Academic Oatmeal

Academic Oatmeal is a group of academic marketing experts who are excited to share their insights, experiences and opinions. This month they asked me to provide comments on an article titled “Would you be friends with your website?”. Feel free to join the conversation.

Assessment – near and dear to my heart

At the CASE Marketing, Communications, & Technology Conference last week – my partner (Andrew Careaga of Missouri University of Science and Technology and author of a blog called Higher Ed Marketing) and I talked about some of the basics of how and what to assess when it comes to your web/electronic communication efforts.  We talked about 4 areas that higher ed should think about:

1. User Data – metrics, hits, visitors, time on site and any other number of data points that any good analytics tool like Google Analytics or Webtrends might deliver.

2. Focus Groups – talking but more importantly listening to what your audience says is critical to the success of your efforts

3. Usability – this might be the toughest one for higher ed. Learning if your call to action is in the right place or your navigation makes sense is sometimes overlooked or removed from a redesign budget.

4. Other data – this is a catch all category I use for things that are related to the web but might have other factors that affect it as well. Things like your acceptance rate, alumni giving percentage, retention and graduation rates. This category all comes back to your strategy and what audiences you are trying to communicate with.

What are others doing in their web assessment efforts?