When optimizing your website do not forget your overall goals. This post will tell you why…

Common mistake:

It is a common mistake these days to get cought up in improving your conversion rates. Now there is nothing wrong with this, it is excellent and guarenteed to bring you more of what you want.

What do you want?

What is is that you want, more profits? Maybe you want more leads? The important point is that you need to keep this in mind when prioritizing your optimization.

Good prioritazation.

In my comment to Millissa Burdon’s post I mentioned always considering your highest traffic pages and other metrics. Again, this is excellent advice but I realised that there is even better advice.

Optimize based on your Goals.

Example, you optimize a product page that has a 50% prophet margin because it has a high hit rate. And get 200 more conversons a day. Celebrate you followed my advice and you did good work. You might even get a bigger christmas bonus.

Better Example, you optimize a page that has a prophet margin of 800% and get 5 more conversions a day. Shame on your for not listening to my advice, but you actually cause your company to make more money, because your ROI is higher.

Moral of the story.

If you forget your goals you will optimize for optimization not for your goals.

Conclusion.

With your goals in mind, you should consider what optimization will make you meet your goals. When choosing the optimization you need to consider all types of metrics not just one or two.

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.

There are a number of ways to track a marketing campaign including using different phone numbers and websites. In this post I will touch on the importance of tracking and how to do it with the web. All this information will help you make the most out of your advertising budget.

In the beginning God created marketing

Marketing is essential in today’s business word, we all know that. But the huge gap between marketing departments and technology needs to close. This does not mean marketing needs to use technology as a medium to market; that is being done already. What it does mean is marketing needs to consult with IT to understand the numbers behind their advertisements.

Then God created things that can be measured

• E-mail’s
• Postcards
• Brochures
• Billboards
• Any ad with a call to action

Then god designed a way to measure each of these

All electronic ads like e-mail and pay per click ads can be measured by adding code to the links placed in the adds. If you use Google analytics and Google ad words than you do not need to add any code but you do for e-mails.

How to track e-mails

You want to tag links that are in your e-mails. Google has a good bit of information on how to tag links in their help files. Google also has a URL builder for quick easy URL creation.

How to track non electronic ads

This is all dependent on your call to action, but lets start with the basic idea that you send out postcards with phone numbers on it. Use a unique phone number for that post card so that the number of calls can be tracked.

Tracking using unique URLs

Basically you buy a URL for each piece of advertisement ( billboard, brochure …) and you have the URL redirect to the content you want the user to see.

Example: you want an ad campaign based around your new integrated studies degree. It is obviously terrible to design a billboard with the url, www.yourcollege.edu/integratedstudies. So you purchase is.yourcollege.com which is not the best URL but stick with me. In your hosting you have the URL redirect to

http://www.yourcollege.edu/integratedstudies?utm_source=integrated%2Bstudies&utm_medium=Billboard&utm_campaign=IS%2Bcampaign

I got that URL from the URL builder, the URL will tell Google Analytics that the visitor came from seeing your billboard.

And on the seventh day god rested while the ads were optimized.

Now that you can track all your ads, what can you do to improve them? Well start off with brochures, postcards and e-mail. Create 3 versions of each and send them out to a small portion of your mailing list, each with a unique tracking feature. I.e. for brochures and postcard each version needs its own URL, where the e-mail can use the same link just different campaign information. After a couple weeks see which brochure resulted in the most visitors to your site. Than send that one out to all the rest of your list. No more guessing what is the best way to design a postcard, you can now have measurable results to base your decisions on.

If you have ever said the following, ” My website is < insert some claim to complexity>, so there is no way I can test it.” you are wrong. Your website is not too complex to test, you can do it and you should have started months ago. There is a good article by John Quarto-Vontivadar titled The Price of Perfection, which touches on the importance of not lying to yourself and start testing.

What is website optimization?

First, if you are asking this question you are a step ahead of the game. Around 3/4 of e-comerce websites do not optimize their websites, so you are one step closer to increasing your job security. Now, take a look at the resources on the Google’s Website Optimizer website. In summery, you conduct tests to see what causes more users to convert.

Where do I start?

