When it comes to running a private school, allocating your marketing budget might mean the difference between being profitable and being in the red. Are you inaccurately measuring the value of your marketing channels? What if you’re overspending on student acquisition? What if you’re losing money because of outmoded thinking and incorrect assumptions?
What would additional market share be worth to your private school?
The Value of Organic Search Versus Paid Search for Your Private School
No matter who you cater to, studies have shown that organic search delivers a lower acquisition cost than paid search. This is often referred to as “customer acquisition cost” or CAC. Google has said that organic search can double the ROI of paid search.
Limitations of Paid Media
Many private schools seem to think they need to allocate exponentially more of their marketing budget to paid media over organic search. However, many schools are largely unaware of the waste inherently included in paid media. More on this in the next section.
On the other hand, organic search has little to no regarding click costs or lost ad spend. Because it engages with parents more effectively, your organic search marketing spend catches actual clicks. An investment in organic search also grows in value over time, resulting in higher returns.
The Real Source of Website Traffic
Because organic search results are widely trustworthy, they receive the majority of hits. Consider that on desktop, Google’s organic search results produce approximately 20X more hits than sponsored advertisements and 10X more on mobile. (Source: SparkToro)
Your Private School Could Be Misallocating Your Budget
Quite possibly, most private schools in the US do not value organic search as a marketing channel. This presents a significant opportunity for school marketers who are trying to grow enrollment by lowering the cost of acquiring new students. And, with marketing budgets at an all-time low, it’s critical that every dollar you spend must be spent getting students through your doors.
Search Marketing: Organic Versus Paid
Looking to the business world, a typical large business will spend more on paid search than organic methods. According to Terakeet, on average, the CAC of organic search for brands was 87.4% lower than that of paid search. Or in other words, if you spent $79 to acquire a new student through the paid search channel, you could achieve the same results for only $10 through organic search.
Terakeet says that although paid search had a higher total conversion rate, it was most likely due to advertising targeting primarily high-intent queries where searchers were already more likely to make purchases. Typically paid search is focused on these bottom-of-funnel inquiries, but organic search (when done well) targets the full funnel; thus, conversions often occur a few touches later.
Even with a greater conversion rate, their analysis discovered that paid ads were 29X more expensive than organic search.
Outdated Practices
Historically private schools have focused on more traditional marketing methods, and paid search made for an easy transition. However, with the introduction of Apple’s iOS 14.5 update, the impending death of cookies, and recent privacy regulations, the industry of online advertising is rapidly changing. Schools focusing on content marketing and organic search strategies will be in a much better position.
Wasting Money on the Wrong Audiences and Fraud
The reality is that by investing in paid search, private school marketers may be throwing money away to reach the wrong audience or to ad fraud, as I mentioned earlier. But let’s say you are reaching the right audience. These paid ads rarely generate the results you need. This begs the question as to what is really going on.
1. Unforeseen Challenges in Targeting
- Often your target audience, the parents, don’t want to be bothered by ads, so they simply ignore them or use ad blockers.
- Schools must also consider correlation as opposed to causation. Ads are most effective when they are already relevant to an activity that the searcher or user will do. As a result, paid advertisements are an expensive technique of enticing people who may already be planning to reach out, which results in negative returns.
- On the other hand, organic search is the sole channel in which potential parents come out and tell you exactly what they want. Throughout their journey, it is where the bulk of parents attempt to address difficulties. This allows you to provide the answers your parents and caregivers need rather than interrupting their experience with self-promotional information they didn’t want. This level of conversation is far more detailed, trusted, and targeted than anything paid search ads could realistically hope to achieve.
2. Paid Media Waste and Ad Fraud
I mentioned earlier that with paid media, there is inherently more waste. Now bare with me as we go down the rabbit hole of ad fraud so you can better understand what I am talking about.
Ad fraud is a crime in which thieves steal money from organizations, like your school, by using computer technology. You may believe you are purchasing advertising when, in fact, you are purchasing nothing. Thankfully, this type of ad fraud is found mainly in display ads and online video ads.
While there are numerous varieties of ad fraud, the vast majority of ad fraud falls into one of three categories:
- False Audiences
- Fraudulent Websites
- Fraudulent Clicks
These include the characteristics that many private school marketers often pay for, such as how many parents have seen their ad or how many prospective parents have clicked on it.
