Aug 26 2008
Holy cow! Where the heck do we start?
A couple weeks ago I wrote a post about usability and web analytics and how you can’t have one without the other. When talking about recommendations from your usability testing, surveys, or website analytics, though, it can be overwhelming.
In higher education (as in a lot of fields), sometimes the reluctance to use web analytics correctly or test users might not be because website owners don’t think it’s useful, but rather because it may uncover too many issues. People are busy. Budgets are low. Where do we start?
Let me be frank with the answer to this question. For your users, your students, your faculty, your staff, you must start somewhere! Don’t ignore it. Take baby steps, but take steps. Prioritization is the key. Ask yourself two questions:
- What’s the easiest thing to fix (the task that would take the least amount of time – the low hanging fruit)?
- What’s the deal-breaker? When all is said and done, what’s the one item that has to be fixed because you’re losing your users, applicants, students, money?
Start there. If the deal-breaker is the project that would cost the most and take the most time (and it usually is), if possible, can you break it into mini-projects?
The quick fixes are easy. Typos. Renaming link labels. Content restructures. Or … how about getting some insights from your 404 report?
More complex issues may not be so easy. If these are your deal-breakers, though, it’s essential that you at least *start* somewhere.
For admissions websites, if your online application is not user-friendly (do you know that it is/isn’t? have you conducted user-testing and followed it up with web stats analysis?), that is a deal-breaker. Why? Because although potential students may not go elsewhere if they have their heart set on your school, it will impact all aspects of admissions. Your call volume could increase substantially. How many potential students don’t fill out the application correctly (wrong campus chosen – if applicable, information missing, wrong major chosen, etc.)? Odds are it’s a usability issue. This is costing your staff time and money.
You can translate this same scenario to other types of university websites (library, school websites, helpdesk, registrar, student aid, etc.).
The key is to start somewhere. Implement that analytics code. Pay attention to offline clues (call volume, mistakes made by students submitting forms, etc.). Remember, ALL higher education websites are customer service websites. Our customers are our students and potential students. If these students came into your office, would you give them the runaround? Are you allowing your website to give them the runaround?
Of all the low hanging fruits in the web analytics universe here is the lowest hanging:
Look at your Top Landing Pages report and look for the ones with the highest bounce rate.
These are pages that are your defacto home pages and by bouncing traffic they are letting you down every second of every day.
Check what they are supposed to do. Fix ‘em (right content/call to action). Measure. Celebrate.
Happy birthday!
-Avinash.
Avinash – thanks so much for your comment!
Absolutely. Top landing pages with high bounce rates is key. Be sure to put it into context, though. For example, one of our top landing pages happens to have external links to our learning management system and billing system. Those two links are the most popular links on that page. Obviously that page has a high bounce rate, but, in that context, that’s ok.
I’m in the middle of a series of posts at the moment looking at what Google Analytics has to say about the academic library website for the institution I work for (The Open University), and part of that critique is looking at ways in which the library stats may be able to provide information back to course teams about how their students are using library resources:
http://ouseful.wordpress.com/category/analytics
Previously, I’ve also dabbled with using Google Analytics to look at how students were using an online course, an approach I referred to as “Course Analytics”: http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/blogarchive/014377.html
tony
Tony,
Thanks for the comment. I am *very* interested in your library analytics series as well as your course analytics post and can’t wait to read them both.
Shelby
[...] Stealing an Avinash idea – This is very easy to do and is very actionable as well. Remember that just because a page has a high bounce rate doesn’t necessarily mean that’s a bad thing. If your page is ”portal” page or a “non-sticky” page by design, then you can expect a high bounce rate. [...]