Use this if:

You’d like to increase the volume of sign-ups to your platform
You want to optimize the placement of your traffic drivers to boost engagement
You’d like to balance the workload of your student ambassadors
You want to provide a relevant and appealing experience to prospects
You want to stand out to prospects with your Unibuddy ambassadors

Our recommendations

Use one of the available traffic drivers per page of your website. Multiple traffic drivers can compete for students’ attention, and make it confusing for students to pick an ambassador to chat with.
Be wary of altering the snippet codes provided to you in your dashboard. The codes are customized to your Unibuddy platform, and editing them may cause issues.
Each traffic driver provides different value: Want a traffic driver to stand out and highlight your students, diversity and varied programs? Use the popcard. If you want something that lives directly in your page and highlights more than one student at a time, use the carousel. Want to highlight staff? Use a staff popcard or staff buddy card.
While our traffic drivers are a great way to quickly weave the value of peer-to-peer connections throughout your website, they’re not the only options available to you. We encourage all of our partners to consider adding your own calls-to-action and traffic drivers to their website. You can simply have these buttons redirect students to the page on which your chat platform is embedded.

Improving yield

It’s important to consider where in the hierarchy of your website you’re placing your traffic drivers. Higher in the hierarchy (on more visible pages like your homepage, or student life page) will generate much greater awareness of the platform, leading to increased student sign-ups, and eventually more applications for your institution.

If you’re looking to improve yield, try adding our ‘Popcard’ traffic driver to the homepage of your website. If you’ve already got lots of competing calls-to-action on the site, you can always build your own call-to-action for Unibuddy, so that it can fit into your existing navigation. Or, you can consider swapping an existing CTA with the Unibuddy traffic driver to see which performs best.
If you have an area of study that is not yielding well, consider highlighting a student and/or staff ambassador to ensure prospective students know how wonderful your programs are. Use a popcard or buddy card on relevant academic pages to improve your customer service, inform your prospects and ultimately enhance your yield efforts.

If you have a particularly high traffic homepage, you may find that prospective students are using Unibuddy to ask simple questions like high-level ‘transactional questions’ about admissions, or other less relevant questions. For some institutions, answering questions like these is a natural part of their ambassador's role, and the high volume of sign-ups generated through the platform is a fair exchange for these types of questions. A “chat bubble” would be best on these pages.

If you’re worried about replacing existing CTA’s with the Unibuddy platform, remember that you can always train your student and staff ambassadors to redirect students to those areas of your site that you’d like students to visit and explore.

Managing the placement of traffic drivers

What if you’ve already embedded traffic drivers into most pages of your website, and you’re simply still not seeing the sign-up numbers that you’d expect?

There is no one-size-fits-all approach as each school, college and university website is unique. Like all marketing initiatives, experimentation and trial and error is the best way to improve those visitor-to-sign-up conversions.

Pay close attention to the traffic drivers you’ve embedded on your site, consider auditing them to understand where they sit on the page, and if the ambassadors or content shown in the traffic drivers is relevant for the page they are associated with.
- Carousel traffic drivers work well when embedded among the content of a particular page that’s lower on your website hierarchy (e.g. on specific degree program pages). As the carousel feels part of the page flow, this reduces the likelihood that students will brush over the platform.
- Make sure you’re using the filtered versions of your carousels, buddycards, and popcards - so that the ambassadors shown are relevant to the students current search.
- Even better, include mentions to specific ambassadors inside the content of the page, and place a buddy card adjacent to the mention for maximum impact. Reading content written by, or mentioning an ambassador, and having the ability to ask that specific student more about that topic, all without leaving your website is powerful.

Live examples of Unibuddy traffic drivers

Below are some examples of excellent traffic driver usage from our partners. To help preserve the conversion metrics for these partners, please visit the links in an ‘incognito’ window in your browser. On Google Chrome you can do this by right-clicking on the link, and selecting ‘Open Link in Incognito Window.’