What is FindAMasters Compass?
Masters Compass is our powerful insight dashboard that gives you unrivalled access to understanding the behaviour of over 8.8 million prospective students visiting FindAMasters each year. Using the information in there, you can make informed decisions for your campaigns, improve ROI and save valuable time. This means Masters Compass is an essential part of your postgraduate recruitment toolkit.
How does Compass gather data?
Data is gathered every time a user interacts with FindAMasters. From loading a page, to performing a search or clicking onto a programme. All this data feeds into this Compass report, to assist with your campaign planning and analysis.
To understand the numbers, it's important to know the breakdown between Users, Sessions and Views:
- “Users” are unique
- “Sessions” are not unique
- “Views” are the total views across all sessions.
Selecting a date range
The date range is flexible for you, and each section can be viewed “Year-on-Year” (meaning the same time frame a year previous) – or Period-on-Period, meaning the same time frame but for the period immediately preceding the one selected. The option can be selected and changed using the drop down on each header at the top of the dashboard.
All percentage deltas (the %∆ symbol) are either comparing the same time frame for the period immediately preceding the selected time frame, or year-on-year timeframe, depending on your selection.
A summary of the different tabs in Compass
Below we'll summarise each tab available to you in Compass, and what info it holds.
It's always worth remembering you can always pull up these helpful summaries at any point by clicking on the 'User guide' button in the top right of Compass.
Overview
The Overview tab provides a snapshot of your audience engagement, contextualized against FindAMasters demographics.
You can view FindAMasters sitewide demographics, along with user demographics that are specific to your institution.
Departments & Programmes
The Departments & Programmes tab provides an overview of which departments and programmes are driving engagement with your brand.
You will be able to see trends in users either searching for your university or viewing your programmes, or another of your listings (e.g. Institution Profile). This is broken down into regional cohorts: UK, EU (excludes the UK) and rest of the world.
The filters in this section enable you to see engagement from a specific regional cohort, one of the UK home nations or a specific country. You can also view by Featured or Standard Programme Type. Any selection here will apply to the tables in this section also.
Campaign Health
The Campaign Health tab provides a snapshot of your programme performance, focusing on areas that may require attention (or further discussion with your Account Manager).
You'll see what's trending UP and trending DOWN for your programmes and departments, as well as any keyword searches related to your institution.
Competitor Benchmarking
The Competitor Benchmarking tab enables you to identify who your institution is directly competing with on FindAMasters. This data is gathered by collating the pool of users who have searched for, or viewed programmes from your institution, and shows you which competitors those specific users have also viewed.
This tab will not be altered by the Previous period vs Year-on-year toggle, as it is set to provide an overview of the past 90 days alone.
Identifying competitors at both institutional and programme level can be highly beneficial to better understand user engagement and utilise this information to plan upcoming campaigns, either to retarget against competitor sets or expand your regional targeting where required.
Search Engagement
The Search Engagement tab shows the trend in your user engagement, broken down into the disciplines and subjects that your users have searched for, or viewed programmes within, specific to your institution.
You can also see a word cloud for your institution from the past 60 days of site-wide data, and then select by user country to narrow down these searches.
Audience Geo
The Audience Geo tab breaks down where in the world your users are based. This consists of an interactive heatmap of worldwide user location, as well as the same country data in tabular form.
Products
The Products tab shows a breakdown the daily number of users viewing your programmes by type (standard and featured programme) and then a breakdown of our profiles by type (Department and Institution)
Supply and Demand
Here you can compare FindAMasters site-wide data with your own institution.
For this section, we are comparing the total number of users viewing the programmes within each discipline, against the number of programmes listed on the website. This identifies where the balance between supply of programmes meets the demand of users seeking this type of programme, to identify key campaign areas to prioritise.
Leaderboard
On the Leaderboard tab, we focus on all FindAMasters users and which institutions they are most interested in, determined by user engagement.
You will be able to see a breakdown of the most popular institutions across FindAMasters, in terms of both brand searches and programme views, as well as the most popular programmes across FindAMasters.
This data can then all be refined using the filters available. For example, you could filter down to institutions or programmes based in a specific country or identify the most popular institutions within a specific subject.