UNIVERSITY OF SUNDERLAND: 6,055 ADDITIONAL OPEN DAY REGISTRATIONS

Shortlisted as University of the Year in 2021, the University of Sunderland is a global institution offering life-changing opportunities to thousands of students across the world at their partner colleges and at main sites in Sunderland, London, and Hong Kong.

The institution is one of the few universities in the North of England that focuses on recruiting students who are local to their campuses. The University was already successful in attracting a high level of website traffic, but it was not converting visits to course application enquiries. The University partnered with Mediaworks to help analyse why it was not achieving its goals and support it in converting visitors into transactional enquiries.

Mediaworks began by analysing the University’s levels of informational and transactional search, tracking the typical pathways of visitors. It then combined that with secret shopping user experience testing.

Through a mixture of both quantitative and qualitative research methods, Mediaworks was able to identify the key pieces of information that were preventing future learners from converting. Using a series of A/B and multivariate user experimentation, design improvements were identified to optimise the traffic flow and increase user-friendliness of the University of Sunderland’s website. This helped increase the flow of prospective students to areas of the website that encouraged selection of open day enquiries, course enquiries, or full-time enrolment.

Once initial recommendations and improvements were made, A/B and A/B/C testing determined which UX and Design changes made the greatest impact towards the objectives.

Mediaworks partnered with the University of Sunderland to make incremental improvements and evolve its user experience on an ongoing basis using audience insight and analysis, resulting in achieving a 181% increase in students looking at a course and converting to attending an open day event at the University of Sunderland. The improvements in performance increased overall open day applications through the website by 51% and students looking to sign up for a course by 61%.