The student journey starts before the open day. How do you measure what happens beforehand?

In higher education, the student journey is a concept that everyone understands and almost no one fully measures. Not because the ambition is lacking—but because the infrastructure does not allow it.

Most institutions have a view of who attended the open day, who registered for a trial study day, and who eventually submitted a study application. But the contact moments in between—the information webinars, the digital brochures, the repeated website visits, the conversations during school visits—remain largely invisible in the reporting.

That matters, because those in-between moments are often decisive.

What data about contact moments reveals

Analyses at institutions that have measured their entire journey reveal a consistent pattern: study choosers who have gone through four or more contact moments convert significantly more often to enrolment. Not surprising—but the implication is larger than it seems.

If you do not know who has completed four contact moments, you cannot proactively guide that group. You are then directing at the last visible moment, while the decision was formed earlier in the process. And the study chooser who has attended three online sessions and downloaded two brochures but has never been to the campus is simply invisible to most systems.

Your CRM is not the problem. Forcing student recruitment into it is.

Generic CRM systems are not built to track a journey like this. They record what is entered into the system—but the logic to merge disparate contact moments into one coherent picture per study chooser, and follow up automatically, is not standard functionality. It is configuration. And configuration costs time, money, and maintenance.

A specialised recruitment platform reverses that logic: the journey is the core, not an addition. Every contact moment is documented, linked to an individual, and enables the right follow-up automatically—without manual work, without intervention.

Courses want to recruit students themselves. But do they still dare to work within the system?

The extent to which journey data is usable does not only depend on what the system records—but on who works with it. If a platform is so complex that only central marketing staff can handle it well, you lose most of the information that is available more decentrally.

Courses and institutes that organise activities independently also need independent access to the data these activities generate. This requires a system that is simple enough to be widely deployed—and robust enough to combine the journey at the institutional level.

From registration to direction

The strategic question underlying all this: on which contact moments does our communication have the most effect? Which channels contribute to enrolment—not to reach, but to actual conversion? And how do we adjust, mid-season, based on what we see?

These questions can only be answered if the infrastructure makes them possible. Hippocampus documents every contact moment, links it to the student journey, and automates the follow-up through Activity Automation—so the team can focus on analysis and consultation, not on the manual work that was needed for that.

Plan a consultation and discover how Hippocampus makes the full student journey clear for your institution.