Elicia Dennis, Web Strategist at University of Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters, is one of the 12 presenters of the 2020 Higher Ed Analytics Conference.
In this 4-question interview, Elicia tells us about higher ed analytics in 2020, a success story, a data analysis technique and what higher ed leaders really need to understand about analytics.
1) What’s next in 2020 for higher ed analytics?
I see user behavior tracking within pages being a field that expands in 2020 as demand for more page-specific information increases.
In the next year, I hope to further implement Google event tracking on our websites to monitor site visitor engagement with key elements on our pages. I am also exploring adding heatmaps and session recordings to our analytics toolkit. Heatmaps and event tracking are resources I learned about from other web strategists over the last year.
Overall, I’m looking to learn more about which elements on websites work well and which aren’t being used. I will use this to be more deliberate in how we prioritize content into our next round of website redesigns.
2) Tell us about your biggest analytics success story!
Within our college, we found that prospective graduate students use department websites to research programs ahead of applying. Repeated visits during the period between acceptance and decision suggest that many prospective students also return to the same website when determining which university they ultimately want to attend.
Last year, one of our campus partners surveyed admitted graduate students who were accepted to the university but opted not to attend to find out what influenced their decision. One of the most common reasons given was that there was insufficient information about career development support. Since our analytics show that graduate students rely on our department websites for part of their decision-making process, those websites were the first step in addressing the recruitment problem we identified.
We inventoried the career information across our graduate web pages and have begun to update those sites with more robust lists of career resources. We will continue working with our other campus partners to re-evaluate the effectiveness of improving our career-centered content through this next graduate student recruitment season.
3) What’s the data analysis technique (or trick) you’ve found the most helpful?
Custom segments in Google Analytics are currently the most helpful trick I have in my day-to-day data use.
By filtering out local traffic to remove web activity from faculty, staff, and current students, I have gained insights into the web behavior of prospective graduate and undergraduate students. To determine how our websites are being used during the admissions process, I focus on key time periods in the student recruitment and discernment processes such as the weeks leading up to application and decision deadlines. To get a sense of our current student’s web behavior, I have a custom segment that only shows traffic from campus IP addresses from users in the 18-24 year old demographic. These segments have given me a better understanding of the web needs of two of our target audiences.
4) What are the top 3 points higher ed leaders should “get” about analytics?
- I think that the ethics around data are too often overlooked. It’s important to be honest about our data and where we have to make assumptions. By being transparent with the data we’re using, we build trust and make it easier to implement analytics in future situations. Once we really understand both the strengths and weaknesses of our data, it’s easier to earnestly sell analytics as a great resource.
- It is also important for us to present our data in ways that are easily digested and can be understood by a broad audience. Even though most of our campus stakeholders are highly educated faculty, the analytics we present are not their main priority. By making the information we’re sharing easier to grasp as fast as possible, we speed up the process around understanding and implementing that data.
- My most successful use of google analytics is using data to research elements of our strategic goals. The data from our websites is better received and gets deeper engagement when it is shared in the context of a goal or priority. It’s not enough to just share the analytics, we have to know the priorities of those we’re working with to offer data relevant to their individual project. Stakeholders are more invested in learning about their websites when they understand how that information ties back to their needs.
A conference focusing on higher ed analytics?
The 2020 Higher Ed Analytics Conference (#HEA20) 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 2020
Read below what your higher ed colleagues who attended the past editions of the Higher Ed Analytics Conference said about their experience.
Tags: HEA20, Higher Ed News