How to Measure Your School’s Open Day ROI

Open days consume staff time, marketing budget and leadership attention. Yet many schools judge them on how the day felt rather than what it produced. Measuring your school marketing ROI turns open days from a tradition into a managed part of your admissions funnel — and tells you exactly where next year’s budget should go.

Define What Success Looks Like

Set targets before the event, not after. Useful goals include:

• Registrations (and registration source)
• Actual attendance on the day
• Admissions enquiries generated
• Applications submitted
• Offers accepted and pupils enrolled

Without defined targets, “ROI” is just a vague sense of busyness.

Track the Full Funnel

The numbers that matter sit at the points where families drop off:

• Registration → attendance: how many who booked actually came (no-show rates of 25–40% are common without reminder emails)
• Attendance → enquiry/application: how many visitors took the next step
• Application → enrolment: how many eventually joined

A school with 100 registrations, 60 attendees, 20 applications and 8 enrolments can see precisely where effort is being lost — and whether the fix is better reminders, a better event, or better follow-up.

Work Out Your Costs Per Stage

Keep the maths simple and consistent:

• Cost per registration = total promotion spend ÷ registrations
• Cost per attendee = total event cost ÷ attendees
• Cost per enrolment = total event cost ÷ enrolments

For example: £1,500 spent promoting an event that generates 50 registrations works out at £30 per registration. If that event ultimately produces 5 enrolments, that’s £300 per enrolled pupil — set against several years of fees per pupil, most schools will find open days are among their best-value recruitment activity.

Know Where Every Registration Came From

You can’t judge channels if you don’t attribute registrations:

• Use UTM-tagged links in every email, social post and advert
• Track registrations and traffic in Google Analytics (GA4)
• Include a “How did you hear about us?” question on the registration form
• Record the source in your admissions CRM for every family

This tells you whether it was the Facebook ad, the parent referral, the Google search or the directory listing that actually filled the room — so you can cut what doesn’t work and back what does.

Measure Over Months, Not Days

Open days influence decisions long after the event. Families often attend in the autumn and apply months later. Keep tracking for at least six to twelve months:

• Follow-up email engagement
• Subsequent event attendance
• Application and enrolment outcomes

Only long-term tracking shows the true return, and only consistent year-on-year measurement shows whether your events are genuinely improving.

Final Thoughts

Schools that measure their open day ROI stop guessing. By tracking the funnel from registration to enrolment, costing each stage, and attributing every registration to its source, you can prove the value of your events, fix the weak points, and invest with confidence. Listing your open days on SchoolOpenDays.co.uk also gives you an additional, clearly trackable channel reaching families actively searching for school open days.