A conversation with Nick Kurjiaka, General Manager of Education at PX, and Ryan Simmons, Senior Director of Sales.
Most schools buying third-party leads negotiate one flat price of all the leads they buy from a particular lead vendor. It is the easiest version of the deal to sign and the easiest to reconcile at the end of the month.
It is also why a lot of enrollment budgets miss their cost per enrollment target while every lead invoice looks correct.
We sat down with Nick Kurjiaka and Ryan Simmons to talk through what flat pricing does to the enrollment funnel, why seat supply should move your bid, and which KPIs schools should be measured on now that students take twice as long to decide.
Nick: Fixed prices are sometimes beneficial and sometimes not. If there are plenty of lead vendors, giving one price point is just easy, and you can run it across all your different sources. I don't think that is the most efficient way to do it. Our model is to run a dynamic lead pricing and pay publishers the price they need to be successful, because not every lead is created equal. Not every lead should be $50 or $100. Some need to be $25 to get back into a cost per enrollment. Some need to be $100, and they are going to convert higher and be more efficient.
Ryan: It comes down to efficiency. Schools have a cost per enrollment they are trying to back out to. On a flat lead rate, if you introduce lower quality partners, they are not going to meet that cost per enrollment. So, you end up leaning on your higher quality partners to make up for what the others are driving, because not everybody is built to be a $50 lead.
Ryan: Every school is competing for the same students, and the name of the game is getting your brand in front of them. When there is a shortage of students against the seats you have to fill, price points go up, because you are competing for the higher quality traffic that drives enrollment rates.
Nick: From a client perspective, if I have more applicants than open seats, I am going to be less aggressive on my cost per lead. If I need additional students to fill every seat, I want to be more aggressive with the publisher partners I am working with. A variable price point is what lets me move in either direction and stay efficient about filling the classroom.
Nick: Cost per enrollment moves with it. If we are aggressive, we might land at a higher cost per enrollment, and that is fine. It is often necessary for the start we are trying to fill. If it isn't peak season, we want to be more aggressive about where cost per enrollment falls. In January or August, it is easier to get students. More people are looking, the more intent they are, the more ready they are to act, so we can pull back on cost per lead. We get as many applicants and the cost per enrollment gets more efficient.
A lot of schools understand that, and we push them to be aggressive in the offseason if they have started to fill then.
Nick: Across any channel, it is hard to find what the actual CPL needs to be. On Google, whether it is searching some keywords carry efficiency, and some don't. You can be running a smooth campaign, and then Google changes the rules, tests a new product, and forces you to relearn where your results are coming from. Social works similarly. You are running a low budget, and you think you will hit the CPLs you need, but those companies are built to have you spend money. The more you spend, the more efficient your campaigns get.
It happens constantly: the CPL looks good on paper and then fails to get back into what you need. Whether you are working with one publisher or twenty, that is why you need diversification across your third-party partners, your keywords on Google, and your campaigns on Meta. There is no single price point that does it across the board, and even when you think you have something, other factors change it. The more platforms and partners you have, the better you protect yourself from the small changes that happen over time.
Ryan: That is why disposition data matters so much. When clients share it actively, we understand which sources are working and which are not, so we can optimize the fly, and they are not overpaid for traffic. It benefits the school, and it benefits the publisher.
Nick: It depends on the vertical. In home services, plenty of buyers never ask where the traffic is coming from or what the form flows like. In education, everybody asks; we show this to them as well. When one to one consent came up over the last couple of years, everybody built the technology for it. After the FCC vacated it, several verticals dropped it completely. In education, we kept it, because when a student goes through a lead form and sees exactly who they are submitting their information to, that is the best way to bring intent and quality into the funnel.
Knowing the source also sets performance expectations. Search leads want a call right away. They are higher intent and more likely to move toward an application and an interview. Social leads can be high intent, but that is more of an awareness funnel, so they need more nurturing. The more the school knows, the more precisely they can tell their admissions advisors how to handle each lead.
Ryan: There is also accreditation. A lot of these institutions hold accreditations from the government, and if they lose one, they are no longer a school. That sensitivity is why they stay so focused on compliance and visibility in the media and the traffic.
