Higher Education Marketing

Web Analytics Explained

admin — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 15:00:00 +0000

In this edition of the Higher Education Marketing newsletter, we’ll be looking at the increasingly important world of Web Analytics and what it means to your school’s website and web marketing strategy.

The official definition used by the Web Analytics Association (which can be found on Wikipedia), is as follows: “Web Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing Web usage.”

In other words, Web Analytics is information culled from your website and used as the basis of all future Web optimization. With a Web Analytics tool (like Google Analytics, which we’ll discuss later), schools can find which advertisement medium (print, email, social media, radio, television, etc) is most effective, and can measure the impact of each advertising campaign.

As well, using Web Analytics as a guide, a school can effectively monitor their website’s statistics in real time and gauge the impact of higher education marketing initiatives, such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for schools and Pay Per Click Marketing (also known as Search Engine Marketing). Doing so allows them to make informed decisions on website design and optimization, and ultimately maximizes their return on investment (ROI).

Web Analytics is generally used for four major website categories: lead generation, e-commerce, customer support, and content. Higher Education Marketing specializes in Web Analytics for lead generation and e-commerce websites.

Here are some of the more commonly used Web Analytics terms, as defined by the Web Analytics Association:

Page views
The number of times a page (an analyst-definable unit of content) was viewed.

When people talk about a website’s popularity (e.g.”It gets a lot of hits”), they’re usually referring to page views. However, this doesn’t actually represent the amount of people visiting your site.

Visits/Sessions
A visit is an interaction, by an individual, with a website consisting of one or more requests for an analyst-definable unit of content (i.e. “page view”). If an individual has not taken another action (typically additional page views) on the site within a specified time period, the visit session will terminate.

Unique Visitors
The number of inferred individual people (filtered for spiders and robots), within a designated reporting timeframe, with activity consisting of one or more visits to a site. Each individual is counted only once in the unique visitor measure for the reporting period.

Entry and Exit Page
The first and last page of a visit.

Landing Page
A page intended to identify the beginning of the user experience resulting from a defined marketing effort.

Visit Duration
The length of time in a session. Calculation is typically the timestamp of the last activity in the session minus the timestamp of the first activity of the session.

Referrer
The referrer is the page URL that originally generated the request for the current page view or object.

Search Referrer
The search referrer is an internal or external referrer for which the URL has been generated by a search function.

Click-through
Number of times a link was clicked by a visitor. This may occasionally be refered to as “clicks”.

Click-through Rate/Ratio
The number of click-throughs for a specific link divided by the number of times that link was viewed.

Single Page View Visits (Bounces)
Visits that consist of one pageview.

Bounce Rate
Single page view visits divided by entry pages.

Conversion
A visitor completing a target action.

Conversion Rate
Percentage of a visitor type who complete a multi-step conversion process with a defined beginning and end within 30 minutes, whether it be signing up for a newsletter, buying a product online, or some other desired outcome.

Take the time to review and understand these terms. Knowing your way around the basic terminology is the first step in truly understanding what you’re measuring when working with Web Analytics.

To sign-up for future editions of the Higher Education Marketing newsletter, please use the e-mail form on the right.

Inside Google Analytics with HEM

admin — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 14:12:43 +0000

Higher Education Marketing founder Phil Taza has worked in the Canadian education market for nearly a decade, specializing in Google Analytics, Education Lead Generation, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Schools, and Pay Per Click Marketing, among many other education marketing tactics and tools. Phil recently took some time out to share his thoughts on Web and Google Analytics.

Here’s what he had to say:

How important would you say Web Analytics are today?

There’s a push from schools to have measurable marketing results, which can be used to determine their Return on Investment (ROI). For a typical college, marketing can be in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, a year, so, especially now, with the downturn in the economy and the last recession, Web Analytics is a very powerful tool and mechanism that can identify each individual source of traffic that comes to the website. With proper configuration and set up, we’ll be able to know the actual end result of that traffic. So Web Analytics is very important today.

Can a school effectively market themselves without it?

