Client: UK University
Sector: Higher Education
Project Duration: November 2024 – January 2025
Services Provided:
• Hubspot CRM BigQuery Integration
• Data Strategy
• Automation and software integration
• Report Building
• Team Training
Scenario & Objectives
Following a successful phase 1, in which Apex Digital implemented accurate website tracking & reporting infrastructure, and additional requirement was set to link website activity with the post conversion funnel to gain a full picture of marketing ROI and post lead conversion efficiency.
These data points would be used by student recruitment teams, as well as operations and marketing to gauge which leads are most valuable to attract, e.g. most likely to turn into enrolled students.
The broad requirements were to produce a report which displayed:
• Enquiry origin, from either offline or online sources.
• Post lead conversion data funnels, based on academic year and internally defined recruitment cycles.
• Reporting on open days & offline touchpoints, and how many attendees we linked to both upper funnel marketing activity plus post event conversion and enrolment.
• All data points split by language, application type (e.g. clearing).
• A link between website data and HubSpot data, using first party identifiers where possible.
The way HubSpot and the customer journey was configured needed structural improvement which was outside the control of the team responsible for CRM. In which cases, any report must have been future proof to provide scope for future data to be enriched by improvements in data collection processes. This needed to be achieved both technically, building into the reporting infrastructure based on future data quality, and through documentation and team training.
What We Did
Given the clear brief, the first action was to instigate a discovery phase to identify where current gaps were in both data collection and how datasets could be integrated through common identifiers. This discovery phase informed the data strategy, which was a plan to address the requirement and actions required to bridge the gap.
The initial discovery phase uncovered significant gaps in visibility of the student journey between the website and the CRM, due to a unique process which introduced a blackspot in tracking post conversion. There were also challenges around integrating offline data hosted within Eventbrite and tying these to the integrations to the universities systems.
We utilised various means of integration to HubSpot, to complete a full picture of the contacts and activities post conversion, and collated all data within Google BigQuery, where it was then joined with other HubSpot object plus website data to achieve an attribution across the full funnel where these records could be matched.
This process allowed for future process improvements to drive up the match rate of website visits to post conversion CRM activity.
These data were then integrated with Power BI, the universities chosen visualisation software, where we produced concise reports of all the required datapoints to be shared with senior stakeholders.
Results
• Full understanding of website performance to CRM activity and conversion, to granular detail.
• Allowed for futureproofing of the report to receive enhanced data from process improvements
• Documentation and training provided to wider university stakeholders detailing the exact requirements to connect the relevant data points through data collection improvements in the future.
• Team training for newly appointed data scientists & engineers dealing how the pipeline functioned and how to replicate SQL code to generate insights.
• Marketing attribution between campaigns and conversion points for better ROI measurement.
• Bespoke reporting suitable for each organisational level.
• Single source of truth across web, marketing and student recruitment teams, integrating the entire funnel from marketing clicks to enrolled students.
Summary:
This project included the integration of many different tools to provide a holistic data story, many businesses crave valuable data and insight to make decisions. This project enabled the university to have a source of truth in relation to their entire marketing and student recruitment funnel. This will empower these teams going forward to optimise their acquisition strategy based on the data story.
Client Feedback:
We worked with Apex to develop a Web Analytics reporting suite for our university, bringing key website data into one meaningful dashboard to help inform marketing activity. The team was a pleasure to work with, they were responsive and informative throughout the project. Sam was able to break down quite complex information and terminology and make it meaningful to someone non-technical. I would happily work with Apex Digital again on future projects
– Head of Marketing
Tech stack:
• Hubspot
• Google Analytics
• Zapier
• Google Big Query / GCP SQL
• Power BI / Microsoft Fabric
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