Good marketing is all about segmentation.

If you truly understand your market and communicate effectively with them you will be successful in whatever your goals or “conversion events” might be. The higher ed marketplace is no different in this respect, it is just really complicated by the wide range of programs, approaches and types of people it serves. This post provides a few organizing concepts and examples to try and help make it a bit simpler for higher education marketers to understand their digital market segments and improve their overall effectiveness (and results!) through analytics.

So let’s review the four basic types of market segmentation and showcase how two tools, Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer, can be used to analyze those different segments of traffic on your website.

The four basic types of Market Segmentation are:

1) Geographic
2) Demographic
3) Psychographic
4) Behavioral

1) Geographic Market Segmentation

Geographic segmentation breaks down your web traffic by geographic criteria – countries, states/provinces, regions, counties, cities, neighborhoods, or even zip/postal codes.

The report below, from Google Analytics, shows a distribution of website visitors from the state of Texas to an anonymous college’s website over a 1 month period.

If you are College or University marketer with a high priority to recruit students regionally, this simple type of analysis can make your marketing planning and recruitment human resource allocations much simpler.

2) Demographic Market Segmentation

As you know, demographics are statistical characteristics of your site visitor population.

Demographic segmentation involves things like age, gender, family size, income, occupation, education, religion, race and nationality. In this example, Google Analytics is used to report visitor behavior, based on the language settings used on their computers.

International student recruitment is a very important part of revenue generation for many colleges and universities. This type of analysis can be very useful to marketing planning and optimization of your site, as you work to develop a relationship with these foreign language speaking, prospect students.

3) Psychographic Market Segmentation

Psychographic segmentation examines markets according to lifestyle, personality, and values.

Psychographic segmentation is often studied in parallel to demographics as people within the same demographic group often have very different psychographic profiles. In simple terms, they represent an individual’s interests, activities, and opinions, including attitudes and cultural touchstones.

In the Google Analytics report below, a community college’s microsite mobile traffic is examined to reveal local student smart phone preference. Over 66% of the mobile device traffic is from an Apple operating system. So in this market, Apple is clearly winning the brand battle for the hearts and minds of the college student. Understanding student popular opinion toward and use of Apple, Android and Blackberry systems can be very important in setting priorities in the future development of internal college mobile apps and campaigns.

Just for the record, in the writing of this post we’ve had a lively discussion in our office over the question of “is mobile operating system a psychographic or a behavioral segment”.

I personally believe, that in this case, it is psychographic because it seems that these days, your selection of smart phone OS is as much a political statement of your support to Apple, Google and to a lesser extent RIM, rather than simply the purchase of a product. Let us know how you feel about this question and we will report back with your feedback in a future post.

4) Behavioral Market Segmentation

Behavioral segmentation typically divides people into groups according to their knowledge of, attitude towards, use of, or response to, a product.

In the higher education digital marketing context, we use web analytics to break-down the range of all visitors (prospective students, existing students, staff, parents, alumni, etc.) into a number of discrete channels. Each channel is then analyzed and a virtual profile is created to deal with each channel. These profiles can be developed into personas that give you a starting point in terms of deciding what content, navigation and layout to present to each of the different personas for optimal conversion results.

Further micro-segmentation of your channels can be researched using A/B testing, (the example below is from Google Website Optimizer), on content, messaging and calls to action, allowing visitor behavior to further indicate which of your communications lead to the most desired outcomes or conversion events for each segment and when to further split your messaging into tighter segments.

I‘ve only touched on a few examples here, revealing the tip of the segmentation iceberg.

We’ve looked at a few default reports, to demonstrate how readily available this type of analysis is to you, within your existing resources. Once you master the basics of segmentation, the sky is the limit in terms of what higher level segmentation strategies you implement and the analyses you develop to track their performance. But that is another topic (or two)! I do hope to have demonstrated that using these (free) tools even in the most basic ways, can lead you down the road to improved marketing effectiveness.

We would love to get your feedback on these approaches and hear about your favourite market segmentation success stories.

Please share your feedback and comments below.

Thanks

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Analytics-Driven Marketing, Google Analytics, Recruitment Solutions, Smartphones

We’ve often trumpeted the importance of Google Analytics when it comes to online marketing (and education marketing in particular), but Google’s recent Q1 2012 earnings call has revealed just how important it is to today’s online landscape. Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora revealed that “over 10 million marketers and websites globally use Google Analytics to measure the effectiveness of their online presence in real-time”.

That figure, by the way, would mean it is used on over 55% of all websites, giving it an analytics tool market share of over 82%. Impressive indeed, and considering the additions Google has made to GA, including email scheduling, social reports and flow visualizations, that share may continue to grow.

Here is the announcement during Google’s Q1 2012 earnings call:

In the meantime, Google has been working on their other big product: Google+.

The search engine giant has announced a redesign for its social networking platform, which will allow more user customization. New features, which will be rolled out progressively, include:

• The ability to customize apps
• A new navigation ribbon
• A new Explore page that highlights posts that are trending across the site
• Bigger photos
• A chat list
• An always-updated list of invitations from the people in your circles
• Quick access to every public and On Air hangout, for those times when you want to meet someone new, or watch a live broadcast
• A rotating billboard of popular hangouts, pro tips and other items you don’t want to miss

These changes will allow users to:

• Drag apps up or down to create the order you want
• Hover over certain apps to reveal a set of quick actions
• Show or hide apps by moving them in and out of “More”
• Follow community around your content
• Quickly join discussions and conversations

Here’s a video that takes a look at the new navigation ribbon:

Google senior vice president Vic Gundotra had this to say on Google’s Official Blog:

“More than 170 million people have upgraded to Google+, enjoying new ways to share in Search, Gmail, YouTube and lots of other places. It’s still early days, and there’s plenty left to do, but we’re more excited than ever to build a seamless social experience, all across Google… We think you’ll find it easier to use and nicer to look at, but most importantly, it accelerates our efforts to create a simpler, more beautiful Google.”

Clearly, Google+ still has ground to make up to be able to compete with Facebook, but the more Google improves this product, the more important it will become for your college marketing department.

What do you think about the new Google+?

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Analytics-Driven Marketing, Google, Google Analytics, Google Products, Social Media

Way back in November 2011, Google came out and told users of its analytics that it would be adding email scheduling and PDF reports to the new version of Google Analytics. As you may recall, these were features of the old version of Google Analytics, and their abscence in the new version irked quite a few users. In fact, the company call them “two of the most requested features from the old version of Google Analytics that have been absent in the new interface.”

At the time, they claimed both emails scheduling and PDF exporting would be available in a few weeks and started soliciting feedback from users. And then…nothing. At least until now. Google has very quietly rolled out both features, with something of a staggered release at the end of last week (users were progressively given access). Both features, which are in BETA, are now open to all.

A Google Analytics Help thread was the first to pick up on this, with one user stating: “Good news!!!! Pdf and email functions are now available. I saw them this morning. How crazy of them to leave them out for so long.”

Email scheduling, in particular, can be very helpful for college marketing departments, as the feature allows users to schedule a regular report from Analytics. This report can then emailed to relevant stakeholders (you may also export a snapshot of data in PDF format) across a number of different departments, ensuring that everyone is on the same page when it comes to data and the performance of your program pages. Clearly, the easier you can share this information, the easier marketing decisions (and budgets) can be.

What do you think about these additions to Google Analytics?

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Analytics-Driven Marketing, Google, Google Analytics, Google Products

It’s always been a challenge to measure social media, since activity can occur both on and off your college website. Google is hoping to address this problem by releasing a new set of social reports within Google Analytics.

These new social reports are an exciting prospect for education marketing departments, since they will bridge the gap between social media and the metrics important to your college or university. This will help you measure the full value of your social media platforms (and, one would think, the platform that is most beneficial to your marketing and recruitment needs).

More specifically, the new Google Analytics Social Reports can help your school:

• Identify the full value of traffic coming from social sites and measure how they lead to direct conversions or assist in future conversions
• Understand social activities happening both on and off of your site to help you optimize user engagement and increase social key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Make better, more efficient data-driven decisions in your social media marketing programs

Best of all, though, is that these new social reports will give you the chance to analyze this information together in one place, providing a much more complete picture of your share of social media voice.

The reports involve a number of features, including:

• An overview report (which provides social performance and impact on conversions)
• A conversions report (indicating what goals are being impacted by social media)
• Social sources (showing how visitors from different sources behave)
• Social plugins (indicating most shared content)
• Activity stream (showing you what’s happening outside your website)

Here is a screen shot of the overview report from the Google Analytics Blog:

As you can see, the breadth of the new offerings can really help your college get a handle on its social media output, impact and strategy.

The new reports will be available for all users over the next few weeks in the Standard Reporting Tab.

What do you think?

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Analytics-Driven Marketing, Google, Google Analytics, Social Media

Schools have been able to find out who is watching their videos and YouTube channel for some time now through Insight, but now the analytics end of Google’s massive social media platform is going to get a significant boost. Insight is going to be replaced with YouTube Analytics.

The new features of YouTube Analytics include:

A Quick Overview
Analyzing a ton of data can sometimes be off putting for your school’s marketing department. This new feature will help in that regard, providing quick, easy access to info your school is most interested in.

More Detailed Reports
As we’ve said many times, the more data you have, the more effective your content and marketing decisions will be. This new feature, therefore, should be very helpful in getting a better sense of your Youtube audience and content.