Well, you can always take a tank to hunt a rabbit, but I think it’s overkill. There’s always been the analogy of the sniper or the shotgun. If you want to be a sniper in marketing, and want to be precise and know exactly what’s happening, you need Web Analytics. And Google Analytics is a great tool…

If you don’t use Web Analytics, you’re really going at this with your gut and intuition, and in today’s day and age it’s not productive.

What is Google Analytics? What does it offer that offer that other Web Analytics tools do not?

There are different types of Web Analytics tools, some measure log files, others measure packet snippets, and others measure click stream data, like Google Analytics does.

There are two main technological approaches to collecting the data. The first method, logfile analysis, reads the logfiles in which the web server records all its transactions. The second method, page tagging, uses JavaScript on each page to notify a third-party server when a web browser renders a page. Both collect data that can be processed to produce web traffic reports.

Technical things aside, though, the main benefit of using Google Analytics is user adoption: it’s the most commonly used and it’s also free, whereas other enterprise Web Analytics tools are costly. For example, in the retail sector a lot of businesses use Coremetrics or Omniture, and it’s a very steep bill.

Google Analytics is software as a service model, so you don’t have to install, maintain or host anything on your server; Google does it all. So I would say that’s very beneficial.

How would you go about setting Google Analytics up for a school? What would be the first steps?

When I come in, I want to see how that the Google Analytics code is implemented, but I also want to have a broader picture of the type of website that is being measured. For smaller schools, that only have one simple site, the implementation and setup process requires making sure that the proper codes are on all the pages, that website goals are defined and configured – and often a goal is a lead form or a request for more information form being filled out – and a few filters to make sure that all the internal traffic is taken out of the reports.

But for larger schools (like universities or colleges) that have a library, an international department, a continuing education department, community training, etc, it can be trickier. These schools often have multiple subdomains to their website, and what I’ve found is that schools will sometimes implement a different version of the Google Analytics code for each subdomain. This can really create a mess, since the metrics, as the user navigates from the home page to all these different subdomains, are always being accrued as a bounce or a new visitor, when it’s really just the same visitor and the same session going through the site.

So typically, we look at the site holistically, mapping out all the subdomains and the domains to the school. We then implement one universal Google Analytics code base, which supports visits across multiple domains and subdomains. So, to go back to the original question, the first steps would be to align the website goals with the strategic objectives of the college, assess the web universe for that school, determine how complex the installation of the website is, and then provide the proper Google Analytics code for one account.

What are some of the challenges involved in configuring Google Analytics?

IT is always a challenge. If IT is involved in the website, which it often is, then the timelines are longer. Another challenge is making sure the top stakeholders are buying into Web Analytics and that they’re pushing for this.

Also, the stakeholders we communicate with are often in charge of marketing, but that doesn’t mean they’re in charge of the entire website, and there are often other departments that want to control their own site. They think there’s a benefit to having their own Google Analytics account, but actually, it deters the process for them and the whole school.

Another challenge is identifying the proper Key Performance Indicators which are relevant to each tier of stakeholders…

Are there some common mistakes that schools often make when working with Google Analytics?

Well the one we just identified, with multiple accounts, is a common mistake. Another one that’s not really a mistake, but something that’s neglected is forgetting to configure website goals. What do you want Google Analytics to tell you? And more importantly, what objectives do you want visitors to your site to accomplish? Those questions aren’t thought of, and that’s a problem, since the whole configuration of GA should be aligned with your overall strategy.

Another mistake is not filtering out internal traffic. Think of it, if you’re a university, you have hundreds of employees and terminals that may access the website on a day-to-day basis, accruing page views, visits and traffic. Well, that’s not who we want to measure, we want to measure the outsiders.

Also, a lot of schools do email marketing campaigns, which drive people to the website. Problem is, they don’t properly implement those emails, they don’t tag them so that Google Analytics can see them coming back. So those are some of the mistakes.

Once you’ve assembled all the necessary data, how would you go about improving a website’s performance?

Once we know what the goals are, we can start getting the conversion data from those goals, so, how many visits does it take to get one completed goal? Then we work to increase that metric. Typically, we have to drill down into each keyword, segment of traffic, or referral traffic and try to optimize each of them. It could be that some of marketing initiatives are not yielding good results, so we could eliminate some, or increase others.

