Google Analytics + Excel + Bing Ads Intelligence = Audience insights

The Process

Go to the organic keywords report in Google Analytics. You may need to filter this report to find topic-specific keywords. At the least, you will want to exclude branded keywords from the list. The non-branded keywords will be much more helpful for our purposes.

Once you have the list of keywords, export the keywords as a CSV file.

You will then want to open the CSV file in Excel. At this point, you will be able to perform additional analysis on the keywords.

We want to take it a step further and use the Bing Ads Intelligence Excel Add-on to gather some demographic information on these keywords. Note that this is only currently available for the Windows version of Excel (sorry Mac users).

After you select the list of keywords, click “Age Group & Gender” in the Bing Ads Intelligence options. It will query the Bing Yahoo! network on general demographic characteristics and display the national averages by default.

The Age Group & Gender report will show you the age and gender demographic breakdown for each keyword based on national averages. You will note in the following example, the keyword “homeland security degree” is predominantly (60%) male and mostly searched by the age group 35-49. The next most popular age group for this term is 50-64.

This information should not be viewed as 100% accurate information about your site users. However, it can give you a good idea about the type of searcher that uses certain terms.

What can you do with this information?

If you are trying to reach a specific demographic, you can begin to use some of this information to modify the page content. If you find some word choices (keywords) are common among the group you are trying to reach, you can ensure that you are using those terms in strategic ways on your website.

• Include the terms used by your target demographic in the HTML page titles.
• Use those terms in the content of primary pages (such as program pages).
• Use those terms as anchor text for internal links that guide users to those primary pages.

This gives you some insights for how to reach your audience more effectively via SEO. Also keep in mind, SEO includes building rapport with your visitors. If your visitors see the terms on the page that they searched for, they are more likely to engage with your website.

How do you justify all the work done on social media at your institution?
How do you select the right metric to quantify return on investment for social media?

Adrian Ebsary, Online Community Specialist at the University of Ottawa, offered answers to both questions in the 13-minute presentation he gave at the 1st Higher Ed Analytics conference (HEA13) on February 6, 2013.

Measurement tools for Twitter

Adrian shared a selection of the tools he has found the most useful for Twitter.

• Audience Size: TwitSprout, TwitterCounter
• RTs: Klout, Topsy, Keyhole.co
• Audience and Conversation: FollowerWonk, Gephi, Netlytic.org

Measurement techniques for Facebook

He also discussed and explained several useful techniques to assess your institution performance on Facebook compared to its direct competitors.

• Impact of Negative & Positive Feedback
• The EdgeRank Algorithm
• Participation
• Benchmarking by # of Page Fans
• Feedback-mining your institution hashtag

Among other tasks, she manages analytics dashboards and reporting associated with the college’s website.

In this 3-question interview, Colleen tells us about her biggest success story with analytics, favorite tool and a great tip you can use.

1) What is your biggest win using analytics?

The simple addition of adding tracking code at the ad and keyword level has given Ithaca College the ability to evaluate the importance of a user’s intentions once they come to the site.

No longer are ads and keywords solely being paused due to low click-thru rates. Low click-thru rates should be evaluated for ad effectiveness and data sampling, not user intention.

2) What is your favorite analytics tool? Why is it so useful in your higher ed job?

Probably one of the most powerful pieces of Google Analytics for advanced marketers is attribution modeling or as Google calls it, multi-channel funnels.

Since conversions are typically attributed to the medium driving the final visit, it’s hard to understand roles that may not play a part in generating the final conversion, but have yet assisted in bringing that conversion to fruition. Common media to assist in conversions include retargeting and social media. This type of report gives analysts a better understanding of the types of mediums integral to the final conversion.

3) What is the most important piece of advice you could give to a colleague starting with higher ed analytics?

In addition to my age old advice to “track everything,” it’s really important to make sure all your clients understand the data.

Without a full team of disciplines behind you (marketing managers, admissions, PR, schools), you may begin to find your insights are becoming non-actionable. Schedule 101s and take the time to go over the reports and action items. This will help each team member gain a better understanding of data metrics and how powerful they can be to increase overall site engagement and conversions.

He has also been teaching a 4-week course on analytics for higher ed since September 2011. Last but not least, Joshua has the reputation to eat Google Analytics report for breakfast, lunch and dinner

In this 3-question interview, Joshua tells us about his biggest success story with analytics, favorite tool and a great tip you can use.

1) What is your biggest win using analytics?

Recently, I looked closely at a program that needed some additional leads. Using analytics, I could see that some sources were working much better at bringing traffic, while other sources were not working as expected. This made it easier to see the holes that needed to be filled, as well as new SEO opportunities.

2) What is your favorite analytics tool? Why is it so useful in your higher ed job?

