Using Circuit Virtual Tours to Promote Fall 2024 Open Houses
In fall 2024, 36 US and Canadian institutions used their Circuit virtual tour to promote 44 fall on-campus “open house” events—key recruitment opportunities timed with the start of the application season. These efforts leveraged Circuit's Timed Calls to Action (CTA) Notices, which varied in their display timing, activation period, and content. We analyzed best practices on top-performing CTAs, and break down our recommendations and learnings below.
At a high level, CTA Notices achieve an average click through rate (CTR) of 7%, outperforming typical benchmarks for higher ed marketing such as mobile search ads, display ads, and pay-per-click campaigns. Two additional insights stood out: first, scheduling CTAs to begin displaying 2.5 weeks before an event proved most effective. Second, positioning CTAs to appear after 3-5 scenes within a tour consistently delivered the strongest engagement results. Let's dive a bit deeper into the analysis.
Why Open Houses Matter
Fall open houses are flagship recruitment events for higher education institutions in Canada and the United States. With applications opening in early fall and deadlines approaching by winter, these events play a critical role in building excitement, attracting prospective students and their supporters to campus, and even driving same-day applications.
As institutions continue to face new enrollment challenges both domestically and abroad, the 2024 Open House season represented a key moment to kick off the enrollment funnel with strong momentum.
Using Circuit to Drive Event Attendance
Aligned with our belief that the first visit is virtual, the Customer Success Team at Circuit proactively worked with institutions to promote in-person events within their virtual tours. The goal: encourage online visitors to take the next step and register for a campus visit.
Throughout fall, 45 timed CTAs were deployed across 36 participating institutions, promoting 44 events. These CTAs varied in three key ways: CTA timing, activation lead time, and messaging and media.
CTA timing: when the CTA appeared within the tour
Institutions chose different moments in their virtual tours to trigger CTAs:
- On entry to the virtual tour experience: used by 3 institutions
- After the tour splash page of a particular tour (or multiple tours): used by 12 institutions
- After a specific number of scenes of a particular tour: used by 30 institutions
In Circuit, the CTAs above can be "scheduled" with a specific start and end date, ensuring relevance during the lead-up to the event.
Activation lead time: how far in advance CTAs were enabled
On average, customers had open house CTAs enabled for 37 days before an event. The longest activation was 107 days in advance, and the shortest activation was 4 days before an event. This varied based on how far ahead institutions began event promotions.
Messaging and media: using different elements to explain and promote events
For these Timed CTAs, institutions included a title for the pop-up, an optional descriptive paragraph, an image or video, and a button linking directly to the event's registration page. Since most institutions opted to repurpose assets from their event landing pages, it was a very light lift to implementation.
Outcomes
Timed CTAs promoting fall open houses notified a total of 19,006 users during virtual tour visit sessions. Of those, 1,153 sessions included a click on the CTA button—a 7% average CTR across all institutions. This outperforms the average CTRs in the higher education industry cited by Sixth City Marketing for search ads on mobile (4.45%), display ads on mobile (5%), pay-per-click campaigns (1.7%) and email marketing campaigns (4.4%). This affirms that virtual tours are not only discovery tools but also effective channels to drive in-person engagement.
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Best Practices
When evaluating the three dimensions of an open house timed CTA—timing, activation lead time, and messaging and media—the following best practices surfaced when looking at the CTAs with the highest CTR.
CTA Timing: CTAs displayed after 3 to 5 scenes performed the best as measured by CTR
Thinking through the user journey within a virtual visit, we know users who have already engaged with tour content are more likely to take the next step towards in-person opportunities by visiting registration pages.
Comparatively, On Entry and After tour splash page CTAs achieved lower click through rates but higher awareness impressions. For example, one institution utilized both an On Entry CTA and an after 3 scenes CTA with all other variables constant. The On Entry CTA displayed 1824 times with a CTR of 3.8% vs. 498 times with a CTR of 10.8% after 3 scenes. Despite the lower CTR, the overall total number of visits to the event page from the On Entry CTA were higher along with the total number of views.
Activation lead time: the sweet spot was enabling CTAs 2.5 weeks in advance
For the CTAs with high-performing CTRs, the median number of days before the event that the CTA was activated was 18.5 days or 2.64 weeks. However, based on the assumption that not all visitors who learned about the Open House clicked during the virtual tour and may have looked up the event later through another channel, the maximum number of days where a CTA still performed with a high CTR was 38 days or approximately 1 month and 1 week before the event.
Messaging and media: no notable findings here
When comparing high-performing CTAs to lower-performing ones, there were no standout differences related to messaging or media. Most institutions repurposed content from existing event landing pages, and variations in copy or visuals didn’t appear to significantly impact engagement.
Implications
Circuit’s CTA Notices have proven to be an effective strategy for promoting on-campus events and converting virtual visitors into deeper engagement with an institution. Based on fall 2024 results, institutions are encouraged to schedule CTAs for large-scale events approximately 2.5 weeks in advance, and set them to display after 3–5 scenes within their virtual tour experience.
CTAs can be built and scheduled ahead of time, with flexibility to adjust display dates, timing, and content as needed to meet the benchmark 7% click-through rate. As part of a year-round event promotion strategy, institutions can create a calendar of CTAs that automatically publish and unpublish, and reuse or adapt CTAs from previous years to streamline execution.
