Oct 29, 2008

Take stock of your time

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Let's face it...the economic climate has created a pretty grim outlook for colleges and universities. In the future that lies ahead my sympathies lie with the web staff, especially those at small and mid-major private institutions.

Already burdened by high demand and minuscule budgets, expectations will continue to rise while the FTE count for web teams will remain immensely disproportionate.

The news today seems to indicate this trend will continue; "College Tuition Rises Faster Than Inflation Yet Again."

As web communication channels proliferate (websites, email, blogs, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc, etc, etc) how is it possible to maintain them all across all audiences (prospects, parents, alumni, etc, etc, etc) with a handful of staff and students?

I'm not convinced it can be done, at least not well. Now is the time for web teams to implement a web analytics methodology to protect their time and maximize resources.

What do you think?

Oct 17, 2008

The value of web analytics

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A weeks ago I had the great pleasure of presenting at Educational Marketing Group's (EMG) inaugural Brand Managers' Summit. Having always had great respect for EMG, they continued to exceed my expectations by holding an event that was one part CASE conference, one part nuts-n-bolts workshop. Geared totally for higher education marketing managers, the theme this year was Web 2.0. My session was on "Mapping and Measuring E-Marketing Effectiveness."

As most people typically do when giving a presentation, I wanted to gage the audience's depth of knowledge on the topic, so I asked how many used web analytics or site tracking reports. To my surprise, only one person raised her hand. Lack of time was most sighted as the reason why it wasn't used.

It is so unfortunate that in the daily grind of putting out fires and fighting battles, we often don't have time to employ little tools and techniques, like Google Analytics, that can have a huge impact on our ability to understand if all the effort we are expending is actually impacting our ultimate goals.

Over the next few months, I will blog about ways analytics can be utilized in your overall web strategies.

So, do you use web analytics? If so, please share what you use and how it helps...