Education
For Educators, Positive Copy Doesn’t Get a Passing Grade
OVERVIEW
Key Insights for Education
Whether it’s registering for in-person classes or attending virtual lessons, it’s safe to say that learning has officially gone online. As education becomes increasingly remote, marketers will wanna make sure their landing pages are taking visitors to school.
You’ll sign up more students on social.
Most of your visitors come from paid search ads, but they don’t convert as well as you might think. See why you should think about putting Google Ads in detention. (Or, y’know, reducing them.)
Most emotions lead to lower conversions.
People have got lots of feelings about school—apparently, nearly all of them can lead to lower landing page performance. Get a lesson on which sentiments convert your visitors.
Hey—go easy on the assigned reading.
You might’ve guessed that short and simple copy can improve your page performance. But how short and simple, exactly? Let’s just say you’d better grab your red pen.
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Key Insight: Conversion Rate
Pages for online and remote learning get higher rates.
Conversion Rate: 2020 vs. 2021
What’s this mean? This graph (called a “box plot”) shows how the conversion rates of landing pages are distributed. The dotted horizontal line is the median conversion rate, while the “box” shows where most pages sit. The vertical lines (or “whiskers”) represent the range of the remaining pages, excluding any extreme outliers.
Key Insight: Traffic
Don’t look now, but your search ads might be falling behind.
Education landing pages get roughly half of all their visitors from paid ads on Google and Bing (52.2% and 39.3% to form and click pages, respectively). Social media is pretty productive, too, contributing nearly a fifth of total traffic (19.5% and 13.5%).
No matter the type of campaign you’re running—whether you’re creating awareness or trying to nab registrations—your ad budget is probably better spent on social than search. People who’ve just been taggin’ and tweetin’ have a higher median conversion rate on both click and form-fill pages.
Why is that? It could be that search visitors are already checking out different schools and wanna shop around. Or maybe people are just more likely to sign up for classes after they’ve wasted hours crawling through social media. (What are we doin’ with our lives?)
It doesn’t really matter what your campaign goal is. If you’re using paid advertising, you should think about prioritizing social media over search engines.
CONVERSION OPTIMIZATION
Increase your enrollment rates by optimizing for more conversions
Wanna get the most outta these insights? Here’s how we recommend you use ‘em in your marketing.
1. Pick the insights that are most relevant to you.
Do pages in your industry convert better when they’re short? Maybe your copy is giving off the wrong vibes? Take note of the findings that are relevant to your campaigns.
2. Apply the recommendations to your pages.
Create a variant of your landing page and make the changes recommended in this report. Use A/B testing to see how it performs.
3. Get new insights and keep on optimizing.
Use the results from your landing page variant to inform the creation of more variants. Keep improving your pages and watch as your conversion rates climb.
Key Insight: Sentiment
Wanna get students excited? Then don’t be too positive.
When people think “education,” they’re usually imagining positive things, right? Pursue your dream career. Level up your professional skills. Heck, we’ll say it: school is cool.
So it’s kinda strange that when we analyzed which emotional sentiments get visitors to convert on education landing pages, we learned that good feelings can sometimes lead to bad results.
See the graph? As the percentage of words relating to joy and anticipation go up, page performance tends to go slightly down. Positivity seems to have a neutral or negative influence on whether visitors convert.
One more observation: Some negative sentiments (like anger and disgust) show a correlation with increased conversions. Now, don’t get all goth kid on us. Instead, maybe experiment with a version of your copy that highlights the problems education solves.
Try creating a variant of your page that focuses on the problem visitors are facing (rather than just the benefits you’re offering), then use Smart Traffic to see how it performs.
Sentiments: 2020 vs. 2021
These types of emotional language saw the biggest change in use (increase or decrease) on education pages over the past year.
+10.1%
More Sadness Words
+6.1%
More Surprise Words
+10.2%
More Anger Words
Key Insight: Readability
Your page converts best when your copy is informal.
In last year’s report, we emphasized that using easy-to-understand, to-the-point language was a sure-fire way to increase your landing page conversion rate. (We don’t need to teach you about reading comprehension, right?)
That recommendation holds up—and, boy, does it. From the graph, we can tell that anything written at a college level or higher has a pretty flat conversion rate. But as you simplify your copy—for high school students, then for elementary school students—you can see your performance really take off.
How ‘bout word count? Well, shorter’s always better. You can expect to see improved results when your page is under 400 words—but for top marks, get it under 200.
Keep your copy as short as possible (under 200 words, ideally) and write for a middle school audience or elementary-school audience.
Readability: 2020 vs. 2021
Here’s how reading ease and word count have changed on education landing pages since our last report.
+12.5%
Easier to Read
+9.2%
More Total Words
Education
Education marketers using Smart Traffic convert 31% more visitors.
At least, that’s what the average lift data shows. Smart Traffic looks at each visitor’s attributes and sends ‘em to the page where they’re most likely to convert.
See how Smart Traffic “automagically” gets you more conversions.