Conseil scolaire de district Centre-Sud-Ouest web analytics

Posted on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 9:52 AM by Simon Smith  |  Comments (0)

Challenge

The Conseil scolaire de district Centre-Sud-Ouest (CSDCSO) manages the French-language public schools in the central southwestern region of Ontario. Currently, the board oversees 38 schools in a territory that stretches from Windsor and Sarnia in the south to Barrie and Penetanguishene in the north. Over 7,000 students attend CSDCSO schools.

To support French language education throughout its territory, the CSDCSO needed to increase registrations. To achieve this in a way that was both cost-effective and compelling, the board had to determine its most effective marketing channels. To do this, it needed to monitor the performance of its website and determine where its marketing dollars would be best spent.

In 2006, the CSDCSO began to upgrade its existing website, recognizing that, even in a time of tight budgets and reduced spending, the potential for using the site as a communication and marketing tool to both new and existing students justified the investment. Although the CSDCSO had run both on- and offline marketing campaigns (aided by community partnerships and government-sponsored initiatives), the board still needed to address some very real challenges, including:

  • Determining which marketing channels would bring the highest return on investment and avoiding investment in initiatives or partnerships that might not yield results
  • Justifying marketing spend to trustees and other stakeholders with concrete, tangible results
  • Focusing on its regional marketing efforts and assessing its penetration throughout its territory to determine key areas for targeted student and staff recruitment efforts
  • Assessing which sections of the website were best serving student, parent and staff needs and deciding how to optimize under-performing pages
  • Tracking key website activities that had direct relevance to return on investment—such as downloads of registration forms—rather than just generic metrics like “hits”
  • Gathering accurate website performance data through the installation of web analytics tools that, despite prior investments in website upgrades, had yet to be added

Solution

Although the CSDCSO was headed in the right direction, the board needed help to create an end-to-end reporting plan to ensure future marketing decisions would be firmly rooted in hard data and based on past successes. To assist, we implemented a comprehensive system, enabling the board’s marketing team to determine which web marketing initiatives were realizing a robust return on investment.

Specifically, we:

  • Conducted an audit of the CSDCSO through personal interviews to fully understand the board’s objectives—and how well its web marketing efforts were supporting them
  • Created a strategy defining key website metrics relevant to the board’s objectives and our plan for installing and configuring an analytics platform to measure and report them
  • Installed Google Analytics in the CSDCSO’s website content management system and customized tracking code to measure key performance goals such as registration form downloads
  • Configured profiles in Google Analytics, filtering irrelevant data and ensuring that the data the board received was relevant and actionable
  • Educated key stakeholders in interpreting analytics data, ensuring the tool was usable and useful and helping to establish a culture of data-driven decision making

Results

Installing Google Analytics in mid-2009 has already given the CSDCSO relevant, actionable data to optimize marketing performance, including:

  • More robust return on investment data
    The CSDCSO has done some on- and offline promotions, and there are government-funded programs designed to highlight the board’s offering. With analytics data, the board now has details on which initiatives are working and which aren’t. For example, while government websites aren’t driving a large amount of overall traffic, they’re top referral partners for visitors who download registration forms, and have the highest conversion rate of any referral site. This important source of traffic would be missed with a simple focus on hits or page views.
  • Greater understanding of qualified traffic sources
    Too often, website success is measured simply in terms of visits or impressions, without thought to where visitors are coming from or how they engage with site content once they’ve arrived. With specific goals for the website—such as encouraging registration form downloads—the CSDCSO now has data about where qualified traffic comes from, allowing the board to optimize its website and marketing not just for traffic, but for performance that actually matters to its objectives. For instance, one referral source with a high conversion rate is a government site providing information for new immigrants, giving the CSDCSO a prospective new partner.
  • Potential areas for expansion
    As with referral partners, analytics data also revealed differences between top cities for website traffic and top cities for registration form downloads. These differences provide information for geographically targeted student recruitment campaigns that are likely to be most effective. And while the vast majority of visitors are from Canada, there are small contingents from France, South Korea and Belgium, all of which indicate some level of foreign traction, and an opportunity to reach a powerful secondary market for foreign students.
  • More information on site usage
    After the home page, a website page illustrating the board’s territory and listing its schools is the most popular choice for external visitors. Such information allows the board to create linking and promotional strategies to drive registrations from high-profile pages. The board can also determine which content items are under-performing to avoid investing in content that fails to engage visitors.
  • More detailed data to inform website capabilities
    One interesting observation is that many visitors to the board’s French site use Google Translator and other online tools to convert key pages into English. As well, 38% of visitors had their browsers set to English, indicating that more comprehensive English resources on the website would be a worthwhile investment.

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