Attracting international student applications to a university website: The role of story-based content and gender in improving stickiness

Universities websites have become a recruitment tool that is popular with students. Recruitment pages often seek to demonstrate the benefits of studying at the institution by adopting an objective approach that makes use of textual content that emphasises facts and data. Story-based text consisting of alumni experiences of a programme of studies represent an alternative textual approach to argument based content that can put across a personal view of experiences. The research proposes hypotheses about the impact of these two types of content on website stickiness and the role of gender, using an experimental methodology. We use Facebook ads over 24 days to recruit participants and to collect gender and stickiness metrics using Google Analytics. Analyses show stronger stickiness results for story-based content and differences between the two types of content by gender. The results support narrative paradigm theory that suggests that story basedcommunication is more effective than argument-based communication. The results suggest the usefulness of story-based content supported by online ads to attract international student applications. The findings provide a solution to student recruiters at tertiary institutions who often struggle to identify the themes and type of content that prospective students find engaging.