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:
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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.
As of July 2023, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) has officially replaced Universal Analytics, bringing significant changes to the way data is collected and analyzed. GA4 offers an event-based approach, allowing for more detailed tracking of user interactions, such as button clicks, video views, and file downloads.
In addition, it integrates more effectively with other Google platforms and offers enhanced machine learning capabilities to predict user behavior. These improvements are especially useful for educational institutions looking to better understand visitor behavior on their websites and optimize their digital marketing strategies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In addition to traditional Web Analytics, concepts such as Learning Analytics and Educational Data Mining have gained prominence in the education sector. These approaches involve the collection and analysis of educational data to understand and improve the teaching and learning process.
For example, it is possible to identify patterns of behavior that indicate a risk of school dropout or learning difficulties, allowing for more precise and personalized interventions. Recent studies highlight the potential of these techniques to improve pedagogical and administrative decision-making in educational institutions.
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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.
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.
Caption: Person analyzing performance graphs on a monitor, representing the use of web analytics for decision making.
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.
Summary: Web Analytics is an essential tool for educational institutions that want to increase enrollments, as it allows you to monitor the behavior of visitors on your website — from the source of traffic to the actions performed, such as clicks, time spent on your website, and conversions. With this data analysis, you can adjust content strategies, improve the user experience, identify pages with better or worse performance, and align the digital sales funnel with the student journey, optimizing results and boosting student recruitment.
Web Analytics is the process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data from your institution's website. It monitors visitors' behavior, revealing where they came from, which pages they accessed, how long they spent browsing, and what they did on the site, helping to improve student recruitment strategies.
With tools like Google Analytics 4, your institution can view information such as age, gender, location, interests, type of device used, interactions with videos, button clicks, and browsing behavior — all in an aggregated and anonymous way, in compliance with the LGPD.
The so-called “traffic sources” help identify which channels (Google searches, social networks, campaigns, direct access, etc.) bring in the most visitors. With this, your team can invest in the most effective channels to attract potential students and optimize marketing investments.
By understanding how visitors navigate the website, what content they consume and where they convert, it is possible to improve the sales funnel, adjust low-performing pages, reinforce the best content and reduce barriers to enrollment, increasing the number of enrolled students.
Exit pages are those where visitors leave the website. Analyzing these pages helps to understand why the user did not continue on the journey. With A/B testing and optimizations, it is possible to keep the visitor engaged for longer, increasing the chances of conversion.
Yes. Web Analytics allows you to identify which posts, videos or pages have the most access, the longest dwell time and engagement. This data is essential to direct the production of content that truly attracts and impacts the institution's target audience.
You can set up goals in Google Analytics to track actions like form completion, newsletter signups, or enrollments. This allows you to measure the effectiveness of each step of the user journey, as well as predict behavior based on past patterns.