How Colleges Can Use Geotargeting to Improve Website Performance

Guest post by Michael Oguine and Kyle Pucko. Kyle is Co-Founder of GeoFli – a geotargeting software company launched in 2015 in beautiful Missoula, Montana.

---

Each year, millions of prospective college students around the world scour the Internet in hopes of finding the perfect school for them. As the application deadline approaches, students and parents alike will visit several college websites to obtain information that’s vital to the college decision process.

With the high volume of traffic coming into these sites from various regions, it’s very important that visitors see quality, relevant information that will generate more interest in the school.

In order to differentiate your college website from any other plain old college website, you have to make your page stand out.

The goal is to show visitors at least one piece of content that directly leads to heightened interest in your school in the least amount of time. In this article, we’ll discuss how colleges can use geotargeting to achieve that very goal.

Geotargeting

Geotargeting is the practice of delivering content to a specific user based on the user’s location.

Websites, especially college websites, receive visitors from all over the world. A basic website will show the same content to everyone who views it regardless of where they are in the world, while an efficient website will show content that pertains to a certain individual.

Geotargeting is a complex yet extremely effective practice in the art of digital marketing. Fortunately, there’s an effective software out there called GeoFli that simplifies the entire process.

GeoFli

GeoFli is an easy-to-use software that uses geotargeting to allow colleges to modify their website content based on visitor location.

As the video above shows, GeoFli users can utilize radius targeting to show content to people within a certain radius of a location. The made-up Barnaby University is located in the Bay Area and we used GeoFli to inform website visitors that a school admissions counselor will be meeting with students at a local college fair next week.

Information about this potential face-to-face meeting with a college admissions counselor is content that prospective college students in the Bay Area will find extremely helpful in their college search process. This same content will not be relevant to a prospective student in Minneapolis.

In order to better serve those website visitors in and around Minneapolis, we can use GeoFli to, let’s say, show them an article about a current student from the same area. Or, we could post a link to an article about a notable Barnaby alumni who just opened up the largest cancer research center in Minnesota.

Let’s be real for a minute — we all know colleges love to brag. This is your opportunity as a digital marketer to share all the wonderful things your school has to offer with the right people.

Geotargeting is an effective means of ensuring that prospective students and parents don’t miss out on content that’s relevant to them.

GeoFli uses geotargeting to give a unique and personal feel to generic, one-size-fits-nobody websites.

With a generic website, you’ll have to pick and choose which content gets displayed on the homepage and hope that the right people see it. The rest of the content gets dispersed throughout the website which means that fewer people will see it. If a visitor comes to a website and doesn’t see any relevant content right away, they have no incentive to stick around.

Our customers aren’t burdened by this dilemma as they see an increase in time-on-site and average session duration along with a decrease in bounce rate after enhancing their website with our geotargeting tools. Some of our higher education clients even saw a healthy 2% increase in inquiry completion rates after implementing our software.

Let’s take a deeper look at how GeoFli works.

With GeoFli, your college website can be meticulously catered for a specific audience based on region.

The great part is that there’s no limit on the number of regions you can select. All you have to do is tell GeoFli what you want people from each region to see. Regions can be selected using one of three ways.

One option is the Location Library which allows you to choose from a selection of pre-created regions that are divided up by state.

Another option is the Custom Drawing tool which allows you to draw the exact region you wish to target. Simply draw a shape across the map and you can change content for any IP address in that region.

The last option is radius targeting which we saw in the first video. It allows you to select the area you want to target around a given city or zip code. Once you have your selected region, you’re free to get as creative as you like.

In the video, we used GeoFli to display Chicago’s skyline to visitors within a 50-mile radius of Chicago on the university’s homepage. When an out-of-state prospective student visits a college website and is greeted with a nice picture that reminds them of home, they’ll be more inclined to explore the page.

From there, we added a section with a link to inform visitors that our made-up admissions counselors are coming to Chicago. Like we discussed earlier, the fact that Barnaby has admissions counselors coming to Chicago is important to one region but does not pertain to every region.

Simple Website Personalization

Education marketers need to familiarize themselves with contemporary methods that can help them take on their latest challenges. GeoFli was created to provide a simple, yet effective way to implement geotargeting technology into education marketing strategies.

For additional help improving your website’s performance, give us a call. We’ll show you how our proven solutions can work for you!

---

Looking for Enrollment Marketing Content that Works?

You’re in luck! We’ve curated 25 awesome ideas inspired by top higher ed institutions across the country and put them in one handy guide: 25 Ideas for Great Admissions Content.

In this brand new resource from Caylor Solutions, you’ll get…

• • 25 enrollment marketing content ideas you might never have considered before
  • Guidance on how to use each one for best results
  • Brief discussion on why they work to help you sell these ideas to your team

Get inspired. Get enrollment results.
Get 25 Ideas for Great Admissions Content.

Download your copy today!

Featured image by Artur via Adobe Stock