Trending Upward

It’s about time we start a revolution … and we need your help! You know how important web analytics is for higher education websites, but we need to spread the word. So, where do we start? With a benchmark, of course.

Last week Karine Joly launched the “State of Higher Ed Online Analytics” survey to get a better idea of where we are as an industry with our use of web analytics.

Complete the survey today!

Enter your email address at the end of the survey to receive an executive summary in July highlighting the survey results.

Thanks to Karine for putting together the survey and starting the revolution!

Survey closes on May 24th.

This post is long overdue. I wanted to do a review of Brian Clifton’s book Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics (second edition) last month when it came out. For those of us in higher education, this book is essential reading. Period.

When it comes to web analytics and, specifically Google Analytics, Brian Clifton is at the top. The book is the second edition, but it is so much more than just an update of the first book – it’s almost a complete re-write. So much has happened since the first book came out. You can read all about it over on Brian’s blog.

Full disclosure: I was lucky enough to read the book before it was published and offer feedback and comments. I’ve never done that before, but what an excellent learning experience!

So, let’s get down to the book. The name of it says “advanced” but you don’t need to be an advanced user of Google Analytics to get a lot out of it. It takes you from the very basics of what web analytics is, how to get started with both web analytics and Google Analytics all the way to advanced topics and techniques.
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For this month, I’ve subscribed to 3 great blogs (well, 2, I’ll explain below)  that I hope you find useful and entertaining. It’s worth noting that I was introduced to all these blogs via the people I follow on Twitter. Yet another reason why Twitter is invaluable to me.
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In November, for some reason, I was much more focused on the web analytics tools themselves, reading blogs about both Google Analytics and Omniture, since I use both tools.

Here are a few that are definitely worth adding to your reader (depending upon what tool you use).
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This past week was Google Analytics week for some reason. It was in the news and all over the blogs. Controversy *and* good stuff. I, of course, am going to focus on the controversy for this post. Nothing new here, but worth mentioning.

Article Number One. First, read The Disturbing Truth about Google Analytics on iMediaConnection. The post charges that much of the way Google Analytics collects its data is inaccurate and therefore the calculated metrics (i.e., time on site) are inaccurate. The comments were generally negative. Brian Clifton, author of Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics, even said the post was incorrect. Very interesting post and comments overall.
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There have been a ton of posts and news lately about Twitter. The mini-blogging platform has been everywhere. The presidential election was a hot topic (and still is!), hashtags are all the rage, one user raised $10K for a dowry using Twitter, and it’s even seen by the Army as a possible communication tool for terrorists.

Higher education blogs have mainly focused on how Twitter can help as a marketing, recruitment, advising tool. There are so many great uses for Twitter both in higher education and for corporations.

What about us Twitter-users as individuals, though? How does it affect what we do, our sense of community, our sense of professional involvement?

It’s fantastic to talk about Twitter as a tool to help our students and customers. I’m completely on board with that.

Let’s do something that I don’t like to do a lot on this blog, though.

Let’s talk about us!

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During the past week, there was quite a lively debate going on at the Web Analytics Forum on Yahoo! Groups. Paul Holstein, who blogs over at Web Analytics Demystified, started the conversation by asking people the simple question, “Why do we still need Omniture?”

Sidebar: For those of you aren’t familiar with Omniture, it is a proprietary web analytics tool. It’s like Google Analytics, but more robust and, therefore, more complex.

Since there are so many schools that use Google Analytics, I thought I’d share my thoughts. If you don’t want to read through the entire Yahoo thread, Paul listed a summary of the comments on this blog post. I’ll give a readers digest version here – focused mainly on features higher ed sites might use.
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I’m a little late this month (I completely missed October), but here is the most recent installment of What’s in my RSS reader? This time I’m focusing less on higher education websites and more on the customer (yes, all you higher ed sites, your students and users are your customers!) and social media.

So, here is my list for the month of October, 2008 (I know, I know, it’s already November) …
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There were a lot of interesting posts out there this week. My picks:

• Choosing the right classification words – Giraffe Forum – This is a great post dealing with the way users search on keyword phrases, even when the phrase isn’t technically correct. For instance, the official term on government websites is climate change. According to Google, a monthly search average for climate change is 300,000 while the monthly search average for global warming is 2.2 million. It gets even more interesting when “low fare” is compared to “cheap flights” search volume. Worth the read.
• We Don’t Need More Social Networks. We Need More Purposed Social Networks. – Social Media Explorer – I couldn’t agree more with this post. We need more focused and specific social networks. Although this post isn’t specific to higher education, it’s true within higher education. It gives a great example of a social network specifically for middle-aged affluent women.
• The Ultimate Google Analytics Plugins, Hacks, & Tricks Collection – GrokDotCom – I only use Google Analytics for my blog, but I know that the majority of higher education websites (no, I don’t know that for sure, I’m making an assumption here) do use Google Analytics. Quite a comprehensive list.

Do you have any favorites from the week?

I’ve decided to start a new, semi-regular, series called, “What’s in my RSS reader?”

At least once a month I want to share some of the rss feeds I subscribe to that pertain to *anything* website-oriented. Most of them are higher education related, but not all.

The rules (can you tell I like rules?) – The subject of the blog can be web analytics (yay!), design, usability, copywriting, or anything else. The only rule is that it pertains to websites (web design, development, marketing, anything – but it has to be about the web). Again, hopefully most of them pertain to higher education as well, however, sometimes you have to broaden your horizons.

So, here is my list for the month of September, 2008 …
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