Kris Hardy, Director of Web and Digital Marketing – Messiah College, is one of the 12 presenters of the 2019 Higher Ed Analytics Conference.
In this 3-question interview, Kris shares with us thoughts on what’s next for higher ed analytics in 2019, advice to get more strategic with measurement and tips to make analytics reports more efficient
1) What will make a big difference for higher ed analytics and measurement in 2019? Where do you plan to focus your analytics efforts?
When it comes to tracking campaigns and digital recruitment initiatives, the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system can offer some pretty incredible insight. Being able to track leads from marketing campaigns within the CRM can really improve reporting by allowing the marketing and web team to see metrics on lead quality and enrollment status.
Moving forward, I plan to focus my efforts on using the web analytics in my institution’s CRM to create behavioral models that can be run to help identify prospective students who are most likely to enroll.
2) What’s your advice to adopt a more strategic approach to analytics and performance measurement?
Unfortunately, many institutions are in a ‘flying by the seat of your pants’ mentality where it can be difficult to take time to think strategically about analytics. In addition, siloed workflows and processes can make it difficult to implement any type of analytic infrastructure.
One of the best ways to break out of this mentality is to start small with a project that has a clear tie to campus revenue generation (such as an enrollment campaign). Then share your success story with campus leadership, so they can see firsthand the power of analytics in decision making.
3) Analyzing the data and unearthing analytics insights is half the battle. What are your top tips to present/share analytics reports that drive action?
Google Data Studio offers some powerful data visualization tools. Leveraging different chart types, breakdown dimensions and styles can take an analytics report to the next level by delivering key performance metrics in a way that is easy to understand and digest. Once a report is built, don’t just send it to the project stakeholders, setup a meeting with them and help them understand the report and guide them through how to interpret the data that’s being displayed. In addition, create a channel for dialogue based on feedback from the reports to make them actionable.
A conference focusing on higher ed analytics?
The 2019 Higher Ed Analytics Conference (#HEA19) is a must-attend event for higher ed marketing professionals and teams looking for inspiration, ideas and best practices to step up their analytics and measurement game in 2019..
Read below what your higher ed colleagues who attended the past editions of the Higher Ed Analytics Conference said about their experience.
Tags: HEA19, Higher Ed Marketing, Higher Ed News