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Marketing Manager
On A-level results day, universities have a matter of hours to fill the places they still have. Students refresh UCAS Hub on their phones, parents search for alternatives at the kitchen table desperate to move kids out, and admissions hotlines are busy from 8am.
Every single university with vacancies is competing for the same searches at the same moment. We’ve even seen the cost per click rise from a few pounds to nearly £100!
But the universities that come out on top don’t win it on the day itself. Their teams have been growing course pages were ranking weeks earlier, and their paid campaigns were built around the UCAS calendar long before August.
In this blog, we’re going look at how Clearing has changed and how utilising certain higher education digital marketing strategies puts universities in front of students long before their competitors start showing up.
People think about Clearing
Clearing has had the reputation of being a safety net for those of us who missed their target grades. Today though, UCAS data shows that picture is well out of date. In 2024, last-minute applicants made up just 24% of Clearing users, the lowest share on record. A third of users were “mind changers” and “trade ups”: students who already held an offer but switched course or aimed higher once their results came in.
These are students who are planning ahead not sitting on the hotline accepting whoever will take them. According to UCAS, 67% of Clearing users in 2024 researched their options before August, and 45% contacted only one university during that period.
Despite the more organised nature, numbers are backed by demand for Clearing continuing to grow. Times Higher Education reported a record 16,820 students placed through Clearing on the first day in 2025. HEPI’s analysis of UCAS data for 2026 shows 695,740 applicants by the 30 June deadline, up 4.6% year on year. Mature applicant numbers also rose, the first increase at that point in the cycle since 2022.
So, what can university marketers take from this quick analysis of the environment?
We think it should be that clearing campaigns that only start in August are mostly reaching students who have already decided. What does that mean? It means you need to be showing up whilst they are deciding.
How to capture attention
Now we’ve established that Clearing rewards the universities that do the groundwork months before some students even realise they are looking for their next stage of education; let’s walk you through the two best places you can solidify your foundations.
Get found in search all year round
It’ll be no mystery that students researching Clearing in June and July will be searching for terms like “psychology clearing courses” or “nursing clearing places”. But knowing that it takes Google time to index and trust a webpage, you can’t rebuild or go live for a few weeks before results day and expect to show for these key terms. These will be competitive, and Google needs time to learn that your site is worth showing.
Rankings take months to build, and any major change to course pages risks a drop in visibility. That’s why your SEO strategy needs to be implemented and involved long before clearing.
A university we worked with understood the concerns around starting late, and they started to redevelop its course pages a year before and brought our SEO team in to work alongside the university’s internal team from the first day of the build.
Our team gave feedback on page structure, keyword placement and technical basics. We audited the new templates against the old ones. We also benchmarked a sample of postgraduate pages against leading competitor universities to set realistic targets so we could help report accurately.
The pages launched in strong organic health and kept building momentum. In the 12 months after launch:
- Organic sessions grew 81% year on year
- Keywords ranking in positions one to three rose 244%
- First-page keywords rose 121%
For Clearing, the lesson is to build and optimise your Clearing and course pages months in advance, and to bring SEO in at the planning stage of any site change.
Plan paid search around the UCAS calendar
On results day, who would have guessed that costs-per-click on Clearing terms climb as universities bid for the same students? It can feel simple, but smart planning will put you leaps ahead of your competitors and ultimately push a budget you had last year further.
We proved this when another university came to us after a period of stagnation with its previous paid media agency. Competitors were pulling ahead, and the goal was to grow applications year-on-year ahead of the January UCAS deadline without increasing media spend.
We built a full-funnel PPC plan dedicated and structured for the UCAS calendar. It generated awareness and intent early in the calendar, then moved budget towards conversions and key events as the deadline got closer. We even linked the Google and Meta campaigns together, so each platform supported the other and followed students where they went online.
In the end we pivoted to give search a bigger share of budget because that’s where application intent tended to be stronger.
On the same budget as the previous year, applications rose 39% to a record high, traffic grew 179%, and form submissions increased 145%.
We demonstrated that thinking about Clearing with a longer mindset can boost applications and key events significantly. Plan bids and budget date by date and make sure your search and social campaigns work together. Protect your own brand terms as well, because competitors will happily bid on them.
Don’t be a clear loser
The main takeaway from this blog is most universities lose Clearing places well before results day. The most common mistake we see is Universities thinking it’s okay to start in July, which leaves too little time for pages to rank and gives competitors a head starts in getting the attention of your target audience.
Forgetting that time is a loop is also something that universities need to remember. We’re advocating for a year-round strategy, look at the calendar, even though Clearing has just past, now is the time to start ramping up to a new audience and start building your awareness. Your organic channels will be doing this anyway (but be careful about too many changes close to the big day), but it’s the time for you paid arm to start grabbing attention.
Because of this longer cycle, your measurement hits a potential weak spot. Clicks and sessions are easy to report, but they necessarily don’t fill places. Track Clearing calls, applications and enrolments, and judge each channel on what it contributed to them. As we mentioned in our work earlier, we ran a long campaign and engagement from the social campaign might not have come back until months later, robust tracking gives visibility and understanding to make better arguments for budget.
Start your higher education digital marketing plan for 2027 now
Clearing 2026 is over, and many universities will now put their Clearing plans aside until next spring. That makes autumn the best time to get ahead. Audit your Clearing and course pages, check where they rank for the subject terms students search, and review which channels led to enrolments this year.
Pages you improve now will have months to build authority before students start researching next summer. Paid campaigns planned around the 2027 UCAS calendar will put your budget where application intent is strongest. The universities filling their places next August are the ones building their higher education digital marketing plans this autumn, while competitors are winding down.
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