Home/For enrollment marketing leaders at colleges & universities

Your ad spend is in one system.
Your applications are in another.
Leadership needs ROI.

Most dashboards stop at impressions, clicks, and leads — metrics that don't tell you which enrolled students had first visited your site from an ad click and how much was spent, or which programs are converting spend into applications. Below is what a real enrollment marketing dashboard looks like. The numbers are synthetic; every filter, dropdown, and breakdown is real. Click anything.

The prototype below: Filter by division, program, platform · Switch dimensions · YoY deltas baked in
Live interactive prototype — all controls work
U
Enrollment Marketing Dashboard
Overall Performance
U
Your University
Office of Enrollment Marketing · FY 2026
Fiscal Year FY 2026 (1)
or
Date Range Jul 1, 2025 — Jun 30, 2026
DivisionAll (7)
ProgramAll (22)
Area of StudyAll (8)
PlatformAll (9)
Break down by Sets the dimension for the chart and table below
↗ Spend
↗ Leads
↗ Applications
↗ Deposits
↗ CPA
Data Last Refreshed
Performance Summary All selected segments aggregated
Spend
Leads
CPL
Applications
CPA
Deposits
CPD
Impressions
Clicks
CTR
CPM
Applications by Program ← Change metric ▾
Performance by Program
DIMENSION: PROGRAM
Program ▴SpendImpressionsClicksCTRCPCCPMLeadsCPLApplicationsCPADepositsCPD
Applications · Division × Month
HEATMAP · DARKER = MORE
Spend by Platform
Metric: Spend
Spend by Campaign
Metric: Spend
Year for Chart 2024, 2025 (2) ▾
Monthly Performance — Detail
DIMENSION: MONTH YR
Month ▴SpendImpressionsClicksCTRCPCCPMLeadsCPLApplicationsCPADepositsCPD
Applications by Month
Sorted ↓
Applications — Year over Year
By Division
By Area of Study
By Program
By Platform
By Ad Set / Campaign Name
Why it matters
return on ad spend, up from 2× year over year
$15M
tuition revenue from marketing campaigns

Connecting marketing spend to actual enrolled students is what makes ROI visible in the first place — it allows you to see which programs, audiences, and campaigns truly convert. With this dashboard, we can confidently say that our Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) increased from 2× to 5× year over year across the graduate portfolio, generating $15 million in tuition revenue from marketing campaigns.

Now, the hard part

How to build the machine that generates the dashboard — that's the real magic.

Anyone can build a pretty chart from a CSV. The real work — the part that turns "we ran some ads" into "here's exactly what an enrolled student in our MBA program cost us, after multi-touch attribution and a 9-month consideration window" — is wiring the systems together. That's where most enrollment marketing teams get stuck. It's also what I've done at every job for the last 20 years.

01 / Source systems

Your data lives in too many places

Lead capture in one CRM, applications in another, ad spend across five platforms, enrollments in your SIS. Joining them is not "an API call." It's deduping a person across UTMs, emails, form submissions, and a 9-month consideration window.

SlateSalesforceTechnolutionsHubSpotElement451BannerPeopleSoft
02 / Ad platforms

Spend ≠ Cost-per-Enrolled-Student

Platform-reported conversions are the start, not the answer. Real attribution means stitching click IDs to leads, leads to apps, apps to admits, admits to deposits — and reconciling when a "Meta-attributed" lead actually came from organic search.

Google AdsMetaLinkedInTikTokMicrosoftRedditDV360YouTube
03 / Warehouse + viz

A pipeline you actually own

Not a vendor dashboard you rent. Your team's analysts can write SQL against your warehouse, your marketers see a layer they trust, and when leadership asks "what's our CPA for the MSW program?" you have an answer in 90 seconds, not 90 days.

BigQuerySnowflakeLookerTableauPower BIdbtFivetran

Who's building this

20 years of proving ROI to leadership.

EGM

EDU Growth Marketers

Higher-ed marketing infrastructure

Most recent
Led centralized graduate enrollment marketing across multiple schools at a top-tier New York university — law, business, social work, education, and more.
Before that
Directed marketing for the largest public university system in the U.S. — 25 colleges, 275,000 students.
Also
Founded an economics media venture; freelance digital marketing strategy for B2B clients.

The dashboards we build aren't templates. They reflect how your specific school routes leads, what your specific CRM fields are called, and which programs in your specific portfolio compete for the same applicant.

We've shipped the Slate-to-BigQuery pipelines. We've reconciled Meta's iOS 17 conversion gaps against admissions deposit data. We've sat in the meeting where a CFO asks "so what's our actual CPA?" and watched marketers fumble the answer because their dashboard reports platform conversions, not enrollments.

That's the problem we solve. The pretty dashboard is just the proof.


Past work

What this looks like, on real budgets.

A top-tier New York university

Centralized graduate enrollment marketing across 7 schools

Stood up a unified BigQuery + Looker pipeline pulling from Slate, Meta, Google, LinkedIn, and Microsoft Ads. Replaced 6 separate program-level reports with one cross-school dashboard.

7graduate schools
unified into one data view
The largest U.S. public university

Marketing strategy for 25-college public university system

Built attribution frameworks for a system serving 275,000 students. Reconciled platform-reported conversions with SIS enrollment data to produce CPAs that finance leadership actually trusted.

275Kstudents across
25 colleges
Various clients

Freelance dashboard & pipeline engagements

From single-program landing-page analytics to multi-school enrollment funnels — typically 4–12 weeks to ship the data layer, then ongoing partnership on the strategic reads.

4–12weeks to ship
the data layer

Want a dashboard like the one above, but real?

Book a 30-minute discovery call. We'll ask about your stack, your funnel, your reporting headaches. If we can help, we'll tell you how. If we can't, we'll tell you that too.

Schedule a 30-min discovery call →
No deck. No SDR. Just a conversation.