Survey of College Paid Digital Ad Marketing Practices

This report looks closely at how colleges are using paid ads from Google, Bing, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, LinkedIn and Twitter. The study provides specific data on 2023-24 academic year spending on each of these services, and forecasts for the upcoming year. In addition, it furnishes data on the percentage of total add spending accounted for by digital ads, and total digital ad spending for the 2022-23, 23-24 and projected for the 24-25 academic years. Survey participants also discuss what they most like or dislike about each platform, and their plans for future use of each one. The report helps its readers to answer questions such as: how much should we spend on digital ads? Which platforms should we use? How do our peers assess the various platforms? Which platforms are accounting for a rising share of expenditures? Data in this 141-page comprehensive report is based on responses from 62 higher education institutional participants; data is broken out by size and Carnegie class of college or university, by sticker price tuition level, and for public and private institutions. In addition, data is separated by some of the personal characteristics of the respondents, such as personal age or gender. Just a few of this report’s many useful findings are that: 16.13% of respondents had advertised on Twitter over the past three years. Mean 2023-24 academic year spending on Facebook ads for the colleges and universities in the sample was $69,336 with a median of $30,000. 77.78% of respondents from research universities had purchased paid advertising on LinkedIn over the past three years. 40.32% of respondents will maintain their digital ad spending constant over the next year. For colleges charging more than $40,000 annually in tuition, digital marketing accounted for nearly 73% of the overall paid marketing budget. Two thirds of respondents from MA/Doctoral level institutions planned to spend more or much more on YouTube ads in the upcoming year.