Trending Upward

We all know the worthlessness of the data puke. Our analytics tool can give us so much data. Then we realize that we have no idea what to do with it all.

Goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) are so important. What metrics should you use to see if your Web site is meeting its goals? Your Web site as a whole will have goals and KPIs, but your marketing efforts will (or should!) as well.

This is where segmentation comes in. Segmentation allows you to see past the overall averages/trends and focus on specific segments of your Web site and how your Web site performs for those particular segments.
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On Monday, Joshua Ellis (a co-worker and Google Analytics guru — and someone I’m hoping to get to guest blog here soon!) and I presented at the Penn State Web Conference. Our presentation was called Actionable Web Anaytics for Higher Education.

As attendees started asking question during and after the session, a theme developed – a theme that we are all familar with and is consistently brought up (especially in higher education).

Common Theme - I/we have issues with our analytics set up/implementation/limitations – what do we do? Help!
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This will be my 3rd year attending the Penn State Web Conference, but I’m especially excited this year because I am co-presenting at the conference.

Our presentation, Actionable Web Analytics for Higher Education is part of the Web Project and Information Management Track and is, of course, among the last group of presentations of the day. I hope people don’t bail before that time slot. We’ll see.

We did a “dry run” to our co-workers in Outreach Marketing and Communications this past Thursday and I think it went pretty well.

One thing we are emphasizing in the presentation is the fact if the attendees are working with/on a Web site that can be found in a search engine, or if they send out emails with links back to their Web site, then they are marketing that Web site whether they know they are or not.

I’m also looking forward to a lot of other sessions that will be taking place. Mark Greenfield always has awesome sessions and I’m sure this year will be no different. Always look forward to attending his sessions. 

Follow the whole conference on Twitter using #psuweb2009.

In the past few weeks, I’ve been reading great new analytics blogs and following new analytics people on Twitter. Not new, mind you, just new to me.

First up is showmeanalytics.com. You might know my opinion toward unique visitors and Angie’s last couple posts have been around this topic. Very interesting. I love the debate over unique visitors.

Angie also wrote a great post back in December about Intranet analytics. Very different way to look at Intranet analytics – you’re paying the salary of your visitors. Again, very interesting.

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Next up is KISSmetrics. The KISSmetrics blog has some great posts, but I find their Tweets invaluable. I’ve learned so much from the articles and posts they  link to it’s incredible. They tweet more than just analytics, too. SEO, design, development, usability, you name it.

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For those of us that work at large universities (with a lot of different sub-domains – or Web sites – handled by a lot of different entities within the university), there seems to be a problem with duplicate policy information on different sub-domains (or areas within the larger university Web site). 

This issue is always brought up at semester-or-fiscal-year-end because it’s the time that a lot of policies change.

Case in point – we recently changed a policy university-wide. A communication went out from the university to change the policy on individual college or unit Web sites.

Just for kicks, I ran a quick check for the policy on our university internal site search to see how many places the policy showed up. 1,119 internal pages (most at different internal Web sites or sub-domains) contain the name of the policy. Granted, some of those probably link directly to the main university page that contains the policy. What I found, though, is that a *lot* don’t.
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Whether you run an admissions, alumni, athletics, or any other university Web site, chances are you’ve run *some* type of marketing campaign.

The medium doesn’t matter – emails, newspaper ads, banner ads, search engine paid keywords, TV ads, the list goes on and on.

Let’s take email, for example. Do you send emails to students, applicants, or prospects? Alumni? Faculty? Staff? Do your emails have links back to your Web site? It could be reminders to register for classes, pay a bill, buy football tickets, whatever. If there is a link back to your Web site, that is an email that can be tracked and later, using the data, optimized (improved!).

Ok, so you’ve created a fantastic email (or series of emails) and are ready to send it (them) out.
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This weekend I was checking out some organic search results for higher education sites. I was astonished by the number of higher ed sites that do not use a meta description.

Why the meta description is still important. The meta description won’t help your ranking in the top search engines, but it’s still very important.

It describes your page. According to an old SEOmoz post, the meta description is used:

1. To describe the content of the page accurately and succinctly
2. To serve as a short, text “advertisement” to click on your results in the search results
3. To display targeted keywords, not for ranking purposes, but to indicate the content to searchers

The meta description is usually listed beneath the linked title in most search engine results. Key for click-throughs.  The keywords users search for in the top search engines are also bolded in the search result (the meta description and title tag). Again, key for click-throughs.
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A couple weeks ago, at the end of our Higher Ed Experts webinar about web analytics, an attendee asked us for advice about reports to leadership – how often they should be made, what should be in them.

How often you should report and to whom really depends. There shouldn’t be a cookie cutter answer to this. What’s good for one organization or unit may be useless for another.

Remember your website objective and your key performance indicators. These will be essential when creating a dashboard or report for your team and for leadership.

As far as how often, of course this depends as well. I think once a month is fine unless something really good or really bad happens.
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With the current economic conditions and schools all over the country cutting budgets, cutting jobs, raising tuition, we’re all a little on edge and wondering how we can squeeze more out of less.

We’re still being tasked with finding ways to create better experiences for our users only now we have to do it on a tighter budget and with less people.

The problem is that there are many things to get done, but we’re not sure how to prioritize. Should we overhaul? Should we wait until next year? How do we know?

Enter web analytics.

For those of you who are not on the analytics band-wagon. It’s time to jump on. I’m not talking about just tagging your pages and walking away. Now you have Google Analytics installed on your website. Whoopee. Who cares.
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We’ve all read numerous great posts about effective email marketing. Keep it short, Use obvious calls-to-action.

What about writing effective internal emails, though?

I know, I know. It’s not as important as our external emails and so, it takes a backseat. Understood. I have to tell you, though, we all need to have a refresher course in effective internal email writing.
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