Aaron Baker, Associate Director of Content Strategy at Harvard University, is one of the 12 presenters of the 2020 Higher Ed Analytics Conference.
In this 4-question interview, Aaron 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 think higher education institutions have gotten the message about the importance of measurement planning, and setting realistic expectations for website and social media post performance metrics. What I anticipate we’ll see in 2020 is a wider adoption of benchmarking in practice.
For me, even though we’ve been doing rough benchmarking for a couple of years, I want to focus on making it easier to have more granular expectations. For example, right now with our current benchmarks, I have a rough idea how many pageviews a news story will get, or impressions a social post will get. But more and more I’m being asked for benchmarks by content category, or benchmarks by tag, school, post type, etc.
2) Tell us about your biggest analytics success story!
My biggest win this past year was securing more paid social funding as a direct result of data from a recent campaign.
In the past our paid social budget was pretty small, so when we’d boost posts, we’d only use about $25 at a time. Recently we launched a microsite with student, faculty, and alum stories from all over the United States and used these small paid social boosts to make sure people in the areas we were writing about actually saw the content.
A small budget meant we had to be hyper-local with targeting. The traffic wasn’t huge, but the engagement was impressive. We used the data to make the case for a bigger paid social budget for the rest of our project and got the funding!
3) What’s the data analysis technique (or trick) you’ve found the most helpful?
I’ve been learning the Python programming language and in particular the Pandas data analysis library has been such a time saver for number crunching, especially with large datasets.
I was trying to use Excel to make pivot tables, but the data was too big and Excel would just choke. Now with a simple Python script using the Pandas library, I can get reliable results in a fraction of the time. I’m also experimenting with using Python to gather data from APIs and do the number crunching directly. I see a huge potential for this work.
4) What are the top 3 points higher ed leaders should “get” about analytics?
I feel like higher ed leaders are more eager today than ever before to use data to inform marketing and communications decisions.
That said, it can be a challenge to temper their expectations on what the data can tell you and what you should do about it.
My top 3 points of advice would be to:
- establish a weekly or monthly habit of collecting and reporting data,
- encourage a culture of experimentation and testing so that you’re always trying to move the needle
- start small before you scale up.
Using all three of those points, you could take one thing you already do, like producing a weekly or monthly newsletter, make data gathering and reporting a habit, try something new each time and see how it changed the stats, and then tell everyone about it.
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