One of my favorite segments is one where I segment by topic pages and keywords. For instance, if I am wanting to examine how the homeland security program is doing online, I might segment by users that come to the website from a search for “homeland security” or visited the homeland security pages. This lets me see how the pages are performing, as well as if there are other pages on the site (possibly outside of homeland security) that are important to this set of users. This might give me useful information for changing my navigation, internal linking, or copy.

3) What is the most important piece of advice you could give to a colleague starting with higher ed analytics?

It is very common for people that are new to analytics to use aggregate data and think that it is enough. In reality, it doesn’t tell you much at all.

My biggest piece of advice would be to define exactly what you want to find out, then look at the relevant data. This is often easier said than done, but tools such as Advanced Segments can make it much easier to get this data.

At UNL, Seth coordinates a comprehensive web analytics strategy. He also works, as an associate consultant for Noel-Levitz, with clients across the country on digital strategies for recruitment, retention and measurement through web analytics.

In this 3-question interview, Seth tells us about his biggest success story with analytics, favorite tool and a great tip you can use.

1) What is your biggest win using analytics?

One of latest wins involved a client’s frustration with limited conversions from online advertisements.

Slicing data from both analytics and adwords we were able to better define both the audience segment and the goal expectations, allowing for more qualified visitors and more engaging content and actions.

This provided a larger inquiry pool which will hopefully translate to more enrollments.

2) What is your favorite analytics tool? Why is it so useful in your higher ed job?

Hands down, the goal reporting. Hence, the reason it’s the topic of my presentation. With goals, you can better provide context and answer your analytics questions.

3) What is the most important piece of advice you could give to a colleague starting with higher ed analytics?

Don’t try to compare your data with someone else’s data.

I spent too much time in my first analytics adventures trying to match my data with other institutions, or use these as a benchmark. In the end, I realized the only important thing is my site, and what I can do to make it better.

Analytics is all about reaching my goals, not comparing my site to another site.

She is the web strategist and Analytics guru on the University of Vermont’s central web team. Tatjana is a also graduate of the Analytics course offered by Higher Ed Experts. She manages central Analytics reports and teaches campus workshops on leveraging Analytics for improving departmental websites.

In this 3-question interview, Tatjana tells us about her biggest success story with analytics, favorite tool and a great tip you can use.

1) What is your biggest win using analytics?

I am finding that analytics now plays an important role in nearly every web project our office undertakes. In fact, analytics is crucial in helping determine our project priorities. Our recent responsive redesign project was able to get off the ground quickly due to compelling reports on rising mobile traffic generated from analytics data. Analytics is also playing a key role in helping us prioritize departmental redesigns allowing us to identify and address sites with low conversion rates and engagement levels.

2) What is your favorite analytics tool? Why is it so useful in your higher ed job?

I admit to a particular obsession with goal conversions, but I really get excited when I am able to mashup multiple metrics and produce a visual picture of how an area of the site performs over time. Dashboards can be great for that.

3) What is the most important piece of advice you could give to a colleague starting with higher ed analytics?

Gather the most complete set of data that you can from the onset.

When we started with analytics, we had many different analytics accounts controlled by many different people on campus. We now apply one master account to most of the institutional sites (deployed and hosted) while allowing additional accounts for units, if desired. Additionally, it is important to devise and implement a strategy for event and campaign tracking (pdf, video interactions, likes, email, etc.) early on establishing intuitive naming conventions. Only after tackling these two areas can you hope to have all the data and insight necessary to measure how the entire website is performing over time.

In this 3-question interview, Rebecca tells us about her biggest success story with analytics, favorite tool and a great tip you can use.

1) What is your biggest win using analytics?

The recognition that in a Google world, every page is the home page. Through analytics we affirmed over 10 years ago that each of the pages in our news media site were landing pages that were equal to, if not more important than the home page of that site.

So with that finding in mind, how does that influence the design of individual releases and what elements are placed as “next steps?”

2) What is your favorite analytics tool? Why is it so useful in your higher ed job?

Google Analytics Events. Plain and simple.

www.buffalo.edu is an information-providing site whose primary business goals are deepening relationships and “people-moving”. Our success is not always driven by conversions (buy this, fill out this form) and driving web visitors to the page is not enough.

With Google Analytics Events, I can see what elements within the page motivated our web visitors, what captured their interest next.

Like our peers, our overall domain is managed by multiple site owners. If I know that a page on www.buffalo.edu sent 15% of its traffic as a “find out more about this” to a UB department, we did a great job. And, I can tell our partners that 30% of the traffic we drove to their site was from target markets we are prioritzing.

GA Events also help with managing usability. If I see that web visitors are not scrolling or clicking below a certain point, I can review the user interface for barriers to “scent of information” or visual indicators that prevent scrolling.

