SDU' Science programmes are generally more visible
Compared to previous years, more people see and hear about our programmes at the Faculty of Science.
At the Faculty of Science, we work purposefully with a number of initiatives that together ensures that young people seeking higher education know about our educational programmes.
The effort is collaboration consisting of many people from both the secretariat and the departments as well as enrolled students. In addition, we are supplemented by colleagues centrally at SDU.
It is a challenge to measure the direct effect of this effort. We cannot isolate the individual components of the recruitment effort.
At the same time, both internal and external studies indicate that our applicants cannot themselves point to the decisive aspects that led to a first-priority application landing at one of the faculty's programmes.
We measure our visibility and reach
On the other hand, we can measure how many visits and page views our educational presentations receive on sdu.dk, which is one of our applicants' most important sources of information.
Here, the Master's degree programme in Data Science has experienced the strongest progress. In the first two months of the year, 6,035 visits led to 10,848 page views – a growth of 210.8 per cent and 172.4 percent, respectively, compared to the same period two years ago.
The Bachelor's degree programmes in Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, Mathematic-Economics, Chemistry and Physics have also experienced growth of around 26-129 per cent when looking at visits and page views.
Unfortunately, not all degree programmes have experienced progress. Pharmacy, Biomedicine, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Biology and Computer Science have historically been the most visible of our degree programmes. In fact, they still are, but this year they have experienced a decline in visits and page views of between 12 and 37 per cent when compared to the beginning of 2020.
When we compare web traffic in 2022 with 2020, it is because of data breaches in 2021 which makes the figures incomparable.
Marketing and recruitment activities
The most important source of traffic to our education pages is digital ads on, for example, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Google.
In particular Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, gives us a detailed insight into the reach of advertising. Here we can see that our ads received 27,456 unique clicks in the period from 1 January 1 up to the quota 2 application deadline on 15 March. That is a little more than twice as many unique clicks as last year, when the number was 13,692 unique clicks in the same period.
This is due to a combination of two things: a larger part of our marketing budget is allocated to advertising instead of the production of the ads, and our ads make more people want to click.
Overall, this means that the price per unique click on our ads have dropped to DKK 6.01 against DKK 6.98 in 2021 and DKK 8.86 in 2020.
Bonus info: This year, our degree programmes were exposed to our target group 5,036,229 times via Meta during this period. Last year, that number was 3,639,572.
Add YouTube views and Google ads on top of this. Here we are still new and our reach is, therefore, naturally growing.
It's a jungle of numbers! The same goes for our physical activities. With more than 120 young guests, it has been a record year for our Science Camps, when high school students and those on a gap year visited a number of our programmes during the first weekend in March.
We have also succeeded in planning a record number of visits to the region's high schools during March and April, when our student ambassadors will be representing our programmes 40 times.
And while SDU's overall number of visitors at the Open House fell by 43 per cent, the faculty's number of visitors fell by only 22 per cent when comparing 2022 with the latest comparable Open House, which was in 2020.
As mentioned: It's a jumble of numbers. And the numbers indicate in many ways that the level of awareness of our particular programmes is generally going in the right direction – a point that was recently supported by a study done by Epinion.
But all the many numbers unfortunately have their limitations. While they can say something about our increasing visibility, they unfortunately cannot say anything at all about how many first-priority applications we can expect to receive before the application deadline of 5 July.