College Web Development

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Here I will explain the importance of analytics software for college websites. First, we will talk about some specific metrics related to analytics. Then we will touch on issues related to college sites and some solutions. There are a lot of traits common amongst all the major analytics programs. I will mainly refer to Google analytics because it is free and what is use most commonly.

If you don’t have it…. your fired

Before analytics software your best guess was as good as a three year old guessing which ice cream she likes. Analytics software is the porthole to what your visitors are doing. And analytics is a lot more than just page views, some of the most important statistics are the metrics most people don’t even understand.

Understanding Bounce Rate

I agree with Avinash Kaushik in saying the bounce rate is probably the, “Sexiest Web Metric Ever”. Now if Angelina Jolie was a web metric I would have to say Kaushki was wrong, luckily for us Angelina is not a metric… or we would be analyzing her all day. (yes I could have said something about Angelina’s bounce rate but this is supposed to be serious information )

So what is bounce rate:

The definition of bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that hit your website (from an outside website) on a given page and don’t visit any other pages on your site. For example, John Smith conducts a Google search and clicks on a link to your home page, he sees the page and then decides this is not for him so he leaves, John is a bounce.

You think: ” Bounce rate seems similar to exit rate…”

You are correct in thinking that but it is important to remember that there is a fundamental difference between the two. Take a look at this article which goes in depth to the difference. Let me make a quick comparison, say your Future Students (Prospective Students) page has a high exit rate but a low bounce rate, what could this mean? Well let’s say you have a couple forms, your application form and your take a tour form. After a student completes the form they are redirected back to the Future Students page. So presumably the student has completed what they wanted to do and they closed the browser because they were done. So how does this translate to analytics? The student lands on the Future Students page and navigates to either form so they are not registered as a bounce. They then are redirected back to the Future Students page and exit from their browser so they register as exit. Thus explaining the high exit rate, on a side note: if you want to make your bosses happy do not redirect the traffic to the future students site redirect the traffic somewhere else or offer links to the user so they chose where they want to go.

So in conclusion ( I feel like I am writing a high school conclusion paragraph), the two metrics are important but remember to take into consideration the context of each metric and what it means.

College Problems with Analytics

Let’s move on to a couple issues you should be concerned with when it comes to analytics. First things first, because all of your pages are managed by different departments or parts of the collage or parts of another collage… you get the point. It is very hard to enforce a unified analytics code on all sites, if you can my hat off to you, and please send me an e-mail I would love to know how you do it. The inconsistent code adds a couple problems. For example, it is not irregular for a college home page to have a high bounce rate, why is this. Well often visitors are sent to the home page from another website from within the college that is not using the correct tracking code. The user then leaves the site thus the user is a bounce. Even worse is when it happens in the other direction, a user comes to the home page then navigates to a page with incorrect tracking code, so that user is counted as a bounce when she really navigated further into the site. The other main annoyance related to inconsistent code use, is the fact that clicks on links are not registered if the linked page does not have tracking code on it. This can be frustrating when trying to decide major links that should be placed on important pages.

I do have a solution for the link problem, crazyegg.com us another analytics software that concentrates on the users click, so you can see if users are trying to click on parts of your pages that are not links ( feature only available if you pay). But there is a free trial account so you can have an analytics program that registers all the clicks on all your links. And it does not interfere with other analytics software.

Other related causes to a high bounce rate on college home pages is the colleges computer labs and IT departments insistence on setting all the browsers home pages to be the college websites home page, resulting in a bounce or exit every time a student, faculty, or staff opens up a browser. There are a couple solutions to this, continue optimizing your home page to reduce your bounce and exit rates. This will be a difficult process and often leave your important user base (potential students) out on a lim. The other solution, ( the better one in most cases) is to create a home page for on campus computers that refers the users to the most highly used links and information. Not to mention it is a great place to link computer lab How To’s.