Central College Web marketing

For the month of October, we saw a decline in the number of visitors to our Web site compared with last month. We continue to see more traffic than we had last year at this time.

The admission site has seen roughly 500 visitors more than last year at this time. Unfortunately the Athletics, CCA and Alumni sites saw significantly less traffic. It is especially noticeable on the athletics site because it is the most popular content areas of our Web site.

Once again the department and pages Web sites see continued growth as more faculty, staff and students take advantage of their personal Web spaces. We also are seing moderate successes with our e-mail campaigns.

See the full report here.

We have continued to see growth in the traffic to our Web site with almost 55,000 unique visitors in September alone. As we continue to see a shift from traditional mediums of communication, the Web site is becoming front and center as a primary communication channel with various audiences of the college.

New this month, we have email stats from some of the email blasts we have done recently. After collecting this data, we are seeing some unique trends. Our parent group has confirmed that they should be known as “helicopter parents.” Roughly 30 percent of our alumni audience is reading the information we are sending to them. The targeted emails that CCA is doing are also being read which will prove to be especially helpful to their recruitment efforts since the two emails were related to applying.

The admission and CCA sites had significant growth in the last month. The alumni site, despite having homecoming/family weekend festivities in September, was down from last year but up from last month. The athletics site continues to be one of the most popular sections of the Web site with almost 2,000 more visitors than last year.

We have also added stats from the streaming video project that was recently launched. It is particularly encouraging to see that we had just shy of 700 viewers for the Wartburg football game. While volleyball doesn’t see quite the volume of viewers, we did have multiple parents at the game thank us for offering the broadcasts which is always nice.

See the full report here

School is starting to pickup and so is the traffic on the Web site. We see significantly more traffic than we did last year at this time with almost 8,500 more visitors. We are almost back to 2006 levels when we did a significant file clean-up on the Web server. With almost 46,000 unique visitors to our Web site every month, we continue to prioritize content to meet our marketing goals.

The admission area saw slightly more visitors than last year this time, as did Central College Abroad. The athletics site grew the most having just over 3,800 more unique visitors than they did last year at this time. We continue to seek new ways to drive traffic to our Web site.

It is also important to note that the use of our department Web sites is increasing. We continue to investigate new strategies on how best to maintain this section of our Web site while having a hands-off approach on content maintenance.

Also new this month is a heatmap of the homepage to help us understand how people are using the homepage of the Web site. Data was collected last week starting on Monday until we reached 5,000 visitors on the Web site.

See the full report here.

It’s time for the monthly analytics summary again! After 15 months of seeing traffic lower than 2006 levels, we finally surpassed our traffic levels from July 2006. What is even more exciting is that we had 7,669 more visitors this year than we did last year for the month of July.

All three of our focus areas (admission, alumni and Central College Abroad) continue to see more traffic than last year. While our focus areas are seeing more traffic, our non-focus areas like the student life section of the site are also seeing more traffic. Most notably, the campus life homepage saw 326 more visitors than the admissions homepage as students are beginning the transition to campus.

I posted last week on how we added a link to the department Web sites to the homepage of the Central College Web site. This didn’t significantly alter the amount of traffic to the departments Web site since it was only done a week ago, but we did not see such a drastic drop-off in the summer as we did last year. Since we added the link to the homepage we have only had 7 of 59 total visits from the Central Web site.

See the full report here.

Admission visits dropped off slightly this month as we are between recruiting cycles. This is consistent with the past two years of data however, the drop-off was more pronounced this year.

CCA visits continue to be slightly lower than last year. We are continuing the re-design process in hopes of improving the content and usability of this site, which will hopefully increase the traffic on the site.

The Alumni and Bulletin sites continue to be consistent with years past. Visits to the Bulletin site have dropped of significantly from last month, but I would expect to see visits rebound after the next issue of the Bulletin goes out.

Our department sites and student sites continue to grow. I would expect to see the departments site continue to grow as we add different areas of campus on this site.

The athletics site continues to see steady growth when compared to years past.

It is also important to note that our Facebook page has seen a significant number of new “fans.” Many of these new fans are our prospective students that will be attending Central this fall. On June 1, we had 254 fans and we currently have 349 fans. This further demonstrates the importance of using these social networks to promote the college.

See all the graphs and charts here: http://www.central.edu/awstats/dashboard.cfm