Has Higher Education Done a Deal with the Devil When It Comes to Reverse Attribution?

The Hidden Costs of International Student Recruitment

During the pandemic, the spotlight shone brightly on agent aggregators, the emergence of the occasional “unicorn,” and the anticipated disruption that agent aggregators bought to the international student recruitment business. However, amidst the “fan fair,” a subtler yet potentially more insidious revenue reducing trend was quietly taking root in higher education marketing and student recruitment. This trend, practiced by course search / peer-to-peer platforms, and rankings publishers, based on the enrolment of students.

All marketers will be aware that conversion tracking and attribution are fundamental tools in digital marketing analytics, offering invaluable opportunities to enhance data collection strategies for colleges and universities. Conversion tracking allows higher education professionals to evaluate the performance and ROI of marketing campaigns, enabling them to monitor user interactions and assess the effectiveness of their efforts in driving enrolment. In accordance with GDPR cookies can be tracked for up to 12 weeks, which allows reverse attribution during a buying cycle. Any longer than 12 weeks is contravening online regulation.

However, during the pandemic, many course search / peer-to-peer platforms and rankings providers began to lower the cost of online advertising. These commercial entities presented universities with enticing “no student, no fee” propositions. Just think of personal injury lawyers offering “no win no fee” legal claims. This was made possible by cookie technology that allowed these platforms to track individual students researching university options and charge institutions retrospectively for any student who eventually enrolled. While lucrative for the platforms, this practice came at a significant cost to universities.

Enrolment-based contracts with universities in the words of the platforms themselves provide, “Targeted demand generation with the goal to provide you with best-fit, diverse and successful enrolments. Ensure Students are nurtured until they enrol successfully. Provide scalable, unlimited exposure and guaranteed ROI and is payable based on success after the enrolment is realised. Due to the nature of the partnership.”

In short at the end of each contracted period the university provides the commercial entity a list of enrolments, we are unsure of the GDPR implications of this, in terms of institutions sharing enrolment data and the duration of cookies needed to conduct reverse attribution as they should be limited to 12 weeks and the higher education buying cycle is generally around 18 months. Then the commercial entity reverse attributes to each student they “claim” to have “introduced” and/or “converted” on behalf of the university, with little oversight and/or proof as far as we can establish.

Ignoring the GDPR / length of cookies / and/or legal implications of this, who is the regulator in this instance and are universities able to provide evidence, using their own online tracking for and against the commercial entities claim.

This is made more complex by the silo nature of university structures; often marketing and domestic student recruitment is a different office to international student recruitment. We would expect most university central marketing teams to be well aware of conversion tracking and attribution, but does this extend to the international office and specialists there who are experts on attribution modelling and reverse attribution?

To understand the financial implications of reverse attribution , let’s consider the example of Poppleton University, inspired by Laurie Taylor’s fictional column in Times Higher Education. Imagine an international student eager to pursue a taught master’s degree in Business and Management at Poppleton. The student, whose family are avid supporters of the fictional Poppleton United, has always aspired to attend the university. After extensive independent research on the university’s website, the student decides to apply. However, feeling apprehensive about obtaining a student visa, the student seeks help from a university counsellor or agent. The agent encourages the application and helps the student apply to Poppleton, while also suggesting additional research on rankings and peer-to-peer platforms to gather further insights.

Although the student had already decided to apply to Poppleton, this further research triggers reverse attribution costs for the university. For international students recruited through agents, universities typically pay a commission of between 10% and 25%, let’s assume for the sake of argument the commission paid by Poppleton in this case is 15% of the course fee, which is £12,950. This reduces the course fee paid to the university to £11,007.50. We feel that agent commission payments, are a legitimate cost of sale for higher education institutions. However, when reverse attribution fees come into play, the financial burden escalates. Platforms that can prove the student visited their sites during the research phase charge additional fees when the student enrols: ranking publishers, course search platforms, and peer-to-peer platforms may each take £150–£250 per student. As a result, the university’s revenue from this student may diminish even further, dropping to around £10,000.

This erosion in fee income becomes even more significant when one considers that some agents also own course search and peer-to-peer platforms, profiting from both a commission payment and multiple attribution fees for a single student. While these costs may initially seem reasonable, they make it difficult for universities to fully comprehend the total cost of student acquisition.

Multiplied across thousands of students, the financial impact is staggering. For example, a university that recruits 10,000 international students annually, with 60% through agents and 70% subject to two or more reverse attribution fees, could lose £12 million in agent commissions and an additional £2.5 million in reverse attribution payments, a total loss of £14.5 million in international tuition fee revenue.

For a sector already grappling with severe financial constraints, this loss is particularly alarming. In many cases, the student was already inclined to apply to the university and only used these platforms for supplementary research. This raises a pressing question: why are universities paying exorbitant sums to platforms for students who were likely to enrol regardless of their involvement?

To address this, universities must take several steps. First, they should enhance their tracking of student activity on their own institution websites, documenting dates and times to establish whether the student’s interest predates interactions with commercial platforms. They should have a detailed understanding of the student journey and university specific touch points with every student. For example, did they receive an application directly following a university email or following an open day? Such data could help universities challenge and/or negotiate reduced attribution fees or not pay them at all.

Second, institutions need to familiarize themselves with different attribution models and adopt strategies that align with their goals. A first-touch attribution model, for example, allocates the majority of the credit to the first point of contact, often the university website, rather than subsequent student engagement with commercial platforms. In contrast, a last-touch attribution model gives the credit to the last touch point in the sales cycle. Given the long decision-making process in higher education, the first-touch model may more accurately reflect the student’s journey. If students have an individual or number of universities in mind, no matter how much commercial outfits pay and/or game the system to come up first when a student is searching for a course, students will likely go to the source—the university they are interested in—and then use the various rankings, course search, and peer-to-peer platforms subsequently.

Finally, universities must critically evaluate their commercial arrangements with rankings publishers, course search platforms, and peer-to-peer sites. While commission-based models appear straightforward—fees are paid only upon enrolment—they can quickly become disproportionately expensive. Plus, is there any true oversight or proof points that it was the peer-to-peer, course search, or ranking that converted the student? It could be argued in most if not all instances the student would have come anyway and used other sources for cursory due diligence. For platforms, this setup is highly profitable, but for universities, it represents an increasingly unsustainable cost.

As financial pressures for universities mount, it is imperative for senior leadership within all universities to develop a deeper understanding of their international student acquisition costs. Universities should understand how much it costs to recruit all their students, domestic and international. When it comes to international, which countries have the lowest cost of acquisition and which the highest? Which courses are the most lucrative? and how reverse attribution models reduce their revenue across the board. By leveraging their own data, adopting fair attribution models, and rethinking commercial agreements, institutions can reduce their cost of acquisition, protect their revenues and navigate their commercial partnerships including the complexities of enrolment-based contracts with greater confidence.