Gap Year Programs: The Top Marketing Metrics for Fall 2025

Looking to maximize your gap year program’s ROI in 2025? Effective marketing is a must — but it requires a strategic approach. Tracking and analyzing key metrics and KPIs gives you valuable insights into which channels are driving the best results so you can optimize your campaigns accordingly.

Let’s look a little deeper at what marketing metrics work best — and how you can measure them.

Track Marketing Metrics Performance

While data-driven decision-making has become increasingly important for effective management — and it’s certainly more prevalent today than 15 or 20 (or more!) years ago — it’s just one of several ingredients for organizational success. That said, if you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it, right? 

In the competitive gap year program landscape, optimizing your ROI is paramount because you must understand which marketing efforts are truly driving enrollments — and which are falling short. That knowledge comes from tracking key metrics consistently and analyzing the data to gain actionable insights. 

Measure inquiry quality and conversion  

While a high volume of inquiries may seem positive, it’s the quality of those inquiries that ultimately matters. Many inquiries with low conversion rates can signal a disconnect between your marketing message and your target audience.

Track inquiries by channel

Track each inquiry’s source, whether it’s a referral from a past participant, email campaign, social media post, website visit, or attendance at a virtual fair. This granular level of tracking pinpoints which channels attract the most qualified leads — those genuinely interested in your program and more likely to convert into paying participants. 

Analyze conversion rates

Calculate your overall conversion rate by dividing the number of enrollments by the number of inquiries — but don’t stop there! Categorize those conversion rates by marketing channel to identify the most effective for driving enrollments to reveal which marketing investments yield the highest returns.

For example:

Let’s say your social media campaigns consistently generate inquiries with a 50% conversion rate, while your email campaigns only convert at 10%. This data clearly indicates that your social media strategy resonates well with your target audience. This insight might lead you to prioritize social media marketing and allocate more resources to further amplify its reach. Conversely, you might re-evaluate your email marketing approach to refine targeting, messaging, or campaign design to improve its effectiveness.

Leverage data to drive strategic decisions

By continuously monitoring inquiry sources and conversion rates, you can transform data into actionable intelligence, informing your marketing strategy and optimizing your budget allocation.

A month of performance data should help you answer the key marketing assessment question: How many inquiries did it take to enroll one new program participant? That number’s inverse is your average conversion rate (number of participants divided by the number of inquiries). 

Your average conversion rate reveals how many inquiries — on average — it takes to gain one new program participant. Calculate this number to determine your baseline metric, which you can use to assess the overall effectiveness of your marketing efforts and see which channels bring the most bang for your buck.

For example:

You participate in five gap fairs that generate a total of 240 inquiries. Of those, 12 enroll in your programs. The conversion rate for fairs is 5% (12 participants ÷ 240 inquiries).

You upgrade your listing in TeenLife and purchase a full-page Gap Guide profile that generates 300 inquiries. Of those, 10 students enroll, so your conversion rate is 3% (10 participants ÷ 300 inquiries).

It might appear initially that the fairs were more successful because their conversion rate was 2% higher — but the cost per enrollment may tell a different story.

Understand Your Marketing Investment

Your total investment in marketing and promotion can add up. Each channel has variable costs (event management, travel, advertising, postage, online directory participation, etc.) plus ongoing fixed costs (payroll, technology, contract staff, etc.). The monthly fixed costs keep the ship afloat.

One must-do? Maintaining your ability to execute marketing programs. Understanding the true cost of each program requires allocating a portion of fixed costs to each channel you use. 

Calculating the percentage of enrolled participants generated by each channel helps you determine where to allocate your fixed marketing expenses. Your records derived from tracking metrics should make this calculation easy. Determine your total marketing investment by calculating each channel’s variable and fixed costs. 

Know Your Cost-Per-Inquiry and Cost-Per-Acquisition

Conversion rates provide valuable insights into channel performance but don’t tell the whole story. To optimize your ROI, you need to factor in costs. A high-converting channel may be too expensive to justify, while a low-converting channel with minimal costs could still deliver value. Calculating your cost-per-inquiry (CPI) and cost-per-acquisition (CPA) for each channel provides a clearer picture of your ROI. Accurate records simplify the math.

Cost-per inquiry = Marketing Costs (Variable costs + Allocated Fixed Costs) ÷ Inquiries Received 

Cost-per-acquisition = Marketing Costs (Variable Costs + Allocated Fixed Costs) ÷ Program Participants Acquired 

This approach creates a standardized framework for evaluating your marketing channels’ effectiveness. By defining “success” as a program enrollment, you can precisely calculate the cost of achieving that success within each channel. This granular level of insight empowers you to make data-driven decisions, optimize marketing spend, and maximize ROI. 

Strategies for marketing to next-gen gap year students

We’ve talked about how to measure marketing success — now, let’s look at some strategies to elevate each channel.

• Leverage email campaigns to solicit testimonials from past program participants and include their feedback on your website, social media, and in future email campaigns.
• Include parents and families in your targeted campaigns, addressing common questions about cost, pros and cons, and long-term benefits.
• Use social media. Gen-Z uses TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat the most, but don’t discount Facebook, Instagram, X, and Bluesky, either.
• Post video content that shares information about your gap year programs, resources, participant testimonials and interviews, success stories, and financial aid or scholarships.
• Diversify your content on your website or in blogs, social media, and emails. Two in 10 smartphone users between age 18 and 54 spend a whopping 40 hours on their devices each week. Expand your content to include something that appeals to each of your target audiences.

Benchmarking for success

Understanding the overall performance of your marketing efforts is crucial for success. Establish clear benchmarks for your key metrics: conversion rate, CPI, and CPA. These benchmarks provide a valuable point of reference for evaluating each channel’s effectiveness. 

While not an absolute rule, it’s generally a good strategy to prioritize and invest further in channels that exceed these benchmarks and optimize or reduce investments in underperforming channels. This data-driven approach ensures you’ve allocated your marketing budget efficiently to deliver the highest possible ROI. 

Here at TeenLife, we know that tracking and monitoring these marketing metrics helps organizations attract and convert leads into registrants for their gap year programs. How are we so confident? Throughout the years, we’ve learned the best marketing strategies from experts in the field — our program providers! 

If you have questions about how to effectively market your organization’s programs, we’d love to help you out. Connect with us, and let’s get started!