Capture Behavioral Intelligence, Part 1: Where Do Prospects Visit on Your Site?

Over the last four years, Capture Higher Ed — through our behavioral intelligence platform Capture Behavioral Engagement (CBE) — has tracked more than 200 million visits to our partner websites and served more than 15 million pieces of dynamic content to those visitors.  

This has enabled some interesting insights.

For fall 2018, CBE had an influence on more than 30,000 students who saw dynamic content before depositing at one of our partner schools, or about 60% of their class on average.

This gives us a unique view into how students use a school’s website when deciding on a university.

This blog series distills some of those key findings.

How Many, What Kind … and Where They Go

Every year, Capture tracks enough visitors to a university website for it to fill its class 125 times — defined as its number of visitors over the number of deposits. Altogether, we tracked more than 24 million visitors in the last year.

As for identified prospects, enough of them visit a university website for it to fill its class twice. We identified more than 360,000 visitors in the last year or about 7,500 visitors per school on average.

Where do different types of visitors spend time on a university’s website?

Anonymous visitors, identified visitors, applicants and deposited students behave differently when they visit a school’s site, spending their time on different pages. For example, 13% of deposited student visits, 15% of applicant student visits, 17% of identified student visits and 14% of anonymous student visits were to admissions-tagged pages.

We want to place dynamic content on pages where these prospective students — our target audience — visit a lot. Most of the time we are filtering out anonymous visitors. However, if our ruleset includes anonymous visitors, we actually want to avoid pages with a high proportion of anonymous visitors. Anonymous visitors on those pages are likely to be faculty, sports fans, current students or bots.

Instead, we want to place our dynamic content on pages frequented by our target audience. On those pages, anonymous visitors are more likely to be our target audience than on pages with a high proportion of anonymous visitors.

Pages where identified prospects visit in large numbers:
  • Admissions
  • Financial Aid (especially for applicants)
  • Application
  • Housing (especially for applicants and deposits)
  • Visit (especially for identified students who haven’t applied)
Pages where the visitors are disproportionately anonymous visitors:
  • Academics (especially for specific departments, such as pages for the Humanities, Business or Biology departments)
  • Home
  • Athletics

Be sure to tune back in for “Capture Behavioral Intelligence, Part 2” when we look at the seasonality of student visits as well as application rates by page views and the average number of page views by status.

By John Foster, Senior Data Analyst, Capture Higher Ed