Breaking Through the Clutter of Online Education

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Global higher education is a $2.2T industry.  Pre COVID-19, the online degree market was one of the fastest-growing segments of global higher education, estimated to be a $74B online degree market by 2025, according to global education market intelligence company, HolonIQ.

It is no secret that the Covid-19 crisis’s impact on the education industry and its students, faculty, teachers and parents was enormous. The pandemic disrupted the educational experiences of over a  billion students.  Within higher education, enrollments sank by 16 percent, and community college enrollments fell by 9.5 percent in the fall of 2020, according to the National Student Clearinghouse’s data. 

Within the edtech sector, prominent online education space platforms such as Udemy, upGrad, Rosetta Stone, Master Class, LinkedIn Learning, and online-first degree programs such as New York University, University of Buffalo, University of Phoenix and the University of Arizona, found themselves competing with an old adversary: traditional four-year universities creating online-only learning environments.

This meant that online learning brands had to quickly adapt to the changing market to ensure their messaging didn’t get lost in the clutter.

At Yieldmo, we saw that CPMs for education content started getting more expensive. In fact, in Q2 of 2021 CPMs increased by 160% compared to Q1 of 2020. This was a huge indication that we needed to think differently about our edtech clients’ creative strategy and bring new creative messaging online quickly and seamlessly via our frictionless formats.

Using our frictionless formats, the brand could benefit from a high-impact format with no extra work or creative lead time. This meant that the brand could test, adapt and optimize ads based on the health crisis in real-time. And since Yieldmo handled all customizations and the transaction remained within the client’s  DSP, no build step or custom creatives were needed. 

For another Yieldmo client, that meant adjusting creative messaging to ensure the school’s competitive advantage of being set up for online education before the crisis was front and center. Sample messages included: 

  • We have the experience. We have the infrastructure. Take classes from the experts in online education.
  • Get an MBA from a tried and true program – XXX has been online for 15 years.
  • Keep moving forward with your life – even from home.

As consumers spent more time on their phones during the lockdown, edtech advertisers needed to adjust to reach their desired customers. This means our education brand needed to drive better results using in-app placements to capture peak attention and engagement. These large formats are visually appealing and more flexible to tell brand stories with the consumers’ apps.

And finally, one of the many benefits of the Yieldmo Exchange is the unmatched access to our curated Private Marketplace Deals, where we identified the highest value inventory and enhanced it with next-generation formats and AEROS optimization and instantly turn on campaigns and start testing results. We’ve found the Native Comscore Top 50 and High VCR deals appeal to their lead-generation KPI goals for our higher education clients.

Online education isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and the competition for students will only get more intense. With Yieldmo’s deals,  frictionless formats, adjusted creative messaging and in-app placements, our clients will continue to cut through the clutter and drive students closer to their educational goals. 

To learn more about how Yieldmo can help with your education campaigns, click here to reach out to our sales team.