It has been a while since I’ve posted anything in the Social Survey series.  Writing about using Social Networks for Higher Education has kind of taken a backseat to Analytics lately, but let’s see if we can’t combined the two into a web marketing gameplan?   Way back in April Andrew Careaga wrote a post LinkedIn presentation at CASE about Cal Tech’s Alumni group on LinkedIn.  It was really one of those “DUH” moments.  Why hadn’t I already thought about setting up a LinkedIn group for Wofford Alumni?

Read the rest of this entry »

Google Site Search is one of those additional functionalities in Google Analytics that is very easy to skip over.  Once again I’m picking up a topic that Shelby Thayer already started on Trending Upward, but I think that it’s completely worth mentioning again.  Spending time in your Site Search data is definitely something that should consume some of your free time!  Here is your visitors telling you exactly what they want and how they go about finding it.  Maybe you think it’s obvious how to find a certain page on your site, but you have this wealth of data right at your fingertips telling you that it’s not as easy to find as you might think.  Remember it’s not about you it’s about your visitors. Read the rest of this entry »

As I’ve written about Google Analytics quite a bit on this blog it’s probably quite obvious that I think very highly of this free service.  Making sure that you have the code installed on your site properly is a very important initial step.  The problem is that once you have it installed the only way to know if you have it installed properly is to sit and wait for the service to begin collecting data.  If you have a gigantic website, like a huge college website, then even when you are collecting data sometimes you aren’t even sure if every page is collecting simply be cause you have thousands of pages.  Luckily there are a few options to help. Read the rest of this entry »

Google Analytics is a wonderful free service for tracking visitors to your website.  A large website often has the challenges of multiple audiences, multiple site editors, and many stakeholders.  A college website is one that definitely falls into this category.  It can be a little overwhelming to dig into the data to find specific information that you want or what a certain stakeholder might be interested.  One of the most important ways to not only keep your data clean and organized, but to assist in drilling down into relevant information is by applying filters to your data.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was having a discussion in a forum the other day when someone mentioned that they were changing some pages on there site with the hope of increasing pageviews.  As Karlyn is known to do with email metrics the web analytics individual that I strive to be went on the defensive, or offensive if you choose.  What do pageviews mean?  Why are more pageviews better?  So if you don’t want to read any more of this post all that you need to know is that PAGEVIEWS IS A WORTHLESS METRIC.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tagging and tracking can be an important way to segment and understand user behavior on your website.  Google Analytics offers lots of ways to do this, but finding out how to do it isn’t always so obvious.  Knowing a little bit more about your visitors allows you to make better more informed decisions and ultimately provide a better site to your visitors.  There are multiple ways that you can segment, track, and tag site visitors that are not so obvious “out of the box”. Read the rest of this entry »

The other week Shelby Thayer wrote an excellent post titled, Instantly Actionable – The 404 Page.  Reading through her post got me thinking this is definitely a Web Standard that every site needs to implement properly, but very few take the time to do it.  Nobody likes to see an ugly “The page cannot be found” error page.  This has to be one of the quickest ways for a visitor to leave a site and has to have a high exit rate on this page, but most people don’t even track this page so they have no way of knowing even this little bit of information.  Just for the record since I started tracking this two weeks ago the exit rate is only 29%.  Not as bad as I would have thought, but definitely higher than the site as a whole.

Read the rest of this entry »

So many many months ago in what was the third post of this blog I asked the question, Which search engines really matter?  In that post I pulled data from Compete’s monthly post about web search market share that showed Google dominating with almost 69% of the US market.  So fast forward eight months later (can you believe this blog is eight months old!?) and Google is now a dominating 70.4% of the US web search market.  At the time I wanted to see how this national trend held up for Wofford and at the time did some tweaking to Wofford’s search submissions to the other two main search market players, Yahoo and MSN.  Since making these changes I thought they might have an impact on Google’s dominance of searches that return traffic to Wofford’s site (over 80% then). I think to be totally fair before moving forward I need to analyzes what percentage of Wofford’s search traffic is domestic.  Keep in mind this data is only for wofford.edu as pulled from Google Analytics over the last month. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »