Jens Larson, Manager of Student Communication Strategies – Eastern Washington University, is one of the 12 presenters of the 2017 Higher Ed Analytics Conference (the 5th edition!).
In this 3-question interview, Jens tells us about an interesting analytics challenge and a favorite Google Analytics before discussing what will make a big difference for higher ed analytics in 2017.
1) What’s the most challenging yet interesting part in your work with analytics?
Getting people to use meaningful data is sometimes the hardest part of working in the higher ed digital world. Even if the data is relevant and well-presented, and even if folks understand how data-driven decisions should work in theory, we still encounter situations where people revert to tradition, to a feature or pattern they saw at another institution’s website, or worst of all, to their gut. We really don’t need someone’s bacterial biome determining website strategy ;-). It’s not like their gut is the one that has to detail with enrollment declines or reduced net tuition revenue per student.
Everyone is guilty of this at times, but some people really have a hard time with this. It’s always worse when the people involved don’t want to hear that their video or their story or their photo or their menu slider is really not beneficial to institutional goals. It’s even harder when it’s not just about a single piece of content but about an entire digital strategy that’s being used.
Analytics can seem overwhelming and a challenge, but working with people is still the hardest part, and managing the change that analytics brings about can be some of most difficult but most rewarding work.
2) What is your favorite GA feature, why and how do you use it at your school?
I can wax poetic about segments at times, and two of my current favorite segments right now are light versus heavy users. They have incredibly different behavior patterns. Sometimes the differences are as stark as the differences between on-campus and off-campus users, and it’s not too farfetched to say that light users and the heavy users are looking at two entirely different websites.
This creates some really interesting problems to solve. How do you develop content that gets both light and heavy users to their end goal? If your heavy users are exploring more of your site, how do you keep them from getting bored, or lost, or sucked into the website vortex of that one unit on campus that refuses to listen to reason? If a particular piece of content isn’t used much but appears to be crucial to heavy users, should you keep it, delete it, or replace it? Should you try to transform your light users into heavy users? Do light and heavy users have different content consumption patterns, or is it simply a matter of less versus more?
Enrollment is sometimes fighting for single percentage point gains in market share, yield rates, or anti-melt strategies. The answers to these types of questions become really important in those scenarios.
3) What do you think will make a big difference for higher ed analytics and measurement in 2017?
If last year was the year more institutions started to realize that they need to make data-informed decisions, this is the year of data glut. More people keep asking for reports—which is good, because asking for help is the first step on the road to recovery—but sometimes they’re just asking without clear decision paths or clear goals.
Helping people cut through some of the clutter and buzzwords is going to be key to being successful.
The analytics ecosystem is also getting more complicated for institutions and their analytics experts. Most institutions use Google Analytics, but institutions are doing a lot of supplementation, too. From scroll tracking to A/B testing to heat mapping to Tag Manager to API integrations to all the various services offered by CRM and advertising vendors, higher education is adopting a lot more add-on technologies and tools for their analytics environments. Getting value out of them is going to be tricky for a lot of institutions, especially if they’re asking unfocused questions or just throwing things at the digital wall to see what sticks.
A conference on digital analytics for higher education?
The HEA conference has become a must-attend event for digital marketing and communication professionals in higher education looking for new ideas and best practices.
Read below what a few of your higher ed colleagues who attended the past editions of the Higher Ed Analytics Conference say about the event.
Tags: Higher Ed News