University of Dundee Drives 80% More Course Search Usage

The Client

The University of Dundee is a Scottish university serving 16,000 students, with a recruitment strategy that draws substantially on international markets. They are known for their high-impact work in life sciences, medicine, law, and art and design. Consistently rated among the top universities in the UK, it combines a vibrant city-center campus with a strong emphasis on student satisfaction and real-world innovation.

The Situation

The University of Dundee’s Web Services Team aimed to modernize its digital recruitment strategy to better support prospective students, particularly those from international markets. 

Their key objectives included:

• Increasing Engagement: Drawing more attention to critical tools like the course search.
• Reducing Friction: Simplifying the complex journey from interest to application.
• Driving Applications: Converting prospective interest into formal applications, especially for overseas students whose tuition is vital to the institution's financial health.
• Operational Efficiency: Enabling the content team to build and deploy experiences without heavy reliance on developers.

The Challenge

There were two main problems.

Prospective students struggled to find previously viewed courses or specific funding information, particularly on mobile devices. Essential enrollment information, such as fee structures and entry requirements, was often buried, making it difficult for prospective international students to navigate the "nurture" phase of their journey.

With limited resources and high technical barriers, only the UX Manager could build campaigns — creating a bottleneck where personalizations backed up in a queue. Consequently, very little got implemented, preventing the content team from responding to audience insights.

The Solution

The University implemented Conversion Optimization to create a more agile, "point-and-click" personalization environment. Key initiatives included:

1. Animated Search Awareness: Following a suggestion from the customer success team, the University added a subtle animation to the search bar. This simple change drew the user's eye to the primary conversion tool on the homepage.
2. "Recently Viewed" Personalization: To aid navigation, especially on mobile (which accounts for up to 90% of traffic in some regions), the team implemented a "Recently Viewed Courses" section. This automatically surfaces relevant content for returning users on key landing pages.
3. Strategic "Nurture" Banners: To guide students through the funnel, the team used Conversion Optimization to display targeted call-to-action (CTA) banners. If a student had viewed a course but not yet explored financial details, Conversion Optimization would trigger a banner guiding them specifically to the fees and funding resources to encourage the next step in the application process.
4. AI-Powered Segment Builder: Using Conversion Optimization’s built-in AI capabilities, the team quickly created complex regional segments (e.g., Africa, Southeast Asia) for targeted messaging, bypassing the need to manually select dozens of individual countries.

The Results

Course search usage rose 80% in the first six weeks after the animated search bar went live.

• 80% Increase in Search Usage: The animated search bar significantly improved the number of users engaging with the course finder within the first six weeks.
• Enhanced Journey Guidance: The use of targeted nurture banners and "Recently Viewed" courses saw high engagement, effectively moving international applicants from the discovery phase to the serious consideration phase.
• Operational Democratization: Personalization is no longer a "one-man job." The entire content team now builds their own campaigns using Conversion Optimization’s visual editor, significantly increasing the volume of Web Personalization campaigns.
• Contributing to Enrollment Goals: International recruitment is influenced by many factors. However, by reducing friction and improving the visitor experience, these enhancements have played a supportive role in the University's broader strategy to stabilise and grow overseas applications.
• Strategic Resource Optimization: Proving personalization concepts in Conversion Optimization allowed the team to identify high-performing features to be permanently built into Drupal, ensuring the most effective tools were hard-coded for long-term stability.

"With Conversion Optimization, because it’s basically point-and-click, our entire content team is now building their own personalisations... That’s been really useful."  — Rob Ryder-Richardson, Deputy Head of Web Services and Product Owner