an experiment on using online marketing tools for promoting higher education services

In this study we intended, in the first place, to analyse and determine if the online environment represents an efficient environment for promoting educational services offered by higher education institutions in Romania. Another major objective of this paper is to describe a context in which online marketing tools like Facebook and Google AdWords could contribute to promote higher education services in the online environment. In order to achieve the goal, a causal research based on experiment was designed and implemented. The type of the experiment is 'before-after with control group', design. For conducting the experiment, after developing the landing page, two advertising campaigns were designed: one of them through the tools offered by Facebook and the other one by using Google AdWords. The test units considered are two masters of the faculty of economics (one master is the experimental unit and the other is for control). The independent variable is the extent to which the masters are promoted in the online environment and the dependent variable is the number of students enrolled in the two masters during the admission period. Based on the results from this experiment, but also on data of other studies, we consider that the best results in designing online promotion campaigns for higher education institutions - when considering the tools involved in this experiment - are obtained when they are used as complementary tools. According with our observations, Google AdWords has more potential for attracting prospective students on the landing pages containing information dedicated to them, but Facebook’s features can be successfully used in particular for creating and developing relationships with potential students so that they will subsequently want to become students of that institution.