed via A tag manager. So like in Google tag manager, you can expect the block rate. I don't see anywhere between.

For an 8% versus probably less than 1% if installed directly on the page. So talk to those website evokes and you know about the ease and the coverage and just the kind of trade offs there. But it's a great question.

Something we run into a lot.

Thank you.

Next one we are setting up an engagement scoring formula. How can pain be weighted as part of the strategy?

Another great question. I would say you know, including time spent on site including page views definitely should be part of the overall strategy, but you know it shouldn't be the only one. Of course, there's other things that are going to go in there from the kind of query that we showed, like the topping page hits, you know, identify the key pages you know. That would be kind of included in the overall engagement score, and that overall needs for and then assign a small percentage to pay. Again, it's going to be something that will be fine too overtime.

You have to see how it works to see how it fits with your instance and see how qualified you know those leads are as as the kind of scoring models kind of work their way through. Certainly not an exact science and it really just depends how it overall kind of impacts in moment.

Yeah, there's an element of this. You fake it till you make it. You know you might. You might kind of arbitrarily assign some scoring and take that through the first couple years and then then go back and really look and see what's moving the needle. I think I think there's a lot of value to that exercise, right? Because if it forces you again in that mindset to start thinking about it in a certain way now, I wouldn't do much with it.

Right, those that first year where I'm faking it, but it would at least start start the process for me right to when I condense, go back and look. That's that's the way I would recommend doing it.

Great thank you and what steps can be initiated to help admissions counselors manage their territory by using ping data.

That's a great question. I think it's actually really. It's so great to the lead scoring model 'cause they're really helps home the efforts. It helps. Where should the counselor direct their attention to so similar to the other use cases we gave as examples developed lead queries that you know, look at those specific pages and look at specific ping events like the apply the financially page to contact Counselor page and then follow up, you know apply an appropriate amount of time spent on those pages and then the counselor can can can reach out. You know it can be communications we set up to.

Trigger alert to the counselor or for them just to make a personal touch point.

Excellent and will sneak one last one in there. We run out of time, but how can ping be used to combat summer melt?

Summer melt helping break too. You know, I think it's summer melt you know it's just one of those things that you need to monitor. Ping and deep engagement. And when there's ever adapt to enrollment, you know trigger further appropriate communication based on pay activity. You know whatever you have coming up. I know a lot of folks who may be adding extra orientation dates this summer. If students were able to visit earlier on. So just again, you can never overstate the importance of driving relevant content, and an on demand something that's specific to that digital behavior.

Well, just to combat summer, melt in a year, probably more important than ever, just always be there. You know with relevant kind of personalized information.

Alright, well with that we're out of time. Thank you so much, Elaine Rich for joining us in presenting some of our preferred partners. We always welcome your input and sharing this great information. Thank you everyone for attending and have a great afternoon.

Thanks, I'll have a good time.

Breaking away.

Nice yeah.