Paid Search Marketing

Make Every Click Count Toward Enrollment Growth

Reach prospective students when motivation meets opportunity. Our higher education PPC campaigns connect intent with action, driving awareness, engagement, and measurable enrollment outcomes that strengthen your institution’s momentum.

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Our Approach

Every paid media campaign begins with connection. We pair institutional goals with audience intent to ensure every impression counts, from awareness to application. Through continuous optimization, transparent reporting, and AI-powered targeting, our paid search strategies adapt in real time to student behavior, so you’re always one step ahead in a shifting market.

The Essential Elements of Paid Search Success

Pay Per Click Strategies

Our higher education PPC experts continually analyze bidding, targeting, and creative performance to maximize ROI, helping your institution stay visible, relevant, and ahead in a competitive landscape.

Keyword Identification

We combine higher ed fluency with AI-powered insight to uncover the search terms that reflect real student intent. By identifying what prospective learners are truly seeking, we optimize your education PPC campaigns for efficiency, engagement, and conversion.

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA)

Connection doesn’t end with a click. Our remarketing strategies re-engage prospective students with tailored messages at the moments that matter most, turning curiosity into confidence and intent into enrollment.

Landing Pages

Every interaction is a chance to inspire action. Our optimized landing pages merge design, data, and storytelling to transform paid search traffic into meaningful connections, driving inquiries and enrollment growth across your programs.

How it Works

Uncover Student Search Intent

We start where every great campaign begins—with curiosity. Our team uncovers how prospective students search for programs like yours, combining keyword research, competitor analysis, and psychographic data to reveal what truly drives discovery. This insight shapes a paid search strategy that reflects how students think, feel, and decide.

Build Campaigns That Convert

Every ad, keyword, and landing page is crafted for clarity and conversion. As an education paid media agency, we translate institutional goals into campaigns that meet students where they are—across Google, YouTube, and display channels—ensuring your message reaches the right audience at the right moment.

Optimize Performance in Real Time

Your campaigns don’t stand still, and neither do we. Using AI-powered optimization and real-time performance data, our experts adjust bids, creative, and targeting daily to maximize engagement and minimize cost per inquiry. With Carnegie’s continuous monitoring, your higher education PPC investment stays efficient, agile, and effective.

Turn Insights Into Measurable Impact

Transparency is non-negotiable. Through our intuitive dashboards, you’ll see how every campaign contributes to awareness, inquiry, and enrollment outcomes. We turn data into insight, so you can connect digital investment to institutional growth with confidence.

Ready to Get Started?

Contact Us

Paid Search That Turned High-Intent Clicks Into Real Enrollment Results

Mercer University needed a new, strategic approach to meet its enrollment goals in a competitive market. With Carnegie, they found a partner that would set them up for sustainable growth and success.

Featured Paid Search Marketing Case Study

“Partnering with Carnegie, we now have a full student lifecycle strategy that gives us confidence that we can successfully recruit students who belong at Mercer.”

Diana Faircloth
Assistant Vice President for Enrollment Management
Mercer University

Read Case Study
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Mercer University campus
Mercer University

Mercer University

A new, strategic approach to meet enrollment goals in a competitive market.
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Research

Summer Research Series: AI Use in the College Search

We explore how students and parents are using AI in the college search process—from researching schools with tools like ChatGPT to evaluating institutional trust and transparency around AI use.

Learn More

Our Thoughts on Paid Search Marketing

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Digital Advertising
Paid Search Master Class: How to Measure Campaign Success in your PPC Campaigns
Watch
Digital Advertising
The AI Browsing Shift: What Google Gemini Means for Higher Ed Marketing

By Alexa Poulin

Digital Advertising
Google’s AI Mode Now Available: How Higher Education Marketers Should React

By Kate McGowan

Digital Advertising
Leveraging Google Ads to Navigate Seasonality and the Undergraduate Enrollment Funnel

By Grace Deichmann

Where Paid Search Meets a Full Digital Ecosystem

Social Media Marketing
Engage students across every platform with authentic storytelling, creative precision, and campaigns built for real connection.
Explore Social Media Marketing
AEO
Help students get clear answers about your institution wherever AI shapes discovery. Our higher education AEO services strengthen visibility, accuracy, and credibility in AI-driven search, influencing early perception and student choice.
Explore AEO
SEO
Make it easier for students to find their path to your institution. Our higher education SEO services improve visibility and clarity across search, helping you stand out in competitive moments of discovery.
Explore SEO
Web Development
Your website is your most visible brand experience. We design and build higher education websites that reflect your personality, connect with your audiences, and turn curiosity into conversion.
Explore Web Development
Analytics, Attribution, & Reporting
Gain complete visibility into campaign performance with transparent, real-time insights that reveal what’s working, why it’s working, and how to optimize for even greater impact.
Explore Analytics, Attribution and Reporting

Turn Every Search Into a Student Connection

There has never been a more important time to thrive in higher education. Let’s reach students and change everything together with first-class paid media solutions.