We have to look at every variable and try to isolate each one. The best methodology is to do tests. We can do Split A/B or Multivariate testing, and we would use Website Optimizer to do those tests.

Once an improvement is noted, is the job done?

It’s a continual process because the recruitment process is ongoing. Schools are always recruiting students year after year, month after month, and as we know, the Web changes so fast. Today something may be working, but tomorrow it may not. Facebook, for example, is a big thing now, and school’s all have Facebook pages, but are they monitoring it? We can help integrate Facebook Analytics with Google Analytics.

So no, it’s an ongoing process, and as part of our service, we do ongoing monitoring of the Key Performance Indicators, making sure that reports and metrics are adapted to stakeholder requirements, their desires, their business objectives.

What do you see happening in the Web marketing world in the next few years? Is there anything you think that schools should start looking into?

Well, we can look ahead, but I think we should first look at now. A lot of the basics, like SEO – making sure that the website pages are indexed, that the meta tags are populated, that the titles include key words – are often not done properly. So, I would suggest that before schools go out and try to be on the next new thing, focus on the basics, set up their goals, get their analytics tool, and make sure your pages are indexed.

If I had to venture out on a limb and talk about the future, though, I would say SMS and Mobile devices are going to be very important. Reaching Mobile devices, and tailoring to that audience and that screen resolution, should be something that schools focus on.

Mobile and Local Search

admin — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 13:54:30 +0000

Mobile and Local Search

Since the introduction of telephone directories (like Yellow Pages), we have in essence been using a form of Local Search, that is, a searchable directory tailored to a specific region. These days, online Local Search is an increasingly important marketing concept, as more and more search engines (like Google, Yahoo, and Bing) incorporate local business listings with search results.

Meanwhile, with every passing day, Mobile Search continues to grow and develop, becoming an essential offshoot of Local Search listings and marketing. More and more prospective students are using their iPhones or Blackberries to search for local news, businesses, and most importantly, schools. This will only increase in the future.

Higher Education Marketing’s Mobile and Local Search SEO tactics can increase traffic to your site and improve lead generation. How is this done? By establishing what your key markets are and using specific keywords and SEO techniques to position your website on major search engines and attract customers from target cities in Canada, the US, and abroad.

Higher Education Marketing will ensure that your university, community college, or school is prominently and appropriately positioned on Mobile and Local Search results, so that your website attracts prospective students looking for local higher education institutions. Relevant and effective Local Search positioning also guarantees that prospective Internet leads can quickly find your phone number and email address to inquire about your higher education programs.

Higher Education Marketing will also work with various interactive maps (like Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, and Bing, among others) to properly list your school, community college, or university.

Given their convenience, these map sites are increasingly popular for Internet users looking for local businesses and education institutions. And since these mapping services are most usually provided by search engines, your school can be listed above others by satisfying specific search algorithms in your website design. HEM can help your website meet these search algorithms, driving more prospective students to your website and increasing lead generation.

With extensive experience in Mobile and Local Search, Higher Education Marketing can ensure that your Mobile and Local Search campaigns offer the best possible representation for your school and website, no matter the size.

Social Media Marketing

admin — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 13:53:15 +0000

Social Media Marketing for Schools

Found a cool photo? An interesting website? A funny story or great experience? These days, the majority of online users are sharing these things through social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube, and Linkedin, among others.

This social media phenomenon represents a tremendous marketing opportunity for your university or school. Put simply, Social Media Marketing can get the Web talking about your higher education institution, providing “organic” word of mouth recommendations for your programs, campus, and services. Let the Web work for you.

Social Media Marketing for schools can help:

Create awareness of your website’s great content
Increase your website’s traffic
Establish your institution’s reputation (If done properly, you can come to be seen as an authority on a certain topic, program, or educational issue, increasing lead generation)
Develop a network of related individuals and institutions (A network of higher education allies can help future link building campaigns)
Build links (This can improve your school website’s positioning on search engine results pages)

Social Media Marketing Strategy
Social media may be the ‘new kid on the block’ in marketing terms, but it is becoming an increasingly important part of any marketing campaign, either as a compliment to overall efforts, or as its own independent strategy.

