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A university or college admissions site is not only where you’d apply (online), but also where you’ll find essential information like how to transfer credits, tuition, and much more.

Although the admissions website, obviously, has different goals than does the helpdesk website, some of the same analysis can apply as you’ll see later.

Firstly, though, as mentioned in my previous post, I always suggest installing analytics code (any tool is better than no tool) before doing anything. I also suggest creating a survey as well and keep it on your website. Surveys and feedback forms are great for constant feedback that can be compared to your quantitative data. In a later post I plan to go into surveys/feedback/user testing in much more detail, so stay tuned.

Ok, let’s start. Why does the admissions website exist? What do you want users to do on the admissions website?

Trying to keep it simple for our purposes, for this post, we’ll say we want users to:

1. Apply online.
2. Sign up for a campus visit.
3. Find tuition rates.

Apply online. Forms and applications are so fun to track! The most obvious report for this would be the goal conversion report. If you take every step of your application, you can then see where users fall out.

Along with your online application, think about your application instructions as well. Usually the instructions to the application are very important as there are so many aspects to the application. Before hitting your application (previous page), are users visiting your application instructions page?

Sign up for a campus visit. If you have a sign up form, you can measure this much the same way you measure the application (goal conversion report), only it should be much easier. If you have one form page and then a “thank you” page, you create a funnel with those two pages. Then you see how many users *didn’t* make it from your form page to your thank you page. If you have other previous pages you’d like to put into the funnel, you can.

Find tuition rates. I know from experience that the word tuition is usually within the top three internal keyword searches on any college or university website. Users want to know how much it costs, plain and simple. So, how are they finding your tuition rates? You can look at this a couple ways. The internal search keyword report not only tells you how many times that term was searched, but it also can give you alternative suggestions. What do users type in when they’re looking for tuition? Cost? Price? Tuition? If you find quite a bit of “cost” and “price” terminology, are you sure those keywords actually get users to your tuition page? Check it out. Do they? If not, you can start working on that.

Obviously this doesn’t just apply to the word “tuition.” If you have other very popular terms users are searching on, what happens if users search on variations of those terms?

You can obviously see visit trending to specific pages and that is great to have, however, there are few actionable insights you can gain from this data (unless, obviously visits skyrocket or plummet on a specific day – in that case you’ll want to investigate further).

The importance of paying attention to off-site. As I mentioned in the helpdesk post, it’s very important to listen to your callers as well. You can get a feeling for popular topics from your callers and see if your web analytics is showing the same thing. How? If you don’t have a CRM (customer/constiuent relationship management) solution, take a slice of time and manually collect the data. So, let’s say for one week, for every caller you write down every reason for their calls. A simple answer to the question, “what is your purpose for calling today?” is sufficient. Then you can take that data and look at it next to your analytics.

Are callers constantly asking about scheduling campus visits and your analytics is showing that, on average, users are clicking 10 times before they make it to your campus visit form? Or, even worse, are they clicking on the form and not submitting it? Is the form too long? Too complicated? If your visit-to-completion conversion isn’t great, you can start there.

Obviously there are many other ways analytics can help the admissions website, but here are three concrete ways.

I should have reiterated this in the helpdesk post, but I neglected to do so. The most important thing for you to do first, no matter your site type, is figure out the purpose of your website. You’re obviously going to have more than one answer, but the answer to those questions should drive where you focus your efforts in your analytics.

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