3) What is the most important piece of advice you could give to a colleague starting with higher ed analytics?

“Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.” –Albert Einstein

Go into any project with a clear vision of what really matters. And, use your instincts. Not everything you derive can be quantified.

In this 3-question interview, Amy tells us about her biggest success story with analytics, favorite tool and a great tip you can use.

1) What is your biggest win using analytics?

Before we started our homepage redesign project at the University ofChicago, we analyzed our metrics, using Crazy Egg, Google Analytics, and Facebook Insights. This is the first project I’ve worked on where I really saw users’ behavior influence every part of the process, from planning to design, content, and development.

I think this is especially vital in a University, where you can find yourself designing by committee; our users have a voice in our process now through analytics.

2) What is your favorite analytics tool? Why is it so useful in your higher ed job?

I love all the features in Crazy Egg.

We use it a lot to test sites shortly after they launch or before we’re starting a new redesign. It’s quick and very visual, giving you an overview of how people are behaving. If the project doesn’t have the time or budget for a lot of analytics work, Crazy Egg can provide a lot of data quickly.

3) What is the most important piece of advice you could give to a colleague starting with higher ed analytics?

I think it’s very important to make sure your Google Analytics account is set up properly, if that’s the tool you’re using.

We didn’t know what we were doing in 2007 and 2008, and we made the mistake of creating separate accounts for all of our sites rather than setting up our domain and subdomain tracking properly. We are currently in the process of migrating all these separate accounts into one, but had we known how to set up our accounts correctly in the beginning, we wouldn’t be in the midst of this time-consuming and very flawed process.

If you don’t know how to set up your analytics account correctly, find somebody who can guide you through the process.

Adrian’s fascination with social media analytics and influence metrics led him to leave his MSc. in Biochemistry and take a job with the Communications Directorate at the University of Ottawa as Online Community Specialist.

In this 3-question interview, Adrian tells us about his biggest success story with analytics, favorite tool and a great tip you can use.

1) What is your biggest win using analytics?

I’ve done some work comparing higher ed Twitter accounts and their Kred Outreach scores, which revealed we were leading in a large sample of post-secondary institutions.

Accompanied by additional data, this helped to emphasize the value of social media as a customer service tool.

2) What is your favorite analytics tool? Why is it so useful in your higher ed job?

PeopleBrowsr’s Playground has a great long-term search tool for Twitter that allows you to visualize keyword use several years back. While not as useful for research, TwitSprout’s seven-day scan for access to basic Twitter profile metrics is invaluable for measuring community change and account activity.

3) What is the most important piece of advice you could give to a colleague starting with higher ed analytics?

Be prepared to manage expectations regarding the lifetime of certain social media metrics you’re looking to use as benchmarks.

Third-party companies in the influence and ROI space rise and fall quickly and its always useful to have a backup plan for as many metrics as possible. Focus on metrics you could accept collecting data for manually over short periods of time if you need to make a tool transition.

In this 3-question interview, Alan tells us about his biggest success story with analytics, favorite tool and a great tip you can use.

1) What is your biggest win using analytics?

The single biggest win I’ve had using analytics at BCIT was an analysis of the impact our print course catalogue has on web traffic and registrations. We produce 3 catalogues a year, and distribute about 200,000 each time.

I created a detail-rich Excel chart combining pageview data from our online catalogue with course registration data from our enterprise data warehouse. I then added the dates for catalogue distribution, external advertising campaigns, and term registration starts to the chart.

The combined view of the data clearly showed gaps and opportunities in our existing approach. The analysis is now being used to inform a change in strategy.

2) What is your favorite analytics tool? Why is it so useful in your higher ed job?

I don’t have a single favourite, but I love reports that clearly show conversion rates and compare one work group to another.

Ultimately, I want web analytics to identify what’s working – or not working – and motivate change. There’s nothing quite like sharing reports between our various schools to fire up competitive instincts!

3) What is the most important piece of advice you could give to a colleague starting with higher ed analytics?

My first attempts at introducing web analytics at BCIT overwhelmed the folks I was trying to help. I tried creating custom annotated reports with specific recommendations. I tried email distribution of standard reports directly from Google Analytics. I tried regularly scheduled meetings….

What I’d recommend is to find the parts of your school’s operations that are highly motivated to pay attention to the insights web analytics provide.

1. Start with anyone responsible for advertising budgets, nurture a relationship, identify campaigns, tag your conversions, report on how well they’re doing.
2. Offer specific suggestions on how they can do even better.
3. Then, share the success stories.

By having specific examples of how your web analytics work has helped, you’ll tweak the interest of others, and you’ll generate the credibility needed to influence their decisions.