Guus Goorts

We approached Guus because I had purchased his book about recruiting international students using Google Ads and I liked how practical, easy to understand and useful the book was for semi-beginners like me.

By signing up for the course I wanted to help my team and different teams in our university in Communications and Graduate Schools speak the same language of digital marketing for student recruitment, whether domestic or international. Our aim was to become more fluent in the key concepts, measuring the performance of digital marketing campaigns and being able to brief and evaluate external agencies in a way that would reduce spending money or effort on the wrong things.

Our group was mixed in terms of seniority, functional areas and years of experience with digital marketing. It was a pleasure taking part in the weekly live sessions where we would go over the key lessons of that week (watching the videos took about 1 – 2 hours every week) and complete exercises in small groups. The exercises allowed us to re-evaluate existing campaigns for some of our programs from different perspectives but anchored in the key metrics given in the course. Of course, you can’t remember every detail after a couple of months but we can always refer to the course PDF document which is long but has pretty much everything you need in there.

Today, I feel our team is able to completely run succesful in-house digital marketing campaigns to recruit international students to specific programs. Our area for further work is the measuring success part as it does involve having full control of several institutional websites but we’ll get there eventually.

The Irish Universities Association (IUA) was delighted to facilitate access to the e-course on "Fundamentals of Online Student Recruitment" for a group of staff working across its seven member universities.

This training enabled 31 seasoned professionals in the Irish higher education sector to gain valuable new insights into their work in an online context, as well as tangible plans of action to support future student recruitment.

The training is very tailored to marketing staff at HEI's. I believe there will be more questions coming up while diving in GA to monitor the performance and adjust the goal, but this fundamental course explained the basic and practical functions of GA to make a kick start.

The step-by-step learning by doing to set up the goals for conversion was very useful; and understand where to look for what type of information to understand the data as well. As it can be somewhat confusing to look at data in GA without sufficient knowledge and a clear vision of what to look at.