Ryan: Schools avoid sweepstakes-type sites entirely. They are non-compliant, and you don't see them in education. With any lead, it comes down to verification and capturing intent. Email is a good example. The user has to open a creative, click on it, then complete a multiple-step form. Most people won't spend their time on a multiple step form if they don't want to hear from the school, so there is real intent by the time they hit submit.
There is also a lot inside the form itself. Desired start time is a big one. Does the student want to start immediately, in the first three months, three to six, six to nine, or a year out? Anyone choosing a year out probably isn't a good student to contact at that point. The intent isn't there yet; they are gathering information. You don't need the highest quality media in every case. You need to capture intent, and there are form flows that do that regardless of the media.
Ryan: Certainly not cost per lead. If we have learned anything over the years, it is that buying a pile of leads that don't convert on the back-end wastes everyone's time. Those leads go to call centers and admissions reps who get buried in calls that go nowhere. You are better off paying $200 for a lead that becomes an enrollment than getting ten or fifteen leads for that same money that turns into nothing.
What we hear from our partners is cost per start and cost per enrollment. When we ask a school for KPIs, they will say they want appointment rate, and app rate is a useful indicator that things are progressing and the person has interest. It doesn't tell the whole story. So, we take their cost per start target, deconstruct it, and work out what media we need to deliver at what price to hit their goals. We take their cost per start target, deconstruct it, and work out what media we need to deliver at what price to hit their goals.
Nick: Application rate can mislead you on its own. A source with a 10 or 20 percent application rate won't necessarily keep converting, and a source with a 5 percent application rate can convert at 4 percent. Usually, the intent you see at the beginning matches the intent at the end, but that isn't always true.
Nick: In education, leads take three months to mature. In home services it is two weeks, because somebody is in their house and ready to go. Students take longer to decide, and over the last year and a half that has only stretched further. Some students take twice as long to decide as they used to. Cost per enrollment and cost per start are the important numbers, and it takes a long time to see them.
My honest answer is that it depends on how well you know your campaigns. We have partners where we know which keywords produce enrollments and starts, so we know what cost per lead we need on those keywords, and we are comfortable making decisions on that information. That is on campaigns we have run long enough to see consistency in. Starting a new campaign, we use what we know from other campaigns to inform decisions, then move more slowly: cost per lead and source, yes, but also interviews, applications, acceptances, cost per enrollment, and starts, with a close pulse on all of it.
Nick: First, work with PX. That makes the job easier. Second, the halo effect is real, so understand your media mix. A search campaign that works with your Meta campaign, that works with your CTV campaign, that works with organic: all of those feed each other. Running search and Meta side by side improves cost per lead, cost per transfer, and cost per interview on both. An offline campaign like TV, radio, or CTV feeds organic.
The hard part is having enough budget for all of it. If you are going on search, you need to spend enough time for it to be efficient. If you are spending $5,000 or $10,000 a month on Meta and you are frustrated with performance, it is because you need to spend more to create that efficiency, which is tough for a small school. Get search efficiently first, then move to Meta when there is a budget to run it properly.
Ryan: Not all leads are created equal, so schools need to understand what they are buying. We show clients how we are optimizing their campaigns and what to expect from each lead: this is a high-quality lead coming from this source. Once they have that, they should prioritize accordingly in the call center, working the high quality leads first instead of spending rep time on the lower quality ones. That drives more enrollments.
Most schools running flat CPLs aren't doing it for a strategic reason. They are busy people, and the path of least resistance is one price point you can judge all traffic against. What we tell them is that variable pricing can be managed clearly and easily, and it makes their business easier to run. Let us show you how.
Nick: PX started as a broker, with a flat CPL and a lot of different partnerships. We have evolved. We know right pricing is the way to go, so we built a transparent platform where schools can see every publisher, bid on them transparently for what they are worth, and pass back-end data through, so we understand how good each source is and what price its needs in order to hit the cost per enrollment goal.
Want to see what your enrollment media looks like when every source is priced for what it delivers? Talk to the PX education team.