So do you know what a landing page is?  It’s amazing how many people that I talk to that don’t quite understand this subject.  Landing pages are a very important element to actually marketing online.  Landing pages allow you to segment your audience, track a specific segment, send individuals to relevant information and many other things.  Although Wikipedia gives a little bit more of an advertising definition of a landing page, I would simply define it as: Read the rest of this entry »

If you haven’t read any of the Technorati: State of the Blogosphere 2008 then you really need to check it out.  What is a blog?  Which blogs matter.  Are people making money?  These are just some of the questions that they attempt to answer with lots of really interesting data and metrics related to the blogosphere.  One day of reports left to come out and lots of really interested reading especially if you care anything about blogs. If your reading this blog then you probably do.

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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?

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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 »

There was a point, about three years ago, where I was seriously wondering what job security in a jack-of-all-trades style web job was really like.  Was there value in it?  Was there a future in it?  These kinds of questions are inevitable when you consider where you are, where you can go, and what you can do between here and there.  The web is a big place, and those darn kids that won’t get off our lawn are sharper about web stuff than they used to be.  Are we destined to become a dime a dozen, especially at universities where we are effectively training people to replace us every day?

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Another week in the books.  I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to get the excitement itch about the upcoming HighEdWeb Conference.  I guess the itch finally started to set in after I finished my slides for the presentation I’m giving.  60+ slides of goodness later and I’m ready to go!  You have also probably noticed that I’m really pumping out the Analytics post lately?  Well it’s all part of this presentation preparation and I guess just getting you ready for it also.  If your going to the conference and you read this blog well you better make it a point to introduce yourself because at eduWEB meeting all you awesome people is the most exciting part of the conference!  So if that wasn’t enough HighEdWeb also has a Ning group created for the conference and I started a thread the beginning of the week to see who else is arriving Saturday, so if you fall in that category drop a line to let the rest of us know.  If having a Ning group for the conference wasn’t cool enough one of the Keynote speakers is the director of marketing for Ning and his name is Kyle, therefore he has to be cool!

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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 »

Yesterday, I received an email from MoveOn.org that merged the name of the town I live in into the subject line.  I’ll admit, it got my attention, as it was the first email I can recall seeing with this type of customization.  But it didn’t necessarily catch my attention in a good way - I thought it came off as way too spam-like and it reminded me of a few years ago when it became the craze to merge the first name of a recipient into the subject line of a message.

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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.

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Another busy, but ultimately productive week in the books.  Some really good reads this week also.  I spent a good bit of the week setting up our new First Year blogs and let me just say, wow.  I don’t know if it’s a wow because 80% of the kids are off to the races with their blogs or because I am absolutely blown away with the craziness of their content?  Kids fresh out of high school really have no fear about what they tell to the world and how they say it.  Two bloggers specifically are running away with the show already. Read the rest of this entry »