Web Analytics | Education Marketing | Google Analytics | SEO

Curious about how other schools use Web analytics? HigherEdExperts recently conducted a survey to find out the state of Web analytics in higher education.

A total of 358 professionals working in higher education institutions completed this voluntary online survey from April 29 to May 17 2011. The total number (344) of the respondents tracking web traffic data was used as the baseline for most calculations and charts. These professionals came from marketing/communications (45.6%), web/web communications (34.7%), information technology (5%), admissions office (4.5%), alum associations (3%) and other offices. Most respondents worked in public (56%) and non-profit institutions (94%), with 31% working in a doctoral/research university, 26% in a baccalaureate (4-year) college, 23% in a master’s college or university and 9% in a 2-year college.

Here are some highlights from the State of Web Analytics in Higher Education survey:

96% of survey respondents track web traffic data.
96% of survey respondents who track data use Google Analytics, 49% use Facebook Insights, and 32% use YouTube Insights.

Clearly, access to web traffic data isn’t a problem anymore, with the vast majority of institutions tracking web traffic with Google Analytics. The big problem, however, is that there are very few Web analysts involved to help sift through this data. Consider these numbers:

In 46% of the cases schools have a staff member who spends at least 20% of her/his time working on Analytics in 46% (this is up, however, from 35% in 2010).
In 67% (72% in 2010) of the cases, respondents spend less than 2 hours per week working on analytics, with 3% (8% in 2010) not spending any time at all!

These distressing figures are consistent with numbers in “Tapping the Potential of Web Analytics for Public Sector and Non-Profit Sites,” a report published in May 2009 by the Public Sector Special Interest Group of the Web Analytics Association. The report claimed that 70 percent of public sector and non-profit organizations did not have a dedicated web analyst, and more than 60 percent spent only a few hours per week on analytics.

Perhaps even more troubling, however, is what these higher education institutions are measuring (and what they aren’t). The survey found that:

More than 70% monitor the 5 following metrics: visits, page views, unique visitors, referring websites and average length of visits.
28% track goal conversion (applications, online donations, etc.) rates.
22% (35% in 2010) don’t track any conversions.
35% track online applications (29% in 2010) and 34% online inquiry for admissions. (32% in 2010), the majority wish they could.
19% track online donations (17% in 2010) and 40% wish they did.
Insights gained from Analytics are used primarily to improve the website for 74% (53% in 2010), but 13% (15% in 2010) don’t use them at all.

Twenty-two percent of the survey respondents indicated they still didn’t track any conversions at all, and a good percentage of respondents wished they could get more from their analytics. To us, this is a clear indication that a gap still remains between the versatility offered by Web analytics and what higher education institutions are actually doing with this data, particularly when you see how they use insights gained from analytics (74% chose “improving their website”)

With marketing and recruitment departments under greater pressure in most institutions, Web analytics can remove the guesswork from a whole host of decisions, from the aforementioned website design and development, to marketing and recruitment initiatives, staff and budget requests and more. With every passing year, the importance of analytics-driven decision making increases. If it isn’t a cornerstone of your marketing and lead generation initiatives, it’s time to get started.

The good news is that a full technical website audit can help determine the competitive landscape, what metrics you should be measuring and what insights are most important to your goals. It’s never too late to get started.

Contact Higher Education Marketing for a free website audit.

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Education Marketing News, Web Analytics

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.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.