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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.

Wait … hold the phone. Are your call-to-action links tagged? In order to track beyond the click-through you must tag your links. Depending upon your analytics tool, you might do this a bit differently with each one.

For Google Analytics, use their URL builder. Other analytics tools have something similar as well.

Ok. Links tagged. Good. Now cross your fingers and send the email. Depending upon your email provider, you’ll get a lot of analytics about the specific email including open rate, delivery rate, click-through rate, and more. All fantastic stuff.

Beyond the click-through. Let’s say your click-through rate is pretty good. Ok, good start.  But now what? Don’t get me wrong. There is obviously great things you can get from click-throughs. But what next? How do we know if the campaign was truly successful and/or, how do we know how to improve it going forward? After these people get to the Web site … then what are they doing?

Conversions. We all know that, especially in higher education, tracking to the conversion might be difficult. Systems are off-site, too many systems, the list goes on.

If you can track to the conversion (your success event), that’s fantastic. Even if you can’t track to the conversion, if you can track *toward* the conversion, that’s better than nothing.

For instance, if your success event is filling out an application, but the application is in another system that can’t be tracked, you can track the “apply” link (that goes to the application system). So, in this case you can track the click-throughs from the campaign and see how many of those click-throughs led to the “apply” link.

Other useful nuggets. Let’s forget about conversion for right now, though. Seriously? Yes. Seriously. After the click-through, you can find out:

• The bounce rate of users coming in from that campaign (if you get 1,000 click-throughs and of those 85% of them bounce, there’s something wrong)
• The pages those users visit after coming in from that campaign. Are those users interested in a particular thing? Obviously they’re probably interested in whatever the topic of the campaign was, but look beyond that. Are they visiting a particular *other* page or section in big numbers?
• Time spent on the site of users coming from that campaign. Are they leaving after 30 seconds or staying for a while?
• Loyalty of the users coming from that campaign. Do the visitors from that campaign come back to the site a 2nd, 3rd, 4th time?
• Internal site search keywords the users coming in from that campaign are using (you know I love this one!).

The list goes on.

With Google Analytics advanced segmentation,  with Omniture SiteCatalyst and Discover, with most analytics tools, you can segment out the traffic coming in from specific campaigns and track user behavior. What are users from that particular campaign doing? Why do you care? What if they’re doing *nothing* beyond the click-through? What if they’re doing something very specific to that segment beyond the click-through? Optimize. Improve.

Do you have to look at *all* of the above? Maybe. Maybe not. It depends on the goal of your campaign, the goal of your Web site, etc.  Which one you look at really isn’t the point, though, becuase that will vary.

The important thing is to look beyond the click-through. The click-through is not telling you the whole story. You could be wasting money on a campaign that’s bringing you very low quality traffic. You could be missing a perfect opportunity to improve your campaign for next time.

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