If You Can't Agree What Marketing Spend Is, You're Grading Your Own Homework

I have sat on both sides of this table. On the client side, watching a marketing team present a spend number that nobody in finance could interrogate because nobody could say what was inside it. On the agency side, being handed a "marketing budget" that turned out to be four different budgets wearing a trench coat. So when I read that Australian public universities spent anywhere from $91.94 to $499.19 per student on marketing last year, my first thought was not "look at the gap." It was "I bet not one of these numbers means the same thing."

Here is the thesis, and you are allowed to disagree with it. The variance in that table is not a budget story. It is a measurement story. The number that matters is not how much you spend. It is whether you know what that spend returns. Most organisations, universities included, are flying blind because they never sat down and defined the number in the first place.

Mumbrella ranked 20 Australian public universities on marketing spend per student for 2025. Deakin came out the most efficient at $91.94 a head. La Trobe spent more than five times that, $499.19 per student. The University of Tasmania landed at $395.64. Griffith at $375.33. On a chart, that looks like some universities being disciplined and others torching money.

Then you get to the caveat, and the caveat eats the chart. The universities define and report marketing expenditure differently. One institution's "marketing" is another's "communications" plus "student recruitment" plus a slice of "brand." The figures are unlikely to represent the same activities across institutions, which makes a straight comparison against enrolments unreliable. Read that again. The people who published the ranking are telling you the ranking cannot be taken at face value, because the underlying numbers were never counting the same thing.

That is not a footnote. That is the whole story.

Mumbrella's 2025 ranking of 20 Australian public universities found spend per student ranging from $91.94 at the most efficient institution to $499.19 at the highest spender, a more than 5x gap that the report itself warns may reflect different definitions of "marketing" rather than different discipline.

Here is the thing about a shopfront. If a thousand people walk into your physical shop, you can count them. You have a door, a register, eyes, a security camera. The measurement is built in. You know your conversion rate whether you like it or not.

Marketing spend inside a large organisation is the opposite. There is no door. There is no register that automatically tags a dollar as "marketing." Someone has to decide. Does the salary of the internal team count? Does the CRM licence count? Does the open day count as marketing or as student experience? Does the vice chancellor's speaking tour count as brand? Each of those decisions is a judgement call, and every organisation makes them differently.

So when you rank them side by side, you are not measuring who spends efficiently. You are measuring who drew the boundary of "marketing" in the tightest place. Deakin at $91.94 might be the most disciplined marketer in the country. Or it might just define marketing narrowly and park the rest of the spend under another line. From the outside you cannot tell. That is the problem.

The counting stays invisible right up until someone outside marketing asks what is inside it. I have watched that moment land, and it usually arrives as a finance review.

Marketing walks in with a strong slide. Cost per lead is down 30%. The graph points the right way and the room is ready to move on. Then the person from finance, who has been quiet the whole meeting, asks one question. What is a lead. Not rhetorically. They want the definition.

The room goes still, because there are three answers and none of them match. The paid media report counts a form fill. The sales team only counts a lead once it has been qualified on a call. The CRM counts anyone who ever downloaded anything, going back two years. The 30% improvement was real inside one definition and meaningless across the other two.

Nobody in that room was lying. That is the point. The marketer believed the number. The number had just never been forced to mean the same thing to everyone who leaned on it. It looked like measurement. It was three different measurements under one label, and it came apart the second someone with no stake in the story asked what it was made of.

Now look at what happens when someone measures return instead of raw spend.

Educator Data ran a different analysis on the sector. Instead of asking how much each university spends, they asked what each marketing dollar brings back in revenue. When you change the question that way, the order reshuffles. The universities that spend the most are not the ones that return the most, and the strongest performers land well above the sector average on return.

That is a completely different picture. A spend-per-student table tells you who writes the biggest cheque. A return measure tells you whose cheque is working. One is an input. The other is an outcome. Guess which one a chief financial officer actually cares about.

I am not saying return on marketing is a perfect number. Universities are messy organisations and a mountain of their revenue has almost nothing to do with the marketing team. It is directionally honest in a way the spend table is not. It tries to connect money out to money in. The spend-per-student number connects money out to nothing.

When we score Australian businesses on how well they actually measure their marketing, one pattern shows up again and again. The spread inside a single industry is wider than the spread between industries. Two businesses in the same sector, similar size, similar market, will sit at opposite ends of the measurement scale. One knows its numbers cold. The other could not tell you what a customer costs to acquire if you held the door open for them.

The variance is not really about universities being lavish or lean. It is about measurement discipline, and the discipline is all over the place.

A lot of marketers aren't good with numbers, and that's well documented. It causes anxiety, and anxious people avoid the thing that makes them anxious. So the number never gets defined, and the spend never gets interrogated.

Here is the uncomfortable bit. If you cannot agree on what marketing spend even is, you are grading your own homework. You get to pick the boundary, pick the number, present it, with nobody in the room holding a standard to check it against. It looks like accountability. It is theatre.

Strip it back to two questions. Do you know how much money you make? Do you know how much money you spend? Everything else works back from there.

For anyone running a marketing function, university or otherwise, the fix is not a bigger budget or a better dashboard. It is a decision, written down, about what counts. Sit with finance and draw the line. Is the internal team's salary in or out? Is the CRM in or out? Is the open day marketing or operations? There is no universally correct answer. There is only a consistent one. Pick it, write it down and hold it still long enough that this year's number and last year's number are counting the same thing.

Then measure the return, not just the outlay. A spend figure on its own is a confession that you have money going out and no idea what comes back. If you turned that spend off and revenue did not move, you have learned something worth knowing. If you turned it off and revenue fell, you have learned something too. Either way you are ahead of the organisation that never asked.

The universities are a clean example because their numbers are public, but this is not a universities problem. It is a discipline problem, and it lives in almost every marketing function that has never defined its own terms. The businesses that win are not the ones that spend the least or the most. They are the ones that know what their number means, count it the same way every quarter and can tell you what it returns.

Everyone else is flying blind and calling it a strategy. Define the number first. Then argue about the size of it. Do it the other way around and you are just marking your own paper and handing yourself a distinction.

If you want to know whether your own marketing spend is defined consistently enough to trust the number, run a Lens scorecard.

Why does Australian university marketing spend per student vary by more than 5x?

Partly real discipline, but largely definition. Institutions include different things under "marketing", so a spend-per-student ranking mostly measures who drew the narrowest boundary around the term, not who spent most wisely.

Is spend per student a useful benchmark for marketing performance?

On its own, no. It's an input measure. A return-on-marketing-spend measure, which connects the dollar out to the revenue it brings back, is a far more honest comparison, even though it's messier to calculate.

What should an organisation do before comparing its marketing spend to a published benchmark?

Write down what counts as marketing spend internally, consistently, before comparing to anyone else's number. A consistent definition matters more than a bigger or smaller figure.