August 26, 2013

Why every admissions team should use Google Analytics

Aug. 26, 2013 at 09:00 AM | By Tonya Roth and Melissa Perez | Comment Count

Are you using Google Analytics to enhance your admissions marketing? If not, you should be; it helps makes sure that your website is offering what your visitors are looking for.

Google Analytics is a free tool that with a little assistance from your IT Webmaster allows you to evaluate your webpage. Google Analytics has helped the University of Wisconsin-Superior and the University of Wisconsin-Stout reevaluate our web request form, website layout, and track marketing campaigns.

In our research, we realized that we had an underutilized web request form and, although prospective students may have been going to the pages, they were not filling out the request form. Both of our institutions are in the process of working with Connect (the CRM we use) to create a shortened request form to embed in to our top visited admissions pages.

And how did we determine what our top visited admissions sites were? Through Google Analytics of course!

Google Analytics allows you to track your audience (new versus returning visitors), where they are coming from, what content they are looking at, how long they are staying on the page, what the flow visualization is (what pages visitors usually go to after entering your main admissions site), and my personal favorite, conversion goals.

Yup, that’s right. Just like we track conversion goals for applications, we can set conversion goals for transactions on our website (i.e. complete request form, visit campus form or register for a preview event).

Hobsons Higher Ed Marketing - Google Analytics

Do you work with vendors and sometimes wonder if you are getting visitors from their sites? Google Analytics can help track how many visitors your site gets directly from these websites.

Key Analytics For The Admissions User

Evaluate the number of visits your site receives
New versus returning visitors
Average visit duration
Bounce rate
Operating system (did they visit on a computer, mobile, tablet, etc.)
User demographics - What country and city are your visitors from (great when running targeted marketing campaigns in specific areas)?
Sources that are referring visitors to your website. Are they referred by a social network?

Like most Google products, the reports Google produces are easy to read, customizable, and can help evaluate areas that require additional resources to help enhance your online presence.

The Power of BlogGing Well

The University of Wisconsin-Stout has had a lot of success with blogging. The blog is a great opportunity to address common search terms or frequently asked questions through a creative outlet.

Want to see a great example? Check out UW-Stouts’s blog Stout and About!?

Some strategies UW-Stout used included keywords in the blog content (found of course through Google Analytics), keywords in the title text, and keywords shared through multiple media outlets like press releases.

A word to the wise: be cautious about keyword stuffing or placing keywords unnaturally within web copy to manipulate search engines. With the advent of Google’s latest efforts in trying to ensure search engines retrieve only the most relevant and valuable results, Google has tightened its reigns on sites that use keywords specifically for rankings. Here’s Matt Cutts, Google’s head of webspam, on recent updates made to Google’s algorithm.

Also, check out Hobsons’ Guide to Google Updates for advice on how to prevent your site from being affected (Features on Hobsons Education Blog tomorrow!).

Both of our offices have learned some important takeaways in our search to enhance our web presence through Google Analytics.

First of all, evaluate. You don’t have to do everything at one time.
Don’t be afraid to move things around and get creative with how you execute your search strategy.
Set goals for conversions on key transactions.
Data influences decision makers and blogs rule.

Set up a meeting with your IT folks today to design a custom dashboard to monitor your web activity via Google Analytics. Questions? Leave a comment, follow us on Twitter @rothtonya and @melissadperez, or email us troth1@uwsuper.edu and perezm@uwstout.edu.

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