University Business - June 2010 - (Page 29)

INTERNET TECHNOLOGY Embracing Web Analytics Why and how to get a web analytics revolution started at your institution By Karine Joly W ILL THIS NEW FISCAL year come with a bigger budget for your web and marketing initiatives? Given the current state of higher education budgets, chances are it won’t (but, if you’re one of the happy few, congratulations!). For the past couple of years, institutions across the country had to do more with less. at’s why it has become so important today to ﬁnd out quickly what works and what doesn’t, and how you can improve your digital initiatives. While this current budget situation is challenging for everybody, it’s also a great opportunity for higher education web teams. Now, more than ever, web professionals have the chance to help their colleagues from communication, marketing, advancement, and other oﬃces see the light that web analytics can cast on strategic decisions. Can web analytics really come to the rescue? Yes, deﬁnitely. Deﬁned by the Web Analytics Association as “the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage,” web analytics can fuel change within your institution by providing data-supported insights. Now that most of your constituents and target audiences rely on the web to facilitate their interactions with your university, it is possible to track and measure the outcomes of most of their activities online. As a result, the majority of decisions related to web and marketing initiatives don’t have to be based on opinions, hunches, or guesses anymore. With web analytics, you can ﬁnally make beautiful both metrics can be deﬁned as key performance indicators (KPIs), depending on your goals. at power only can be unleashed by going beyond the clicks and translating clear goals into measurable conversions. SOUNDS DIFFICULT, COSTLY, AND TIME CONSUMING? It doesn’t have to be with the help of Google Analytics. But this free and powerful web analytics application, used by a majority of institutions, provides all you need to start measuring web conversions and get real insights on your initiatives. rough its “Goals” feature, Google Analytics allows you to set up and track completion of desired actions initiated by your web visitors—ﬁlling out an inquiry/ application form, making an online donation or registering online for an event, for example. en, it automatically calculates conversion rates for these actions, giving you a precise picture of how well your website and your initiatives meet your strategic goals. By properly tagging the marketing campaigns, it becomes possible and easy to inform your decisions to stop or continue a given eﬀort only based on data—conversion rates in this instance. HOW ARE INSTITUTIONS USING WEB ANALYTICS? At Siena Heights University (Mich.), Doug Goodnough, director of integrated university marketing, has been Karine Joly is the web editor behind www .collegewebeditor.com, a blog about higher ed web marketing, public relations, and technologies. She is also the founder of the professional development online community www.higheredexperts.com. June 2010 | 29 Decisions don’t have to be based on opinions, hunches, or guesses anymore. and simple data-driven decisions. Just by tracking hits, page views, and visitors? No, not really. I do remember a time—about ﬁve years ago—when many executives in higher education were only interested in web statistics to state their claim in a vast popularity contest. e goal was to get the biggest number possible, which is certainly why web hits were such a commonly tracked metric. Because a web hit is logged when a ﬁle (e.g., a photo, a style sheet, some JavaScript code, etc.) request is made to the web server, a single visit to a web page could result in dozens of hits—and thus a higher score to report to the president. While page views and visitors more adequately measure web usage, they should not be the only metrics used. We don’t need to play a new version of “Who wants to be a millionaire… in web hits.” e power of web analytics resides beyond the tracking and reporting of page views and unique visitors—although universitybusiness.com http://www.collegewebeditor.com http://www.collegewebeditor.com http://www.higheredexperts.com http://universitybusiness.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of University Business - June 2010

University Business - June 2010
Contents
Editor's Note
College Index
Company Index
Advisory Board
Behind the News
Sense of Place
Financial Aid
Internet Technology
2010 Higher Education Guide to Audio/Visual Services
Green 2010
Viewpoint
The Quest for Internationals
What's New
End Note

University Business - June 2010