DeVry University, a career-focused online college with hybrid and online degree programs, incorporated Lunio to tackle challenges related to identifying prospective students, improving the quality of interest and reducing fraudulent advertising traffic. This step was vital to enhance the efficiency of enrolling new students.
Key Stats
- 13% improvement in on-page conversion rate
- 7% decrease in cost per lead
Founded in 1931, DeVry University’s legacy is rooted in innovation. Offering 125+ programs and specializations to choose from, the university remains deeply committed to student success and preparing them to thrive in careers shaped by continuous technological change.
With a wide array of hands-on technology, business, and health programs, DeVry creates opportunities for learners to succeed in an evolving digitized economy. It offers a tech-centered program mix across different degree levels, specializations and certificates. Moreover, DeVry was named one of America’s Top Online Colleges by Newsweek in 2023.
In 2022, DeVry’s marketing team noticed challenges with the quality of traffic and quickly needed to search for a partner to provide deeper insights into the issue. They were looking to understand how impactful the invalid traffic (IVT) was and stop it from affecting the university’s marketing efforts.
Why DeVry University Selected Lunio
DeVry evaluated several other invalid traffic solutions before selecting Lunio. The university wanted to find a partner that could help build a data-driven business case to get buy-in from senior stakeholders.
The IVT partner search, spearheaded by DeVry’s paid media manager Abraham Moreno-Riano, aimed to ensure digital ad spending was utilized efficiently. DeVry ultimately chose Lunio based on competitive pricing, flexible contract terms and previous success with higher education institutions.
During Lunio’s pilot program, all paid traffic coming from Google Ads and Microsoft Ads was analyzed to establish a baseline rate of invalid activity. DeVry then got a data-backed estimate of the savings they could expect based on current ad spend.
I like knowing that Lunio’s auto IP exclusions are always running in the background. That level of automation makes our job a lot easier. We don’t have to worry about constantly rotating IPs manually within our account. That, paired with granular insights into the percentage of invalid traffic across different channels, campaigns, keywords and placements, represents the heart and soul of Lunio for the team.
Rolling Out Multi-Channel Protection
With Lunio protecting paid search traffic across Google and Bing, it revealed insights that surprised the paid media team. Notably, the average IVT rate on branded campaigns was significantly higher than non-brand, leading to suboptimal performance on commercially important keywords.
Invalid traffic rates came down sharply across paid search within the first four months, decreasing by 7.4%. This significant uplift in traffic quality led DeVry to expand Lunio to other key acquisition channels in Feb. 2023, including Meta, YouTube and LinkedIn.
The benefits of multi-channel protection were brought into focus last Sept. when a sudden spike in IVT was visibly noted on YouTube. Between 40% – 50% of traffic was invalid, something that would have been undetectable without Lunio.
In response, DeVry’s paid media team was able to quickly exclude offending IPs, while changing the bid strategy from Maximize Clicks to Maximize Conversions. As Lunio data suggested, the spike was fueled by a Google algorithm that optimized for bots that were consistently clicking through DeVry’s landing pages. These two optimizations reduced IVT back to 3% within a couple of weeks.
The Results
Comparing data year-to-year, from Oct. 2022 to Oct. 2023, the downstream benefits of blocking invalid traffic were reflected in improvements across DeVry’s key performance metrics. With Lunio, the university continued to optimize its digital marketing campaigns:
- More than 75,000 IPs automatically excluded
- 13% increase in on-page conversion rate
- 7% decrease in cost per lead
- 11% decrease in cost per enrollment
When we list the top three things that have helped us in the past year to improve our performance, Lunio is on the list. It’s been eye-opening for us.
The increase in overall enrollment efficiency also contributed to DeVry’s Mission to close the opportunity gap in tech. Its Women + Tech and NextGen Hispanic Scholars programs provide access to educational, community, mentorship and career development opportunities that prepare diverse learners to thrive in tech careers.
“DeVry, in collaboration with Lunio, helped give more students the ability to learn about education programs and pathways available to them. We are extremely excited about the partnership we’ve built.” added Moreno-Riano.
After a successful first year, the paid media team at DeVry is now looking into the future. They are already working with Lunio’s Customer Success and Product teams to trial new features and integrations, which are currently in beta.
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