The State of Web Analytics (in Higher Ed)

The practice of web analytics is constantly evolving in step with the evolution of the web itself. Avinash Kaushik outlines the development of the practice from the early dates of the web on through the semantic web in his book Web Analytics 2.0.

From the earliest days of the web, we were counting hits on individual sites. But hits don’t tell us much. Hits evolved into page views, and while Kaushik says these are still a reasonable measure of success, they are becoming obsolete. Kaushik says that we’re currently living in the era of visits and/or visitors. And this metric does mean something. A visit means that a real person visited your site and consumed some type of content.

While we may be using visits and/or visitors as a primary metric now in 2012. Kaushik suggest that we’re on the verge of a “transformative moment.” He foresees a move to outcome-based metrics. Not one metric can be described as outcome-based because just as key performance indicators outcome-based metrics can vary depending on the business.

Kaushik suggests e-commerce site focus on conversion rate and revenue trend metrics. He suggests that content sites look at depth of visit metrics. He even has a suggestion for Facebook, “don’t tell me the number of profiles you have; rather, tell me about your Visitor Loyalty metric.”

So here we are poised between a world focusing on visitors and visits and a world of outcome-based metrics. It sounds like a positive evolution, but what is the reality of it. I have a particular interest in understanding where higher education is on track with that evolution as it has always been somewhat behind trends in private industry (at least in regard to marketing and everything that goes along with it).

Fortunately, the results of a survey conducted by Higher Ed Experts were just released today in a white paper to their email list subscribers. The results of the survey confirmed that there is a lot of work to do if higher ed marketers are going to catch up to current trends in industry. Of the 344 respondents, very few indicated that their institution utilized a model that relied on outcome-based metrics. Instead the vast majority are stuck somewhere between steps 2 and 3 of Kaushik’s evolutionary timeline – between page views and visits/visitors.

The top five metrics monitored by respondents were page views (85%), visits (84%), unique visitors (80%), Facebook Page Likes (66%), length of visit (65%). None of these metrics fall into what might be considered outcome-based metrics.

The highest “conversion” metric rated was click stream and conversions for email campaigns (23%).

Respondents were also asked about some higher ed specific conversion metrics. Of the eight asked about, all but one were monitored by less than a third of respondents. The highest-ranking metric in this category was the monitoring of online inquiry for admissions (35%). Only 18% measured online donations and gifts.

Respondents were also asked to consider how they used the insights that gained from web analytics. Responses were not outcome based either. Rather than responses like “increase enrollment” or “increase online donations”, the most common responses were general and content related, like “to improve website” (72%) and “to inform web content strategy” (66%).

These uses for analytics insights are all well and good, but strategy and goals aren’t one in the same. We use strategy attain goals, just as we use web analytics to find out if we’re attaining those goals.