You have goals, but is your website aware of them?- Stamats Higher Education Marketing Blog

Jan 11th 11 Posted by CJ Cunniff in Analytics, Digital, Featured Articles, Marketing

You have goals, but is your website aware of them?

Recently, I have been noticing a trend where my clients are confused by the question, “What are the goals of your site?” Generally, they can tell me what their institutional goals are which they assume are the same for their website. There is, however, an extremely important distinction between institutional and site goals. The institutional goals are your end goals. A website’s goals should be the actions necessary to help your overall marketing campaign meet the requirements of your institutional goals.

A brief example:

Institutional goal: We want a stronger diversity mix with a higher GPA and a 5% increase in incoming freshman.
Website goals:
- Drive traffic to apply
- Drive traffic to visit
- Drive traffic to request information
- Etc.

As you can see in the example above the institutional goals are generally at a macro level, while your website goals will be much more micro. This becomes an important distinction because in the world of web analytics we are always trying to breakdown the: who, what, when, where, and why of each action to the most micro degree possible in order to help optimize for specific actions.

Taking the example a step further:

Once you have your basic website goals, there are two additional steps you need to take in order to properly track them (I’ll be talking about those steps in my next post).

Step 1) Setup the value of each goal that is completed.
Step 2) Setup the paths or actions that a user must take in order to complete the task

These two additional pieces of information will open up the world of web analytics to you in an almost unimaginably great way! You will begin to understand where problems (also known as opportunities for optimization) currently exist, and which areas on your site are driving the largest bang for your buck as it relates to your website goals and ultimately your institutional goals.

Now it’s your turn:

If you would care to share with the world what your website goals are and how you are tracking those, we would love to hear from you.

Bonus:
Our web analysts will be looking at any comments you leave and offering up advice on further steps you might take for even greater optimization!

http://topsy.com/blog.stamats.com/index.php/2011/01/11/you-have-goals-but-is-your-website-aware-of-them/?utm_source=pingback&utm_campaign=L2 Tweets that mention You have goals, but is your website aware of them?- Stamats Higher Education Marketing Blog — Topsy.com

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by ericsickler and cjcunniff. cjcunniff said: Just released a new blog post, "You Have Goals, but is Your Website Aware of Them?" http://bit.ly/euJI3M [...]
CJ Cunniff

Hi Julie. You are absolutely right about the need to clearly communicate your goals. If you can: 1) define your goals, 2) develop a value for each, 3) determine a reasonable benchmark to start measuring against, and 4) create a dashboard to easily and clearly communicate the result of decisions made on that data, you will be well on your way to being an analytics rock star!
Julie Staggs

Determining the website goals is critical. Additionally, communicating those goals helps lessen the battle for real estate on the homepage when your various departments and offices want their info highlighted there. Goals give you guidelines to prioritize content for your homepage and beyond.
http://blog.stamats.com/ Stamats

Hi Julie. You are absolutely right about the need to clearly communicate your goals. If you can: 1) define your goals, 2) develop a value for each, 3) determine a reasonable benchmark to start measuring against, and 4) create a dashboard to easily and clearly communicate the result of decisions made on that data, you will be well on your way to being an analytics rock star!
http://twitter.com/pavlicko pavlicko

Agreed, if you're not using monetary values to track the performance of your goals, you're blowing it big-time. The closer you can get to the real-life value of that goal, the better your reporting analysis will be, as well.

I try to get as much info at the beginning as I can – for B2B clients, I'll ask things like –
1. How many leads do they get a month (regardless of whether or not they have a website yet),
2. What their lead to close ratio is
3. What their avg sale amount to (for each key product or service)
4. How previous marketing campaigns have performed (e.g. direct mail – .0005% response, etc…)

Do that and you'll have no problem renewing that SEO contract once it ends. Showing a business owner that their website visits increased 80% over a year and he/she might be impressed, but show that same business owner a statement that shows the website delivered $300k in revenue, and you've got a client that's not only going to pay that new rate increase, but who's also going to tell all his friends!