The starting point for college websites is unique in that most college websites lack concrete goals. Read my post on Excellent College Website Goals to learn how to establish goals for your site. For this post I will refer to Future Students section of the website for it is a site with high traffic and common goals for most colleges.

What should I test first?

There are lots of blog posts about what you should test first, here are two resources to help you get started: Prioritize Optimization, Introduction to Website Optimizer Webinar. For your first few tests, go to your future students page and find some major text or photos, then swap them with a couple other versions. Do not do too many versions at first, get a little experience under your belt before you do any complex testing.

What to test for a college website:

• Future Students landing page
• Apply Online buttons
• Request a tour button
• Test, offering incentives for tour request or information request forms
• Test the application process – this is a big one, if your application process is complex you will lose completed applications.

There is no limit to what you can test, so look at your pages and try new ideas. And remember if anyone has an idea during a meeting, do not allow that idea to be wasted. Just say you will test it to see if it increases your conversion rates.

So you don’t just want to keep your job, you want a promotion!

Now this is where optimization gets interesting, you want to increase user satisfaction so how can you do it, well a survey is the only real way to see if your users are enjoying the experience. How are you supposed to test if people are enjoying one version of the site or another?

This is more complex and less objective then normal optimization tests but in no way should this be ignored for college websites. Because every college website should have a goal of user satisfaction, often times it is difficult to find a goal page for a certain site, like the advisement office site.

How to execute it: simply create an a/b test with 2 versions of the page, and use any page as the goal page. Then include different surveys with the same exact questions, i.e. the same survey but the results go to different locations. This test will take a while to execute because you need enough data to have reliable information. Run the test until you feel there is significant data, best is 2 weeks to 6 weeks. Keep the surveys short no more than 6 questions, and one should be “What is your overall opinion of the site?” You can also use 4Q, which is a decent survey for such a test.

Optimize now and forever

Your site should constantly be tested and optimized. Your users change year after year and what might increase your conversions one year can decrease them the next. It can even be seasonal, don’t keep snowflakes on your page from a test in November when it is July.

Lets start off with a view of the most common misstates. Infomration request forms are known as Lead Generation in the internet marketing world. What does ths mean for you, well your information request form is a lead generation form. Therefor it falls into the same best practices category, i.e, “On a lead generation site, optimize form questions, try to shorten the time needed to fill out the form, and introduce ways for the visitor to take more control of when and how they’re contacted.” – Bryan Eisenberg

Common Mistakes,

Asking too many questions. This is a big one, lets take a look at some of the worst offenders to this rule.

1. Lewis-Clark State College – The form is almost 4 pages long !!!!!
2. Berkeley College – The form is long and it is also very confusing, the prospective student is supposed to create an account and then have a web page to request information… I don’t even know what is going on.
3. Dixie State College – Take a look for yourself, the form is almost as long as Lewis-Clark but does not look nearly as nice

So your school is not on the list of worst offenders, great! What can you do to improve your lead generation.

Take a look at a couple minor offenders:

1. Brooklyn College – So their form is shorter, not nearly as short as it can be. But the worst part is they ask the student to leave the site to get the college board code for their high school. Having someone leave the site is a guaranteed way to lose leads.
2. Gettysburg College – Not terrible, but they ask for clearly useless information, i.e. Nickname, and other information that might be useful but most likely not worth asking, i.e. Race, Gender, Sex.

Now, I was not able to find many great examples of information request in my quick searching but here is one example that is nearly ideal.

1. Southern Utah University – The form is as short as possible assuming they utilize every piece of information asked for. It is also clean and quick to fill out, no confirm e-mail or any repeated information. They should probably conduct an optimization test to see the effect of adding ‘preferred form of contact’ radio buttons.

Remember, the more applications you receive the better your school looks. Even if they are from students who do not meet your entrance requirements. Low acceptance rate ( applications relative to acceptance) is a major influence in college reviews such as the College Board or The Princeton Review.

Final point: Each additional field in a form reduces the number of people who will fill it out. So, if your boss says he wants such and such information, be absolutely positivity the information is used. And weight the loss in leads to the benefit of targeted mailings.