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Boy did Andrew not have any idea what he was invoking the other day when he posted about the Ad Age 150. In what turned out to be an interesting Monday and I read about multiple bloggers who rejected this idea to spend two minutes to submit their blog to a Marketing Ranking service. What’s so ironic is the debate has taken exponentially longer than the amount of time it takes to submit, you have to love a good debate! If you don’t want to do it no problem that’s your decision, but something has been eating at me and as I laid down in bed last night one of those few barely twitching electrons is my head hit a spark that can only be described as a nuclear reaction. Anyone who’s considering starting a blog be warned because those nights where you used to sleep peacefully will now be consumed with an unending river of blog post ideas and occasionally the dam will burst and a tidal wave will crash down impeding sleep until you have the flick of a thought on paper. Here goes.

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So I’ve got some upcoming presentations this year about Web Analytics for Higher Education and me being the anti procrastinator that I am have started to think about exactly what could I possibly say, like I have EVER had a problem with that before. This past weekend one of those moments of enlightenment came over me and I present to you my full definition of Web Analytics 2.0. (Ok so I’ve done a little more research and Avinash Kaushik has already coined the term and has his own definition, but just like Web 2.0 there are many definitions and everyone has their own interpretation. Also Avinash if you happen to read this, I just want you to know I’m a HUGE fan! Maybe your initial WA 2.0 advice that I’m sure I’ve read before finally just sunk in, who knows?) Read the rest of this entry »

May was a month of celebration and closure. Graduation came and went and many students are moving on to bigger and better things now. Unfortunately this doesn’t necessarily translate well for Website Traffic. As you would imagine traffic across the sites were down, but there are some positive takeaways if you look at the trends.

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I just wanted to share some quick data from a board of trustee’s committee presentation that I made yesterday. Two specific slides stood out as something I thought would be neat to share.
(Click on the images for larger versions)

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A while back I read a post over on SEOmoz about popular web browser toolbars and their value from a web developer or internet marketer perspective. It was a wonderful article that I highly recommend. This article had me thinking, this list is great but what about Higher Education professionals? I’ve been working on a list and actually had a conversation with Chris Strauber our Web Service Librarian about it. Somewhere deep down I guess I kind of feel like a web person putting together a list of Firefox add-ons that you use is sort of a requirement, right!? For the most part many of these are the standards that everyone has installed, but hopefully you will see something that that you just didn’t know about. So here is my list.

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Just a quick post on a Monday morning. Hopefully everyone had a great weekend. I finished compiling the monthly web analytics on Friday, but didn’t get around to sharing. This month is the first to have full data for off-campus traffic and blog data pulled through Google Analytics. For information about how to track off site traffic or specifically not include traffic from an IP range please see my Google Analytics 101 post.

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Website Grader is one of those excellent free resources that I run on sites about once a month. In it its own words: Read the rest of this entry »

The big news of the week is Yahoo’s acquisition of IndexTools.  I’m not saying this because of personal experience, but that appears to be the buzz from a lot of blogs that I follow.  Unfortunately I must admit I’ve never used IndexTools so I’m at a loss here.  Here are some links to what experts have to say about the acquisition, yeah that’s right experts not my usual techcrunch, readwriteweb, mashable links to news. Read the rest of this entry »

I have an Alexa widget in my Netvibes account that pulls Wofford traffic data along with some of our peer and benchmarking institutions.  One of those trackers comparisons is the Cinderella story of Davidson.  Davidson is only a state away and roughly the same size as Wofford (1,600 to 1,350 college kids) and both are in the Southern Conference and liberal arts institutions.  I knew how good their basketball team was as they dominated us three times this season, the last being a 49-82 drumming in the SoCon tournament.  Knowing that, I predicted them making the sweet sixteen, but that was as far as I saw them rolling.

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