When the Polytechnic of Leiria started the process of looking for a portal, we had a very clear goals-focus concerning increasing brand awareness.

Thus, when choosing a portal to work with and why, the Polytechnic of Leiria aspired to:

• Promote our 9 master's courses taught in English;
• Increase high quality leads;
• Improve referral traffic to our websites;
• Increase applications and enrollments for our English offering.

Since the Polytechnic of Leiria has a strong commitment concerning internationalization, specifically in the intercultural exchange field between international and domestic students, we were also concentrated in looking for a portal that was able to reach a wide range of nationalities and cultures.

What type of campaign did you set up with educations.com?

Polytechnic of Leiria and educations.com discussed different types of campaigns that would promote the nine international English-taught master’s degrees. The core focus of the campaign was creating a presentation page for the university and adding program presentation pages including a detailed description such as dates, language, locations, length, etc.

Apart from the listing campaign that would allow IP Leiria with their international exposure, we added some extra visibility for IP Leiria sponsoring our student country guide for Portugal. A few months after we started the campaign, we spoke about the possibility to integrate an additional call to action to drive prospective students to the university online application portal. 

Since we activated that second call to action and after the university began sharing some statistics from their Google Analytics, we saw that it was a successful strategy. Prospective students coming from educations.com through to the university online application portal stayed an average time of 7 minutes in their portal and the bounce rate was lower than 44%.

How do you measure the delivery of educations.com?

The Polytechnic of Leiria developed the tools and resources to track campaigns driving traffic to our own website and application forms.

The educations.com creative team works closely with the Polytechnic of Leiria giving expertise and assistance in our first marketing campaigns.

The educations.com team works together with the Polytechnic of Leiria in analysing campaign performance, number of leads per Master’s degree and making continuous suggestions on how to improve our results.

How did the results compare to other channels?

Since the Polytechnic of Leiria has a recent collaboration with the educations.com portal, at the moment we can’t present final conclusions. However, we can already inform that our desire to achieve a broader audience and high quality leads was successful.

Moreover, working with the educations.com portal has shown us that it is important to have a marketing mix and use channels which are mutually complementary, supporting us with our international marketing strategy.

What else is good about working with us over other channels?

All companies are made up of people, so the relationships that we establish are determinate in how we can succeed in long-term partnerships.

Working closely with the educations.com team is more than a business deal. Being able to count on their professional and efficient assistance not only builds trust and openness and transparent decision-making processes, but also helps us to understand the importance of the role of each partner. This leads us, ultimately, to better outcomes.