Audience Builders
Is one type of video helping your channel get more subscriptions and views? Find out for sure with this new feature, which can help your school share content that is in line with your social media goals.

Audience Retention
How effective are your videos? With this new feature you’ll be able to see how far viewers are watching through your video. Audience retention reports, no doubt, will help guide future video making decisions.

Interestingly, YouTube has decided to highlight these new features with an infographic, which for a site based on millions of videos, is strange to say the least.

In any case, check out the Youtube Analytics infographic for more:

Youtube has also updated their Creator Playbook to include these new features. The Playbook is a guide to help :build and engage with bigger audiences, earn more money, and make better videos”.

Check out the new Youtube Creator Playbook:

What are your thoughts about YouTube Analytics? Do you think it will help your school’s YouTube channel?

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Analytics-Driven Marketing, Google Analytics, Google Products, Social Media, Youtube

Google Analytics is a powerful analytics tool that can give your school the chance to see, in real time, how your marketing is performing, where it is succeeding and where it can be improved. By properly setting up and maintaing Google Analytics, you will have the capability to track and analyze this information, which will remove the guesswork from your decision making and maximize your ROI. However, when you fully take advantage of everything Google Analytics has to offer, you can also diversify your marketing initiatives.

How Can Google Analytics Diversify Your Marketing?

You might think Google Analytics is only useful for measuring the effectiveness of banner ads, Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click marketing campaigns, but this is only part of what it covers. Apart from offline marketing (including newspapers, radio and TV ads) Google Analytics can also help you optimize the following marketing initiatives and channels:

Mobile Marketing
As we have discussed in the past, the future is increasingly mobile. If your school has developed a mobile website, Google Analytics can help you track and measure its user activity. This requires that you paste Google Analytics tracking code on each page that you want to track. Google Analytics then provides you with data on mobile visits to your website.

What’s more, you can also use Google Analytics to track traffic to your regular website from mobile devices, including smart phones and tablets. All traffic from mobile devices can be viewed under the “Mobile” section in the “Audience” tab of your Analytics account. This is then further divided into “Overview” and “Devices”.

Social Media Marketing
Each social media platform you use has an analytical tool (Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics to help you measure your prospects’ and students’ engagement. By adding a few advanced segment filters to your Google Analytics, you can see the percentage of traffic that comes to your site from social media, and, you can see what this traffic did once they got there.

Google Analytics can also compare social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc), allowing you to understand which one drives the most traffic, has the best lead conversion rates, bounce rates and time spent on your site. Clearly, this kind of information can be invaluable when you are devising recruiting, marketing and social media strategies.

In addition, Google’s Social Plug-in Analytics can help you analyse how users engage with any social plug-in that you incorporate into your school’s website (including a Facebook Like button, Google’s +1 button and Twitter’s Tweet button). Once you configure the JavaScript for Analytics, the plug-in will provide a number of reports, including:

• Engagement
  This will tell you the number of pages viewed per visit, average time on site, bounce rate, and other metrics for visits that included and did not include social actions.
• Action 
  This will allow you to compare the number of social actions (+1 clicks, Likes, etc) for each social source and social source-action combination.
• Pages
  This report allows you to compare the number of actions on each page of your site.

Email Marketing
If your school offers an email newsletter (and it should) or any other method of email marketing, you will need to know the effectiveness of this tactic. There are services out there that can tell you how many clicks ever campaign has received, but it won’t tell you what happens after that initial click. Google Analytics can help you fill in these gaps, letting you know where visitors are coming from and what interested them. This information is extremely important.

What other marketing initiatives have you measured with Google Analytics? Do you feel it is more useful with some than others?

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Analytics-Driven Marketing, Google Analytics, Higher Education Marketing

As we’ve said often in the past, Google Analytics is at the heart of analytics-driven marketing. It is a powerful analytics tool that allows us to measure, report, analyze and optimize numerous marketing initiatives and channels.

With Google Analytics, you can create a series of benchmarks, metrics and goals, which allow you to see, in real time, how your marketing is performing, where it is succeeding and where it can be improved. This information removes the guess work from decision making, maximizing marketing dollars and strategies.

What Marketing can Google Analytics Measure?

Google Analytics can help you track, measure and analyze:

• Search Engine Optimization campaigns
• Pay Per Click marketing campaigns
• Banner ads
• Email marketing
• Social media marketing
• Mobile marketing
• And more

It is, however, also a great tool to track and measure offline marketing efforts, including ads in newspapers and magazines, on billboards, radio and TV.

How to Measure Traditional Ad Campaigns With Google Analytics

Google Analytics can help you track your audience’s reaction to offline campaigns and measure its ROI. What, for example, is the return on investment for an ad your school is running in the metro? Want to know if the contest your school is running on the radio is worthwhile? Google Analytics can tell you where your dollars are going.

