When a visitor arrives at your educational institution's website, they perform a series of actions: clicking on CTAs, accessing menus, navigating between pages, watching videos, signing up for newsletters, among others.
All this movement can be monitored through Web Analytics tools, which capture quantitative and qualitative data from your website to offer a true X-ray of interactions between user and platform.
Based on this global analysis, your marketing team is able to analyze performance indicators and improve educational marketing actions, making them more effective.
Throughout this article, you will see what you can do from the data analysis to increase enrollment at your educational institution.
Here's what you can expect to find in this post:
Visitors: where do they come from?
And what do your visitors do in the meantime?
Keep reading!
Who are your visitors?
The first thing you will learn through Web Analytics is who the visitors to your educational institution's website are. This is because, when connecting a tool like Google Analytics to the website, it collects all possible types of information about the user.
Gender, age, city, device used, interests and engagement are some of the data presented so that you can carry out a detailed analysis of your educational institution's target audience and, based on this data analysis, improve your communication to impact those who really matter : your future students.
Visitors: where do they come from?
Every visitor who arrives at your educational institution's website comes from somewhere, right? It may be that he did a direct search for the institution or accessed a blog post on a social network.
There is also the possibility that he did a random search on Google and came across your website, without the direct intention of joining it. But as the site was well positioned with SEO strategies, the meeting was successful.
These are called traffic sources, and can be identified using Web Analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, which is the best known.
Knowing where your website visitors come from is the starting point for, for example, defining the marketing channels to be used in your digital strategies. This knowledge is also valuable for understanding the behavior of your potential students, that is, on which platforms they interact.
As visitors come, they go
Knowing the exit pages, that is, the pages on the website where people close the tab and stop browsing, is as important as knowing the landing pages (where visitors arrive).
By identifying which are the exit pages on your educational institution's website, you can compare them with the others and promote changes that make visitors stay longer. You can also decide to take a page offline or completely redesign it.
Before make a decision Regarding the pages of a website, it is advisable to carry out A/B tests, that is, to put two practically identical pages online, with just one different element, such as a CTA, to check which one performs better. After an analysis of the page with the best response from visitors, this one is chosen and the other ceases to exist.
And what do your visitors do in the meantime?
Between entering and leaving your educational institution's website, visitors browse through it. Using Web Analytics, we know which pages were visited and for how long; which links were accessed and which were not; which elements were clicked and which were not; and so on. Remember we said it was a real X-ray?
Well, by following the flow of behavior within your educational institution's website, you know what your visitors' interests are and what paths they tend to follow until conversion.
This way, it is possible to make your sales funnel compatible with the flow of pages accessed on the website and optimize the user experience, reducing conversion time. In other words, you eliminate barriers (unnecessary pages) so that the visitor becomes a lead more quickly.
Additionally, take a look at these related materials:
- Improve the results of your campaigns with data analysis!
- Data Analysis: really know your customer;
- What is data science and how is it applied in marketing?
While browsing, what do visitors consume?
If you thought about content, you’re right! Every visitor who arrives at an educational institution's website is looking for valuable content, whether to answer questions or decide on a career. It's up to your team to content marketing provide you with all the information possible.
The best part of this is that you can find out which content performs best, just by accessing a Web Analytics tool. This data analysis can increase enrollments as you publish exactly the content that your visitors are looking for, based on the insights extracted from the data analysis.
How do you get to conversion?
It is also possible to set goals and performance indicators to monitor the conversions made on the website, whether from visitors to leads or leads to students. More than knowing when and how conversions happen, you have the ability to know how long it takes a visitor to become a student and what path they take.
Therefore, your educational institution is able to understand in depth how online students behave and what steps are taken until they enroll. Based on this data analysis, your marketing team can replicate the experience for other students who have the same profile, scaling the number of enrollments.
To finish
The use of Web Analytics in education is the bridge between the educational institution and its future students, as it allows us to understand how they interact on the web and what they are looking for in terms of content and experience.
By performing data analysis and rigorously monitoring your educational institution's performance indicators, it becomes easier to guide marketing strategies towards the central objective, which is student recruitment.
Portugal