Speaker: the original .eduGuru, Kyle James

Are you listening to what your audience is telling you and what they care about on your site? 

If you’re not using web analytics to help you make decisions about what you’re doing online, you are wasting your time. 

“a professional manager is one who manages by facts rather than by intuition or emotion”

Key Performance Indicators: 

  • Sources: campaigns and traffic
  • Content: sites groups, pages
  • Users: segmentation
  • Success: conversions

Not everybody’s first visit to your site is through the home page - every page can be a landing page.

Misunderstood terms: 

  • Pageviews: if users aren’t doing what you need them to, this stat is meaningless. 
  • Average time on site
  • Bounce Rate: always an exit rate; they came to your website and left. 
  • Exit Rate: not always a bounce rate
  • Traffic Types: three main types - referral, direct and search

Benchmarking: 

  • three good sites - Alexa, Compete, Quantcast
  • GA also offers it

Types of Clickstream Data

  • web logs - every web server is tracking data.  more technical.
  • web beacons - email clients
  • packet sniffing - really good for live data
  • javascript tags - the vast majority of analytics tracking.  not an exact science.

10/90 rule: spent 10% of your budget on the tool and 90% of the budget on people who use the tool. 

Most people in the room are using Google Analytics.

You need to make sure you’re standardizing your data - use filters. http://doteduguru.com/stamats/filters

Destination URL tracking - vital for email tracking - http://doteduguru.com/stamats/urlbuilder

GA can track PDFs, movie download, people leaving your site etc….  you just have to do a bit of legwork.  You can also tag audience segments - http://doteduguru.com/stamats/tagging

Site Search - this is your usability test.  This is where your users are going to tell you where you are screwing up.  Or they could just be lazy and want to search rather than look for something. 

Keyword report: this is keyword reporting from the search engines.  This will tell you if you have opportunities for other promotions. 

404 Error Page Report: you can pull out what people were looking for and didn’t find and set up redirects to fix it. http://doteduguru.com/stamats/404

There’s more….because so much of the conversation about our schools isn’t going on on our sites.  You can use URLs to track offline media like print or off-your-site stuff like email.  

(An audience member just started an argument with Kyle.  Note to audience members at presentations - Disagreement is fine, but don’t argue with the presenter!  It’s really rude.  If you want to have a conversation with them after, that’s fine but don’t keep coming back at them during their presentation.  People have put a lot of time and effort into these presentations so at least be respectful of that.) 

Always use feedburner on your RSS feeds - it standardizes things. 

Web analytics 2.0: with social media, there’s a whole other type of communication going on  - http://doteduguru.com/stamats/analytics20

LinkedIn is working really well for Wofford with alumni

Takeaways: 

1) Set Goals before you do anything else

2) Always Be Testing

3) Don’t get caught up in the numbers. Look at the trends. 

4) Setup a reporting schedule and track key metrics