Tracking and measuring the effectiveness of traditional offline advertising campaigns has always been difficult, which is a major problem when you consider the high costs involved in producing ads for television, radio and print. To get around this problem, most traditional advertising campaigns encourage people to visit websites. This is partly a reflection of reality (most people today research online before doing anything) and partly a necessity (doing so helps track the ad’s effectiveness).

Measuring an offline campaign with Google Analytics requires the emphasis of a website, but it takes it one step further (simply asking people to visit your website makes it hard to know where they are coming from). To properly gauge an offline ad’s effectiveness, you have to use a vanity URL. A vanity URL is a new address created specifically for this campaign.

Offline marketing vanity URLs can be:

• A sub-folder on your site (e.g. University.com/OpenHouse)
• A sub-domain (e.g. OpenHouse.University.com)
• An entirely new domain (e.g. YourOpenHouse.ca)

For vanity URLs to work, you need to redirect to relevant landing pages. An example of this would be LoveCars, which was used as a vanity url for the Automotive Training Centre.

This vanity URL redirected to the school’s home page but also included certain campaign variables (which you can ask a webmaster to apply). What happens, therefore, is that when the vanity url loads it then redirects visitors to the proper page but includes these applied campaign variables to track activity.

The added benefit to using vanity URLs is this is that these pages can be written with specific personas or target audiences in mind, ensuring that your messaging is clear and direct.

What other ways have you used Google Analytics to measure offline campaigns?

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Analytics-Driven Marketing

The folks at Google have sent out an email indicating that the new version of Google Analytics will soon be activated in accounts.  Over the next few weeks, in fact, Google Analytics v5 will become the default for all users, however, they will make it possible to switch back and forth between the new and old version until early next year.

This update will boast a new easier to use interface, as well as a host of new features.

Here are a few of Google Analytics v5′s new features:

Google Analytics Real-Time
We’ve discussed this before in the past, and we’re excited about Google Analytics Real-Time. Real-time reporting updates reports continuously and each pageview is reported seconds after it occurs on your site.

Mobile Reporting
The world is increasingly going mobile, and mobile reports in the new version of Google Analytics help you understand how mobile visitors are interacting with your site and what devices their using.

Multi-Channel Funnels
This feature will allow you to see what channels your customers interacted with during the 30 days prior to converting or purchasing, including interactions with many media channels, clicks from paid and organic searches, affiliates, social networks, etc.

Flow Visualization
As we’ve mentioned in our post about Google Analytics’ Flow Visualization, this feature is a great tool for graphically showing how visitors navigate through your site. Google Analytics v5′s flow visualization will offer redesigned navigation tools.

What do you think about these new features? Excited to use Google Analytics v5?

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Analytics-Driven Marketing, Google Analytics, Google Products

Higher Education Marketing founder Philippe Taza recently spoke at the 2011 BCCCA Conference in British Columbia. Phil discussed the increasingly important role that Google Analytics plays in today’s education marketing.

The following is Phil’s in-depth presentation of what Google Analytics can measure, best practices and tips to configure Google Analytics. It focuses on helping colleges improve their ROI and increase the number of leads generated from their websites and online marketing initiatives, such as social media.

BCCCA Google Analytics for Improved Lead Generation

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Analytics-Driven Marketing, Google Analytics, Higher Education Marketing, Student Recruitment News

Google Analytics recently unveiled a new tool which promises to make the process of analyzing the paths visitors take on a website much more intuitive. Called “Flow Visualization”, the new tool displays a visual representation of where a visitor is coming from, and the path that person takes while on a website, as they go from one page to another. This added functionality will make Google Analytics even more powerful than it is now, and is reminiscent of goal funnel visualizations.

The graphic above shows the different sources to a website on the far left, the different pages those visitors landed on in the middle, and the pages they went to subsequent to their landing page to the right. Using flow visualization, it’s easier to see with a quick glance which pages are most frequented. What’s more, users can drill down on specific pages to see more stats and learn more about vistor behaviour.

The benefit of Flow Visualization is the ability to more easily evaluate your site’s effectiveness and give you the data you need to enhance your website. For example, a school could easily determine how effective a new website page is by looking at a visualization: if the page was designed to attract organic search, it would be very quick and easy to determine where visitors to the page are actually coming from using flow visualization. Similarly, if a new page was tweaked to improve flow-through to a school’s “find out more” page, it would also be quick to determine the effectiveness of that change by looking at a flow visualization.

Web analytics is a constantly changing field, and fortunately, Google is at the forefront of these changes. As Google Analytics becomes more and more powerful, and easier to use, schools will be able to make even better decisions.

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Analytics-Driven Marketing, Google Analytics