Typically, SMM strategies involve combining the use of:

Social networking (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter)
Social news (e.g. Digg, Reddit)
Social bookmarking (e.g. Delicious, Google Bookmarks)
Social tagging (e.g. Buzzfeed, StumbleUpon)
Social collaboration (e.g. Yahoo Answers, Wikipedia)

Higher Education Marketing can help you develop, implement, and monitor a Social Media Marketing strategy that works for your school, university, or community college. Most importantly, HEM can help ensure that your school’s website is properly set up for the strategy you implement.

Social Media Marketing Setup
Without an Internet presence, your school, university, or community college will not be a “topic” on the Web. In other words, people will not be talking or sharing anything about your institution on social media sites. Using SEO tactics for schools and properly designing your website for search engines is a great start, but becoming a real player in the social media world, and ending up at the heart of Internet interactions among prospective students, requires a bit more.

Higher Education Marketing can help you take this next step, harnessing the full potential of Social Media Marketing and ensuring that your school, university, or community college is at the forefront of the social media world. HEM will setup and establish your online presence at popular social media sites, and help stimulate and maintain online discussion and interaction about your school, university, or community college.

Social Media Marketing – Reputation Management
Are negative mentions of your school, university, or community college ranking high in the search results for your institution’s name? Unfortunately, this is a fact of life online. As social media grows, you have less and less control over what people say about your school, university, or community college. Inevitably, you will have to contend with some negative press ranking for your school’s name in search results. What should you do? First and foremost, don’t panic.

HEM can help get negative mentions removed, or ‘bumped down’, in search results. More importantly, by developing an effective Social Media Marketing strategy, HEM can help you stimulate blog, forum, and social media discussion and interaction regarding your school, ensuring that future negative mentions are reduced.

Search Engine Marketing

admin — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 13:49:13 +0000

Google Adwords – Pay Per Click Lead Generation Services

Pay Per Click Lead Generation (also known as Search Engine Marketing) is fast becoming the dominant form of online advertising. In fact, studies show more and more advertising money being spent on this marketing technique. Why you ask?

Pay Per Click Marketing gives you the ability to choose the keywords you want your site to rank for, and displays your message (on the first page!) at the top or right of organic search results. Your ads are displayed, and you only pay when someone clicks through to your site. HEM offers Pay Per Click Lead Generation services on all major networks, including Facebook, Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft AdCenter, and Linkedin, among others.

The advantage of a Pay Per Click Campaign is that you have total control over its budget and advertising message, and can turn it on or off at any given time. Pay Per Click Marketing is easily optimized to reduce your cost per lead (CPL) and increase your return on investment (ROI). Beyond these financial rewards, however, a well-managed Google Adwords Campaign can also provide much needed flexibility for website optimization and website design.

After all, not everyone defines, perceives, and interprets things the same way, making it essential to test new keywords and long tail key phrases. Pay Per Click Marketing is a great way to experiment with keywords, and continuously refine your web presence. Once you have established which new terms best attract prospective students (and convert to Internet leads) to your institution, you can then start Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for schools.

A successful Pay Per Click Campaign involves:

Comprehensive keyword research
Keywords are the key to any successful Pay Per Click Campaign, and you can’t simply pluck these out of the air. You need to test which keywords and phrases work best, and then decide which to target. It’s common to have Pay Per Click Campaigns that involve hundreds and thousands of keywords. Figuring out what keywords to use however is only part of the battle, you still need to use them to create high converting ad copy for each listing and landing pages that help measure results, and increase your return on investment.

Careful and thorough bid management
Pay Per Click auction listings can be a rough and tumble world. Without continuous attention and adjustments, your bids will not be at their most efficient and cost effective. By carefully managing your bids, you can increase click through rate, target ads geographically, tweak ad copy, and maximize your cost per lead by removing non-converting listings.

Consistent tracking, measuring, and reporting
Pay Per Click Campaigns must be consistently tracked and measured to determine your click conversion rate, which clicks are making you money, and most importantly, which clicks are costing you money.

