Google Analytics (GA) is a tool that allows you to see prospective student engagement on your website, what content interests them, and what actions they are prepared to take to interact with it.
You’ve likely spent many hours staring at GA reports, trying to decipher the trends and glean insight into your target audience’s goals, mindset, and sensibilities so that you can improve their experience and simultaneously deliver your college or university’s marketing objectives.
But what if the GA data you have been so carefully studying is tainted by the behaviour of visitors who are not prospective students and behave (as in interact with your website) in ways utterly different from that of the typical prospective student?
Sorry to tell you this, but unless you filter your traffic, this is the case, and depending on your situation, it may make up a relatively large percentage of your traffic.
So, Who Are These Visitors, and How Can You Filter Them From Your Data?
The four types of visitors on your website that have a very different agenda from your prospective student and that you should consider filtering out are:
1) You and the Rest of the Marketing Team
Surprise, but you and the rest of your marketing team are on the list. It is obvious when you think about it, but when you’re working on your website, auditing content, comparing it to competitors, optimizing conversion paths or checking fixes, etc, you spend a lot of time on the site. And, of course, GA is happily tracking you alongside your prospective student visitors.
Fixing this is easy. You exclude yourself by telling GA not to track traffic from your IP address. This applies if you have a static IP address. If you have a dynamically generated IP address, like at many higher education institutions, the good news is that your dynamic IP address usually remains the same for long periods. But it may change under certain circumstances, hence the name dynamic.
Check with your IT support; they can help you determine a strategy for dealing with this, such as checking it every 3 or 4 months and updating GA accordingly.
2) Your Web Development and IT Team
This group’s footprints are all over your website, and GA tracks it all.
Keeping your site up-to-date and operational requires many page views and testing to ensure that your updates are implemented properly and that your core functionality, like lead generation forms and registration pages, continues to work properly.
You might want to exclude the whole IT department from tracking by server name to address these unwanted footprints. If an external supplier supports you in web development, you could exclude all traffic from their domain.
You’ll probably need help from these folks to pinpoint which approach is best to mask their traffic from GA. Use this conversation to share knowledge with them about GA and demonstrate how important you are to each other in pursuing your shared goals.
3) Internal Campus Traffic
Your site has lots of internal traffic from academic departments, staff, registered students, administration, etc.
This is essential traffic to understand but is very different from that of a typical prospective student. Many institutions create a separate prospective student site or push it through a separate sub-domain. If your school does this, you will already be in good shape.
If you are like many of your peers, where all traffic comes into one main URL, you need a different approach.
This is where your GA configuration using views will solve the problem. It’s not that you want to remove this activity from GA tracking completely; you will need to look at it to do other parts of your job; you want to hide it from sight when you need to focus on external prospective student traffic.
You do this by setting up a view in GA that looks only at traffic coming from external sources.
This way, the footprints of the external prospective student are separated from those of the internal administrative staffer.
This example below shows a particular institution with several views set up to segment traffic specifically by key functional areas of its website.
Here is how we segment traffic to the HEM blog, allowing us to carefully track the behaviour of visitors like you following this post.
Just a note about setting up views: you should always maintain an “all traffic“ or “Global Roll Up” view of your site that pulls in all visitor traffic.
This ensures you always have the total traffic picture recorded in GA that you can return to in the future, slice and dice any way you need to, and be assured you see the complete picture.
4) External Robots and Spiders
External bots and search engine spiders regularly check your site for various reasons.
It might be a search engine looking for new content or a service to find your latest blog.
The problem is that some will trigger website hits in your tracking. You don’t want your reports to mix these visits with traffic from real prospective students.
Excluding this traffic is now quite simple, thanks to Google, which has just introduced a new and efficient way to exclude it.
Check the box below, and GA will filter out all spiders and bots on the IAB/ABC International Spiders & Bots List from your data.
You will now be in a much better position to understand what’s happening on your site and develop the more profound insights you need to improve your website’s marketing performance significantly.
Have you already implemented some of these filters? What were your most important lessons from looking at your traffic before and after these filters? Are there any other types of traffic you’ve excluded from your GA tracking?
FAQ To Consider:
Who Are These Visitors?
You, your marketing team, web development and IT team, internal campus traffic and external robots and spiders.
