In higher education marketing, tracking application and yield conversions is essential—but often, the insights stop at the surface. Many institutions face a critical challenge: while it’s possible to track an application or yield conversion through paid media campaigns, gaining deeper context such as the program, term, or student type remains out of reach, especially for an institution with a shared CRM. How is it possible to distinguish an undergraduate from a graduate application?
By implementing strategies like data layers and offline conversion tracking, it’s now possible to attribute program or segment-specific applications, and even offline events like admits and deposits, to your paid media campaigns.
In this blog post, we’ll explore three practical ways to level up your reporting in 2025, helping you go beyond the action itself to unlock the details that matter most.
Data Layer
A data layer passes information between your website and a tag management solution such as Google Tag Manager (GTM). Think of it as a bridge, enabling your website, CRM, analytics tools, and marketing platforms to exchange data effortlessly so when a prospective student fills out an application, their information can be shared with the CRM, tracked in analytics tools, and integrated into marketing reports—all in real time. In short, the data layer is the way to make more detailed information about the action accessible to different martech platforms.
In the higher education industry, leveraging a data layer can help solve a common conversion tracking challenge: how to track application submissions for specific programs or student types. Let’s take a closer look at two practical examples:
- Student Type
A school that uses a shared CRM to manage admissions wants to see application conversions broken down by first-year, transfer, and graduate student types. By pushing this CRM data to the data layer, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) or paid media platforms are able to report conversions using those details. - Application Program
Targeted advertising campaigns for specific programs are a common strategy in higher education. A data layer ensures that program-specific applications are accurately tracked and attributed to the correct marketing channels which then allows for ad platforms to optimize their machine learning algorithms for the program application conversion.
Offline Conversion Tracking (OCT)
Offline conversion tracking is a method of tracking conversion points that occur outside of traditional web-based tracking. A few common examples of offline conversions in higher education include: inquiry or application submissions that are in a CRM that is incompatible with Google Tag Manager (such as Common App or CollegeNet), admissions decisions (such as admits or accepts), and enrollment deposit payment submissions. This method of tracking is available for all of the major ad platforms: Google Ads, Meta, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and TikTok.
Setting up OCT is a fairly straightforward process: first, you identify the conversion you want to try to record (let’s say Common App submissions) and build a list of students that fall under that criteria within your CRM. You then upload their email and phone numbers into the ad platforms (where personal data is hashed upon import), and the platforms will do their best to see if that information matches any user profiles who interacted with your marketing campaigns. Now, you should be able to see if any of your marketing campaigns led to Common App submissions (something you weren’t able to record previously).
One thing to be careful of with OCT is attribution windows; as with all methods of conversion tracking, you’ll only be able to attribute a specific conversion event to a specific marketing interaction within a certain timeframe. These differ between platforms: Google is 90 days after an ad click, while Meta is only 7 days, for example. Your Google Ads campaign won’t get credit for an enrollment deposit if the deposit occurred more than 90 days after someone clicked on an ad. This can prove to be tricky when we think about the life cycle of a student, especially traditional undergrad. Does a student click on a PPC ad to request info, and then submit their enrollment deposit within 90 days? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
Because of this, it is recommended to upload your offline conversions on a frequent basis to ensure you are recording as much as you can. Pro Tip: depending on your CRM and the ad platform in question, you can fully automate this workflow.
One other benefit of offline conversion tracking is the impact it has on machine learning. Platforms are relying more and more on their algorithms to make real time optimizations for better performance. The more data the better – and with the additional further-down-the-funnel data being uploaded, the platforms have more insight into what campaigns are driving those key actions.
Despite the potential pitfall related to attribution windows, we’ve seen successes: a Carnegie client in Pennsylvania boasted a total of 98 admitted students and 22 enrollment deposits recorded for their PPC campaigns in Q4. This is data we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to record with traditional web-based conversion tracking and so it also wouldn’t have been available to feed the platform’s machine learning bidding strategies.
Gaining actionable insights in GA4
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) serves as a powerful platform for consolidating both data layer variables and offline conversions, enabling comprehensive reporting and actionable insights. Through its event-based tracking system, GA4 transforms raw data into meaningful insights about your user journey and engagement patterns. If you’re new to setting up events in GA4, our GA4 webinar provides guidance to get you started.
Let’s walk through a practical example: tracking student applications through Google Tag Manager (GTM). When configuring a custom application_submit event in GTM, you can include the parameter student_type from the data layer. This setup allows for detailed analysis in GA4, where you can segment applications by various dimensions including source, medium, and location.
Getting started with analysis:
- Add your custom parameters to the custom definition menu in GA4
- Navigate to Reports > Life Cycle > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition
View user acquisition patterns and add event names or custom parameters to analyze which channels drive completed applications - Navigate to Reports > Life Cycle > Engagement > Events report
Add student type as a second dimension to view metrics for application submissions by student type
For deeper analysis, convert any standard report into an Exploration using the button in the top right navigation menu. This allows you to add multiple dimensions and metrics for comprehensive behavior analysis.
GA4’s capabilities extend beyond website interactions by incorporating offline conversion data, providing a complete view of the customer journey. By combining GTM custom events with imported CRM data, you can track valuable touchpoints that occur outside your digital platforms. These offline conversions appear in your reports with customizable parameters, just like online events.
The real power comes from analyzing online and offline data together in both standard reports and Explorations. This unified approach reveals the true impact of your marketing efforts across all channels, both digital and physical. These comprehensive insights drive more informed decisions for marketing campaigns and website optimizations, ultimately helping to increase application completions and overall conversion rates.
As higher education marketers, moving beyond basic application and yield conversion tracking is no longer optional—it’s essential for making data-driven decisions. By leveraging data layers, offline conversion tracking, and GA4 you can transform surface-level data into meaningful insights. These approaches empower you to not only track the “what” but also understand the details that matter to inform smarter decisions and data-driven optimizations.
If you need help getting started, Carnegie’s proprietary audience segmentation and targeting tools are ready to transform your enrollment strategy. Reach out and start a conversation to learn more.
This article was written by Jack Calderini, Director of Digital Integrations; Elizabeth Glass, Director of Google Analytics; and Kyleigh Letourneu, Assistant Director of Product & Strategy, Clarity.