Search Engine Optimization

admin — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 14:03:29 +0000

Search Engine Optimization for Schools

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for schools, colleges, and universities involves a series of techniques that work together to generate organic traffic from search engines and increase your online visibility. This is accomplished through a combination of techniques that ensure your school’s website ranks well for certain keywords or key phrases in Organic Search Listings or “free” listings on Search Engine Results Pages (SERP).

These SEO techniques can:

Ensure your program pages rank well for relevant keywords in search engine results
Target the most relevant audience for your institution and help give your school, university, or career college an online “brand”
Reduce your cost per lead (CPL)
Become a significant education lead generation channel and traffic source

Here is a brief run down of Higher Education Marketing’s SEO process.

SEO Technical Audit
Is your school website falling behind in search engines? Are they ranking lower than they should be in search engine results pages? Higher Education Marketing’s SEO Technical Audit is the first step in the SEO process, providing insight into why your higher education website is not ranking as highly as it should be.

Individually tailored for each school, university, or college website, HEM’s SEO technical audit can identify problem spots and provide clear, concise, and easy to implement adjustments that can improve ranking and increase your school’s online visibility.

Higher Education Marketing’s SEO Technical Audit can:

Enable schools to find site-specific problems and understand their website’s SEO and design needs
Establish if your site is accessible to Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other major search engines. Are these search engines indexing your pages?
Conduct a complete analysis of server-side issues, page naming, navigational and page structure, meta data, and coding from a search engine perspective
Build an SEO roadmap that prioritizes a list of action items and establishes how your website will achieve its search engine goals

Keyword Research
Keywords are at the heart of your school, university, or community college’s website and online marketing initiatives. These are the words or word combinations that prospective students (and Internet leads) will use to find your website. They are essential to any SEO plan.

However, not all keywords perform the same way. For example, certain keywords may efficiently generate traffic but they may not be the best at turning visitors into Internet leads. Using Google Analytics, HEM can research and experiment with all relevant keywords, helping you isolate the function and strength of each individual keyword.

The image below is an example of a Google Analytics report that can help pinpoint the different values of each keyword:

With these sorts of data and research capabilities, Higher Education Marketing can improve website design and build effective Internet marketing campaigns around these strategic words and phrases.

On- and Off-Page Search Engine Optimization
SEO for schools can be broken down into 2 separate initiatives: on-page search engine optimization and off-page search engine optimization. In order to achieve a page 1 rank (and a top 10 on Google’s search engine results page) on popular search engines, both need to be working hand in hand.

On-page search engine optimization is the part of the process that deals specifically with website design and search engine algorithms. This involves:

URLs
Title tags
H1 tags
Description tags
Alt attributes (images)
Page content
Keyword density

While on-page SEO for schools is becoming increasingly important, you also need to invest energy and resources towards off-page optimization. An essential component of off-page SEO is the tried and true press release, which can generate media interest in your higher education institution, increase your brand name and reputation within the industry (and among potential Internet leads), and help improve your search engine ranking.

With your help, Higher Education Marketing can generate professional press releases for your school, university, or community college, ensuring that your institution’s latest news, events, and developments get the attention they deserve. More importantly, HEM’s press releases can help keep your school’s name stays at the forefront of the higher education industry.

Off-page SEO initiatives, however, are not limited to press releases. They also used to get other relevant websites and Web pages linked back to you.

Link Building
If your institution has a partner school or sister association, these ties could represent important link building opportunities. A partner school, for example, could have a mention of your institution on their website, with a link back to your site. This is considered an inlink, and it is the objective of a link building campaign, of which there are many varieties.

Inlinks are important because they can generate referral traffic to your website. Visitors who otherwise would not have found you may end up on your website through an inlink on one of your partner sites.

Inlinks also give search engines an indication of how popular your website is. In fact, Google assigns a PageRank value to your Web pages based on their proprietary algorithm, which assesses the value of each link you have pointing to your website.

