Study in New Zealand website delivers greater value

Euan Howden, ENZ’s Student Attraction Director, says prospective students are increasingly using StudyinNewZealand.govt.nz (SiNZ) to search for study options, with new statistics showing use of SiNZ’s search widgets (stand-alone applications) surged 117% from last year.

“The addition of the ‘Find a course’ search widget last year, alongside existing widgets for institutions/schools, scholarships and agents, has considerably improved engagement.

“This shows the site is delivering value to prospective students as well as New Zealand providers who want to attract students to their unique education offerings.”

Those using the new search widgets are finding what they are looking for much quicker and are spending more time reading the results, an average of 4.22 minutes, which combined with a bounce rate (people who leave without reading further) of 5.9% is an outstanding result – the industry bounce rate average is 40%.

“The recent improvements to the search widgets have significantly increased our target audience’s exposure to content about why they should choose New Zealand, and we’re very pleased with results to date,” says Euan.

The SINZ search widgets allow prospective students to search for courses, institutions, scholarships and agents.

This improved search performance coincides with a suite of other initiatives designed to improve site performance and deliver greater value to students.

Other updates include:

• Default search results are now randomised if a user has not used any search filters. This is a change from the previous approach of presenting results in alphabetical order and means preference won’t be given to institutions with names beginning with ‘A’.
• The start date refinement filter has been removed due to inconsistencies in the data available from institutions, which led to inconsistent search results.
• Keyword search will be enabled in the search widgets to allow for more intuitive search results for users.

These changes are in addition to the launch of My StudyNZ, which helps to connect students to New Zealand study options.

In the last year, more than one million users visited the SiNZ website. To maximise the potential of SINZ for your institution, ensure your institution’s profile is complete and up-to-date.