All Metrics are Not Created Equal

I was reading Paul Boag’s “6 goals for in-house digital teams in 2016” the other day (and if you haven’t read it, there’s much to think about here) and I was struck by his conclusion:  “Make 2016 the year that you stop passively waiting for direction…It should be the year you start shaping your own role.” This charge got me thinking about ways I can work more impactfully and strategically in the new year.

Since it was the first day back in the office after our holiday break, I was coincidentally taking a look at our monthly analytics and decided the time has come for a bit of a change in my approach. I report the same things each month and have amassed quite a historical library of numbers, but what story do they tell at the highest level?  The answer is not a very compelling one, other than the general performance of our site.

So I started thinking of the general journey our prospective students take. It’s not unlike the typical business funnel:

• Awareness – I’m not familiar quite yet with your institution
• First Visit/Consideration – I’ve found your site and am beginning to explore what you have to offer
• Loyal Visits – I’m getting interested in your institution and continue to return to find new information
• Conversion – I’ve gotten all the information I need and am ready to commit

Then I began to think about what I measure and how it can tell the story of each aspect of this journey. How I can build a dashboard to show how we’re doing? I decided to start at the top and begin with awareness.   Some of the things I felt were important to know about our visitors at this stage were:

• Percentage of new sessions
• Geography
• Demographic breakdowns
• What sites refer the largest amount of new sessions
• What is the bounce rate for the referring sites
• What keywords are leading to new sessions
• Most used search engines

Once those metrics were defined, I was able to create my dashboard in Google Analytics, giving me a nice overview I can report on the start of the prospective student journey.  The beauty of this approach is I’m sure, as we look at it and think about it, we’ll have more questions that we’d like to see answered. But at least now instead of accumulating a laundry list of numbers without context, I’m breaking my data into something more actionable such as:

• Are our efforts to build awareness in a new territory resulting in new visits?
• What are the specific college search sites that are driving new traffic to our site?
• Where are new visitors ending up when they arrive at our site?

I think the moral of this story is that I often think changes have to be large and sweeping to be meaningful, but building this initial dashboard has reminded me that incremental innovation can be just as important.

Next I’ll take a look at what elements will go into the first visit/consideration dashboard.