I know everyone hates the word “users.”  They are our students, our applicants, our prospects, our alumni! Well … that is right … they are all those things. They are also our website “users” just as they are our … oh, God … don’t say it … “customers.” Customers. Customers. Customers. There you go. I said it.

Why is it important to talk about our students, applicants, prospects, and alumni as our “users” and our “customers?”

It’s important because, if we think of our audience as customers (no matter what segment they fall into), we can’t help but serve them to the best of our ability. If we continue to think of our audience as students, applicants, prospects, or alumni *only* … we’re labeling them as such and therefore not giving them the best service possible.

Case in point … can a person be a student, an applicant, an alumni *and* a prospect … all at the same time? The fact is, this scenario (or a subset of this scenario) happens more than we think it does.

As a college or university (probably much more with a larger university), we are so siloed into those customer segments (we handle students, applicants, prospects, *or* alumni), we can’t see the forest for the trees. We only see our little segment, not realizing that these people belong to other segments as well. Not realizing, also, that what happens in other silos affects users and customers within our own silo.

What the heck does all this have to do with web analytics?

This brings me to the purpose of this post. What do we do about this? What do we do when silos are so much a part of our culture but those silos sometimes put us at a disadvantage when serving our customers?

Do we know all mass communication that is happening across our silos? When admissions sends out a communication about a certian topic, does it increase traffic not only for them, but for other silos as well? Even more important, do we know if some of those communication targets received an email from a different silo earlier today? Or yesterday?

Does alumni website traffic increase from the result of a mass communication or campaign elsewhere within the university? Probably. Do we know that this is happening? Often we don’t.

To really solve the issue, it will be no small feat. Technology can obviously help, but only if we shift our mindset. The bottom line is that we need to start sharing. But how?

For starters, we need to just be aware that this is happening. Communications, campaigns, and events are happening across all silos all the time. Usually staff within the silos are unaware of communication or campaigns in other silos. Consequently, when user behavior changes on our website, we don’t get the full picture.

Analytics and Silos

Sometimes different silos will use different sub-domains of the main school domain. For example, university.edu vs. admissions.university.edu vs. registrar.university.edu vs. alumni.university.edu vs. engineering.university.edu, etc., etc.

With web analtyics, we can measure behavior across sub-domains. Specifically, using Google Analytics we have a couple of options.

1. We can track subdomains within one profile. Be careful with this, though. Make sure you create filters that will differentiate between the same page name (index.html vs. index.html) within different subdomains. The ROI Revolution blog has an excellent post about tracking subdomains using Google Analytics.
2. If your college or university analtyics lies in the hands of each individual silo, then this might be difficult to do. In this case, there is another option. You can look at internal referrers, segment by these referrers (using advanced segmentation) and study the behavior coming in from specific internal sub-domains that way.

Shouldn’t we go further with this, though, to get the big picture?

Let’s say the admissions website houses the online application form. When anyone applies for a program, they are referred to the admissions website to fill out this form … no matter where they are within the university website.

How about basing form conversion rates on different segments? Do the users coming from your continuing education website have a higher fallout rate than those coming from, say, undergraduate silos? Segmentation is essential, but it’s good to look at it within the context of the whole. If we are *only* seeing the behavior our segment of customers, we lose the big picture.

Even if we’re not tracking all sub-domains together, let’s start sharing analytics reports across silos at least. This way each silo is aware of traffic patterns across other silos.

Customer Relationship Management

Regular readers of this blog know that I am a huge proponent of CRM (Customer Relationship Management). Implementing CRM is important, but implementing CRM across silos is even more important. Implementing a CRM tool is an obvious step. CRM in and of itself is not a tool, though. It’s a mentality and it takes cooperation between silos.

If you do have a CRM tool, though, consider creating a script that will dump your campaign tracking information into the CRM tool. This way, you can tell where users are coming from that request information, register, enroll, sign up for an event, etc. Not only that, if you’ve implemented CRM across silos, you can see if other silo communications are driving conversions. This, of course, requires all silos to track campaign information.

Using web analytics and customer relationship management can make it easier to help our customers across silos. The bottom line, though, is that we need to work together with other silos in order to do this effectively.