BridgeU Uses Rittman Analytics To Measure And Understand User Engagement

The Download

BridgeU is a pioneering EdTech company dedicated to assisting young individuals globally in unlocking their potential by equipping schools with advanced university and career guidance tools.

Their comprehensive platform offers features such as Smart University Matching, Career Planning, and Document Sending, simplifying the intricate process of university applications through data-driven intelligence and efficient task management.

Recognized as one of Europe's most innovative EdTech startups by EdTech Europe, BridgeU has successfully secured £6.4m in venture capital from notable investors including Octopus Investments, Seedcamp, Fresco Capital, and Deborah Quazzo.

The Challenge

BridgeU's ability to be proficient with reporting, exploring, and analysing their data is core to their mission, making analytics a part of their competitive advantage. Upgrading those capabilities required improvements in systems, processes, and people and the objectives of:

• Enhancing user engagement insights, by developing a deeper understanding of user engagement and thereby enabling BridgeU to refine their products and services more effectively.
• Optimizing outcome measurement, establishing robust methods to measure, report, and analyze the relationship between user engagement with BridgeU's website, email marketing activity and in-person events and the effect they had on successful student outcomes.

However and common to most fast-growing organizations BridgeU faced a number of challenges in delivering this initiative, including:

• Data being stored in multiple places, making it difficult to combine
• Analysis of that data was time-consuming and difficult, leading to lots of time and effort spent on compiling the data, leaving less left over for complex analysis.
• Difficulty in ascertaining whether a business question could be answered, because it was difficult to get an overview of what data was available.

The Solution

Rittman Analytics were engaged therefore to help deliver the first phase of this initiative, adding their expertise with behavioral event analytics and the modern data stack to the domain knowledge of BridgeU's team.

Over a period of three months Rittman Analytics worked with the BridgeU team to:

• Identify the actions that influenced candidates on their journey
• Track and count events that occur following those actions being performed
• Identify the key stages in the candidate to student journey
• Report on movement through the recruitment funnel that those events influenced

Using technology from Google Cloud, Segment and dbt Labs the combined team built a centralized, dimensional data warehouse and set of Looker dashboards that helped answer key business questions such as:

• How-much influence Bridge-U had on each candidate movement through the funnel
• Which actions are the most influential in moving candidates through the funnel
• What proportion of the value of each candidate, at each stage in the funnel, should be attributed (in the classic sense) to Bridge-U activity