What the Heck Do All These Numbers Mean?

Stamats Integrated Marketing Conference
What the Heck Do All These Numbers Mean? Web Analytics in Higher Education
Kyle James, Wofford College

Are you listening to what your website visitors tell you?
How are you making web decisions? If you're not using analytics, you are wasting your time.

What is the purpose of our website?? Recruitment
#1 most important audience is prospective students

Intuition is good, but you need the data

Key Performance Indicators - 4 areas

• Sources (campaigns and traffic)
• Success (conversions)
• Users (segmentation)
• Content (sites, groups, pages)
  

What is important? For uDU - schedule a visit, apply

Benchmarking - look once a month or so
(traffic comparisons, demographics)

Alexa, compete, quountcast
edurank.nucloud.com
Website grader
Google analytics (need to check this comparison capability out in G analytics)

Nothing is exact - enables you to make educated decisions

10/90 rule - spend 10% of budget on tool and 90% on people who use the tool. (use the free solution like Google. We need to get way better at using it)

sitescan or wasp will tell you if analytics is on your page - and working

What do you do with this data overload?

Filters - like an all lowercase filter, www and no wwww - cleans up your analytic data

Destination url tagging - set up for print, email, facebook campaigns, etc.
more info: doteduguru.com/stamats/urlbuilder

tracking links - you can also track pdfs, etc with some extra code.
more info: doteduguru.com/stamats/tagging

helps you make decisions over time about where to make changes

Reports

Site search report - gives you good keyword info, who can't find what they want
Keyword report -
Content by title report - enhance content on pages acc. to what people are looking for
Referring sites report -
404 error page report - use info to customize your 404 pages where fails happen

Goals and conversions - most important to helping you make decisions

Measurement from offline campaigns - TV, radio, print, email

All RSS feeds should go through FeedBurner for analytics purposes and for clean feed

Web analytics 2.0 - qualitative data measurement

• customer surveys 4Q, Survey Monkey - ask people what they care about, what they think
• monitor social media growth - put links to watch vids, read blogs, subscribe to email - link back to your site rather than try to control or keep up social sites too much. Keep spreadsheets on each social site. Video analytics from You Tube
• monitor your own identity

Take aways for web analytics

1. Set goals - business goals
2. Test test test (test? what tests? :-) )
3. Look at the trends - don't get buried in numbers
4. Set up a reporting schedule and track key metrics

Some specific goals:

• x visits scheduled per month
• x viewbooks downloaded
• lower bounce rate on a specific page by x%
• generate x$$ among donors with email campaign
• promote and increase presence on a social network by x%
  

Here are Kyle's slides and a video of the presentation.