Here is a list of the types of links a well-managed link building campaign can obtain:

Social networking sites
Blogs
High Page Rank directories
Press releases
Forum participation
Articles and newsletters

Higher Education Marketing will help you plan and execute a link building strategy that can increase your referral traffic.

Setup Webmaster Tools
The next step in the SEO process is something that is not as well known as Web Analytics but is becoming just as important: search engine Webmaster tools. Google, Yahoo, and Bing, among others, now offer these tools, which assure that your website is properly integrated with their search engines and help maintain the health and visibility of your site. These services include:

Search engine reports on top searches linked to your site
XML sitemap feeds
Index pages and clarity
Site errors
Backlink texts and counts
Top query strings
Content analysis
And more!

The major search engines are continuously improving these Webmaster tool services, so it is essential to set up your site now and make sure you benefit from future changes and improvements. Don’t fall behind! Let HEM can guide you through this important step.

Benefits of SEO
Studies show that nearly 80% of website traffic comes from search engines. However, it isn’t enough to just put up a site and hope for the best. To really benefit from search engines, your school, university, or community college’s website needs to be in the top 10 results. After all, it’s been said that close to 90% of users never look past the 3rd page of search results. By optimizing your website for relevant keywords, you can properly target the audience you want and ensure that your school’s website and program pages rank well for certain keywords in organic search listings on popular search engines, like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

You’ve filled your program pages with content that represents the great things your programs have to offer, so why let them fend for themselves? With so many schools, universities, and career colleges offering similar programs, you need to ensure that prospective students (and potential Internet leads) find your program web pages.

Web Design and Development

admin — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 13:52:43 +0000

Website Design and Development

Whatever your ultimate online goals are, our aim is make your website’s aesthetics and content management systems as manageable and flexible as possible, regardless of their scope and complexity. To do so, we need to work together, continuously sharing ideas, goals, and information to refine your website design and tailor it to your specific needs and goals.

At the heart of this is Web Analytics, information that lets us know who is using your site, and how they are using it. With that knowledge, we can make necessary improvements, ensuring your website design is attractive, usable, and user-friendly. This is a key point, since a big part of your Web marketing success depends on how comfortable people are using your website.

If visitors are frustrated and unhappy, it makes it very difficult to develop your online presence, and cuts off numerous programming and marketing techniques and opportunities, including integration into ever important social networks. And these days, if you’re not maximizing your online marketing opportunities, you’re not making the most of your website.

Take it from us; we have a near obsessive love of website design and development, and we’ll turn over every rock to ensure your site is accessible, engaging, and properly maintained.

Google Analytics

admin — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 14:59:11 +0000

Higher Education Google Analytics Services

Higher Education Marketing considers Google Analytics the first step towards improving your website and Internet marketing performance. Google Analytics is a fully integrated reporting system with Google Adwords™ that offers an enterprise class analysis tool.

Most schools now have a website to promote programs, generate higher education leads, and recruit prospective students. With a Web Analytics tool like Google Analytics, these schools can now optimize and increase their return on investment (ROI) by effectively monitoring their website statistics in real time, and gauging the impact of higher education marketing initiatives, such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for schools and Pay Per Click Marketing.

Creating a series of benchmarks, metrics, and targets can help you understand how online marketing strategies are performing, where they are succeeding, and where they can be more fully developed. With HEM as your guide, you can implement, develop, and interpret Web marketing campaigns and strategies through Google Analytics, and harness the power of your website’s data and put it to work for you. This “hidden” information is critical, as it makes it easy to understand which higher education marketing technique gives you the best return for your investment.

Higher Education Marketing can help any school, university, or community college install and setup a Google Analytics account to ensure that key performance indicators (KPIs) are properly measured. To do so, Higher Education Marketing recommends implementing a Web Analytics framework in a phased approach, which ultimately will help your school increase its online visibility, and better understand its various Internet audiences.

Higher Education Marketing’s Google Analytics services include:

Google Analytics Audit
Google Analytics Setup and Training
Google Analytics Reporting and Website Improvement
Google Analytics Goal Development and Implementation
Google Analytics e-Commerce Integration
Google Analytics Goal Tracking
Google Analytics Customization and Segmentation