Fraudsters, criminals, and thieves exploit the system through its vulnerabilities by establishing fake websites, bogus audiences, and fake clicks.
Ad fraud is arguably one of the world’s largest frauds because no one really knows to what extent it exists. Here are some interesting statistics on ad fraud.
- $68 billion, predicted global losses to ad fraud in 2022 (Source: Juniper Research)
- The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) in the US has variously estimated 2022 ad fraud at $81 billion and $120 billion.
- The World Federation of Advertisers says that by 2025 advertising fraud may be the second largest source of criminal income on the planet after drug trafficking.
- A study by Adobe concluded that about 28% of website traffic showed “non-human signals,” indicating that it originated from automated scripts or click farms. (Source: Wall Street Journal)
- 60% of global losses originate from the US, China, Japan, South Korea, and the UK (Source: Juniper Research)
- For every $3 spent on digital ads, $1 is lost to ad fraud (Source: Adage.com)
- 69% of brands that typically spend $1 million per month or more equate 20% to fraud. Said another way, for every $100 they spend, $20 of their budgets goes to ad fraud (Source: eMarketer)
- Statista estimates the cost of global ad fraud will be $100 billion in 2023. (Source: Statista)
- Regarding mobile ad clicks across networks, recent third-party studies estimate that up to 50% of clicks are accidental. For advertisers, this can artificially inflate clickthrough rates and increase costs. (Source: Google | Source: AdSense forum at WebmasterWorld )
3. Diminishing Returns
- Ads are only helpful if you dedicate a specific budget to them.
- The advantage of organic optimization is that the value grows over time. Even if you shift your focus from one part of your private school website to another, the current pages you’ve optimized continue to gain search equity and user trust, continuously improving your search performance.
- Organic search has “a rising tide lifts all ships” effect, and it gets easier and easier to rank on the search results pages over time.
Organic Search vs. Other Marketing Channels
According to Marketing Charts, “US digital advertising continues its rapid ascent,” growing faster than it had in the past 15 years. They also say, “By 2026, the dollar spend on online advertising is forecast to be more than 3.8 times that of TV advertising spend.” The same study said traditional TV advertising will fall behind digital video (YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, etc.) by 2024.
(Source: US Online and Traditional Media Advertising Outlook, 2022-2026 - Marketing Charts)
Difficulty Tracking Conversions of Non-Search Marketing Channels
Although digital channels give conversion data and the ability to track conversions, they have the same issues as sponsored search in that they do not reach your prospective students’ parents when and where they are seeking help. This usually results in lost marketing dollars and greater acquisition costs.
Organic search combines the best of both worlds, offering more accurate conversion data and user-friendly experiences that enable schools to build strong, trust-based connections with prospects.
Enhancing All Channels
An investment in organic search has far-reaching benefits, helping support and continue the school narrative. Unlike a television commercial, which airs over a few weeks and then delivers high-level insights, organic search provides detailed, real-time audience analytics that can help drive better direction, messaging, and results across all channels.
All other channels and marketing efforts are integrated and supported by organic search. When someone sees a TV commercial, the first thing they do is go to a search engine for further information. Organic search casts a broad net, capturing that demand with valuable, brand-positive content.
Organic search provides a holistic, top-to-bottom experience that can help you meet your growth targets at a lower cost than traditional advertising while giving actionable data that will lead to even better strategies.
Final Thoughts
Most private schools underspend on organic search while overspending on paid ads, resulting in a poor ROI. Many schools prefer to stay with the mantra of “this is how we have always done it,” which happens to be one of the most dangerous phrases in the English language.
Barry Adams, the founder of Polemic Digital, says, “Marketers often prefer comfortable lies to uncomfortable truths, which is why we continue to see PPC channels dominate digital marketing budgets, despite the channel’s inferiority to SEO.”
With that being said, I hope you can take one thing away from this post, and that is that organic search can be the single most impactful channel for schools’ digital marketing efforts. This is especially true when you compare it to display ads, paid search ads, or other forms of digital advertising.
The bottom line is that organic search delivers greater and more varied benefits to your school.
Contact us if you need help with your private school’s organic search efforts. I am here to help; we at Cube Creative Design offer a free consultation, and I would be happy to help!
