Mining for data: using web analytics information, institutions can get to know their website visitors better—and make decisions that enhance the user experience and the school's web presence

University Business, Nov, 2005 by Kirk Snedeker

CHANCES ARE, A FEW YEARS AGO YOU DECIDED IT WAS ABOUT TIME for your institution to create and maintain a professional, centralized website. You did away with the hodgepodge of independently designed pages and built the comprehensive, cohesive, well-branded site your students came to expect from your quality institution.

And, chances are, the commitment wasn't easy. Maybe you had to argue to justify the budget. Maybe you had to wrest some control from individual departments. Maybe you even had to alert some faculty to the presence of "the internet." But you've come a long way, the site is running smoothly, it looks good, and students and faculty are happy. You're done, right?

Yes! And no.

Like many college and university websites, yours was most likely designed primarily as a service rod for the campus community: prospective students, current students, faculty, and alumni. They visit, find the information they need, and leave. If the site is built and designed properly, their experience is a smooth one, one that entices prospective students and instills pride in the campus community.

And while the tendency is to leave well enough alone, doing so means you're probably not using your site to its fullest potential.

An institution's website is not only a wealth of information for its audience, it is a wealth of untapped resources for increasing alumni donations, capturing prospective students, and measuring the effectiveness of, say; ads placed in the local paper for summer sessions. Those still banking on increasing enrollment with that same CD-ROM authorized for distribution in 1996 might want to seek out books with titles like 100 Things People Do with Unwanted CDs and 1996-It Really Is About 10 Years Ago.

Web analytics isn't new, and most people are familiar with some numbers already: "100,000 hits this week, Bob" or "We're getting a lot of traffic from Google" could be common officespeak. And while these numbers are informative, they may not seem very useful. But they are.

Analytics isn't just "so you're going to count my hits," explains Casey Paquet, web manager at Eckerd College (Fla.). "There are all kinds of different ways to use this information."

As often is the case in higher ed, institutions will need to learn to do as business does. E-commerce sites have been using analytics to increase sales and to optimize their sites since before the dot-bust. But, it is a relatively untouched resource in the world of higher education. There's a whole other world out there and some IHEs are already taking advantage.

Ready to prospect for this new wealth? It will mean delving into the mysterious world of web analytics--the oft hard-to-navigate realm of numbers, stats, IPs, click-streams, referrals, conversions, and abandonments that a website generates. Using his or her webmaster as a guide, any administrator can learn how to bring these numbers into check.

WHAT IS WEB ANALYTICS?

Visit a newer local grocery store and you'll notice a few things: a bakery, a premium foods area, even an automotive section, background music, and an appealing design. They aren't there by accident. These companies studied how their "users" interacted with their stores and found useful trends in their shoppers: People are more likely to buy products at eye level; they buy more baked goods when they smell fresh-baked bread; out of convenience, they will buy non-grocery items. Music and store design can make shoppers feel less like they're performing a chore.

Stores were designed accordingly, around what their users wanted, in order to maximize sales. Shopper analytics, web analytics--not so different.

Simply, web analytics is a process of analyzing statistics generated by a site's users. Each time the site is visited, the server (or web analytics software) records the visitor's every click--from where and when they entered to where and when they exit, and everything in between.

Chances are, an institution's web server already has a statistics package built in by default. It can measure such things as:

* How many people visited the site.

* How many pages were viewed.

* What sites visitors came from.

* Where visitors are geographically.

* What browser they are using.

These tools may also report how long each visitor stays and from what page they left the site. More complicated analytics packages can share how many times a specific visitor visited the site, when and where they went each time, and where they left, or "abandoned"--or even how long a person "hovered" over a link before clicking.

Sound like Big Brother? Well, that's another article, but it's the impressive and important array of statistics by which e-commerce sites live and breathe.

With this data, patterns emerge, forming the basis of web analytics: It is the "solution that people use to understand visitor behavior," explains Erik Bratt at WebSideStory, a San Diego-based digital marketing applications provider.

Analytics can turn server numbers into measurable benefits for the organization and the website's visitors. "With it, you can tell what content [visitors] are looking at, how they move through the site, what marketing campaigns are most successful, how far they went, how many people click through to admissions, how to optimize the number of admissions, how to streamline navigation, and even [how] to find out where people are dropping out of particular paths," adds Bratt.