Training providers and tutoring

An enquiry is a person thinking about it. An enrolment is a person who paid. A completion is the only one of the three that brings you the next student.

You run a training provider, a tutoring business, a course or a school. People enquire, consider it for weeks, enrol, and the ones who finish send you the next intake.

Book a call What we do

A teacher explaining a lesson at a whiteboard to a small class

Enquiry volume is fine, enrolments are not, and the gap between them is measured by nobody. Meanwhile the students who complete are your best marketing and there is no number attached to them at all.

What we keep finding

Four things that shape an education business.

The decision takes weeks and the measurement takes days
People research a course for a month, discuss it at home, and enrol from a direct visit. The advertising that did the work shows nothing, the brand search takes all the credit, and the budget moves to the wrong place.
Enquiry to enrolment is a black box
Between the two there is a prospectus, a phone call, an open evening and a funding conversation. Providers measure the first step and the last and nothing in between, so improvements are impossible to aim.
Completion is the best marketing and is not counted as marketing
Students who finish leave reviews, tell friends and come back for the next level. Providers treat completion as an academic metric when it is also the most valuable acquisition channel they have.
The parent and the student are different audiences
In tutoring and in much of vocational training, one person searches and another decides. Advertising written for one of them and landing pages written for the other is extremely common and quietly expensive.

What changes

What the provider can answer afterwards.

What an enrolment costs, by courseNot an enquiry, and not blended across a prospectus with eleven courses in it that cost different amounts to fill.
Where the enquiry to enrolment gap opensEach step measured, so it becomes obvious whether people are lost at the prospectus, at the call or at the price.
Which sources bring students who finishCompletion rate by acquisition source. It varies far more than anybody expects and it is the number that should set the budget.
What a student is worth across levelsProgression and repeat enrolment counted, so the value of the relationship rather than of a single course is what the advertising is buying against.

A teacher working through a book with a student at a desk

The student who finishes is worth two: the fee, and the person they tell. Only one of those ever appears in a marketing report.

What we measure here

The numbers a provider runs on.

Enquiry, prospectus requested, conversation held, enrolled and started, as separate events
Completion and progression rate by acquisition source
Attribution windows matched to a real research period rather than a default
Course level value rather than a blended enrolment value
Parent and student journeys separated where both are involved
Funding and finance eligibility measured as a step, since it removes real volume
Reviews and alumni referral treated as an acquisition channel with numbers on it

Questions people ask

The ones that actually arrive.

We are funded rather than fee paying. Does this apply?

Partly, and the emphasis changes. Where enrolments are funded the value of a student is set by the funding rules rather than by a price, but everything about the enquiry to enrolment gap and about completion still applies, and completion usually matters more to you than to a fee paying provider.

Our intakes are twice a year.

Then the budget should be shaped around them and the measurement has to work across a long gap. This is one of the cases where a default thirty day conversion window will actively mislead you, and fixing it is the first job.

Is it worth advertising individual courses or the institution?

Courses, in nearly every case, with the institution doing the reassurance job on the page people land on. Institution level advertising is very hard to measure and usually the first thing worth cutting.

Can you help with the website?

Yes, and in this sector the course pages are usually the highest return work available. People are deciding whether they can do this, afford this and fit it around a job, and most course pages answer none of those three.

Proof

Zip VPN

Our own app, measured the way we would measure yours.

Our own app rather than a school, and it is the right proof for the part that matters most here: measuring whether somebody was still there after the first week.

Read the case study

20,000

users a day

300,000

events a day

20%

of users come back

Where this usually starts