I was reading this post by Bryan Eisenberg, on how to convince people in your company how important optimization is. It is a great read and has a lot of information, the only problem is that it is more complicated when it comes to colleges.

You can convince your boss and coworkers that optimization is important.

First off, as Bryan says in his post you need to make sure you get your math correct. And here is where it gets complicated, because it is not easy to measure the value of optimizing for someone who requests information about your college. It is equally difficult to measure the value of someone who requests a tour, and a little less complicated is to measure the value of someone who applies.

All of these measurements someone should know on campus, but as we have all experience not everyone does what they should so that leaves you to get the answers, or fake them.

The metrics and what they mean

We are going to do this in reverse, so the easy measurements first then we will build from there.

Values:

1. Enrolled student - The average value of an enrolled student should be easily available to you. Basically, you take the total amount of money that comes from all the student, then divide by the number of student and that will give you the average. There are also other values you can use, for example the quality of students, say the average SAT/ACT scores.
2. Accepted Student – A certain percentage of students that are accepted become enrolled. It is best to take the average rate over a few years if possible. Lets call this the enroll rate. If you are an open enrollment school then this metric is the same as completed applications.
3. Completed Application – A percentage of students who complete their applications become accepted students. We will call this acceptance rate.
4. Incomplete Application – A percentage of students with incomplete application will complete them. Lets call this completion rate.
5. Tour Request – A percentage of students who take a tour will start an application. We will call this apply rate.
6. Information Request – A percentage of students who request information will take a tour or just skip the tour and start an application. We will ignore this for now but it is worth noting when you get more advanced.
7. Visitor to your web site – Finally a percentage of students who visit your site will either request a tour, request information, or start an application. I include this because it is the important starting point to show your bosses the benefits of optimization. This is known as your conversion rate, basically.

Few, I am glad that is over, it is complex and not much fun. Lets do an example:

1. Enrolled student - average worth is $5,000
2. Accepted Student – rate accepted students enroll is: %87
3. Completed Application – rate completed application become accepted: %77
4. Incomplete Application – rate incomplete application are completed: %91
5. Tour Request – Lets say you do not track this well enough to get a measurement
6. Information Request – we will also ignore this saying it is not a reliable metric in this example. Your situation might be different. But you should be able to understand how to translate this into a usable figure.
7. Visitor to your web site – 100,000 in a month and 2% start an application. the 2% is your conversion rate for starting an application. This can change if you count information requests and tour requests as conversions.

Ugh so many numbers!!!! Finally we are to the math.

(100,000 x %2 ) x %91x %77 X %87 X $5,000 = $6,096,090

With a modest conversion rate increase from 2% to 3%

(100,000 x %3 ) x %91x %77 X %87 X $5,000 = $9,144,135

Conclusion

Now all these numbers are made up, but the point is to show how important conversion optimization is. Not to mention I currently am running an experiment where I expect a conversion rate improvement of %10, think about the benefits of that. Now for the percentages that you do not know, you can admit to not knowing them and make a good guess. Often times your boss will just recognize how important optimization is, in other cases he will see an interesting concept and help you to find the rates you are missing.

Website goals are the most important base structure of any website, be it a college website or e-commerce site. Without goals the site can easily become a mess of pages with no unifying purpose. Which is the case with most college websites; the lack of unifying structure causes users to suffer through their navigation. Your design, marketing campaign, and optimization are all based off of good goals, so if you do not have goals already laid out this post is required reading.

Examples of the good the bad and the OMG-WTF !!!

Some OMG-WTF goals:

1. To provide information to the world
2. To sell our products
3. To get people to sign up
4. To provide information about the college

Some bad goals:

1. To provide information about cars to everyone
2. To sell our sinks
3. To get people to subscribe to our blog
4. To increase interest in the college

Some decent goals:

1. To provide information about cars to males between the ages of 16 and 45
2. To sell our sinks to new home owners
3. To get people to subscribe to our blog about <insert unique blog topic here>
4. To get prospective students to apply and to make it easy for current student to pursue their education.

At a first glance you would think that the decent goals are too confining and do not reach the goals of your company or school. This is not the case, because your goals can change as your school/business changes. For example, the current age of your visitors is between the age of 22 and 40, so a goal of providing information to an age range of 16-45 is an excellent goal. In the case of a college website, if your current goals are to get high school seniors to apply, then opening up the goal to all prospective students is quite the goal( If you have such a goal keep an eye out for the upcoming post on persons).

How to: make goals (soccer pun repressed )

Sit down and write them down on a piece of paper. If there are a number of people who work on the site make sure they sit down individually and come up with goals, then meet to decide which goals best represent the website. Well, it is not that simple, because the main point is to not cheat yourselves into creating weak goals. Make sure the goal is specific and related to your website’s current market.

What not to do:

Do not get in the habit of thinking that sub pages have a more specific goal than the main page. They don’t, they have the same goal with a more specific form of achieving that goal. This can be tricky and results in a lot of debated semantics, but in the end the goal of the website is the same as the goal of each page of the website.

Design with goals in mind

So you have goals, now how to design the layout, look, and structure with goals in mind. Take a piece of paper and have the landing pages at the top and goals at the bottom. Now think, how can I get a person from here to there. Normally, this involves complex persons and funnel processes, but those can not be decided until you have concrete goals.