Your school website is an investment. It is a tool to inform prospective parents, keep current parents and students up to date on what is happening around the school, and a whole lot more. The problem is that many schools are unaware of how they should be measuring their school website’s ROI. After all, most schools are not generating huge sums of cash (if any) from their website.
This means that your ROI needs to be measured in different ways. That’s what we want to look at here.
What Does School Website ROI Actually Mean?
Your school website return on investment (ROI), essentially looks at whether your website is accomplishing what the site sets out to do. For example, if the goal of your website is to encourage admissions, then you will be looking at whether admissions go up as a result of your website.
Many schools are measuring their school website metrics incorrectly. They look at the number of page views that their site gets. This is somewhat of a ‘vanity’ metric. Sure, a high number of page views looks amazing, but if those views are not translating to a ROI, does it really matter how many people are looking at your website?
The Five KPIs Every School Should Track
While there are a variety of statistics that a school could be tracking, we believe that five are more important than anything else. This is because these KPIs indicate that a parent may be considering the admissions process for their child.
Prospectus Downloads
Parents want to learn more about a school before they even consider continuing with the admissions process. Generally speaking, a parent will only download a school prospectus if they are giving serious consideration to a school. It is one of the biggest earliest indicators of intent, and if a high number of website visitors are downloading the school prospectus, then the website is converting well.
Schools will want to analyse downloads of the prospectus over time. If downloads are increasing, then the website is doing something right.
Admissions Enquiry Form Completions
After downloading the school’s prospectus, the parent may wish to learn more about the admissions process, and maybe will want to reach out to the school. Any quality school website will have an admissions enquiry form in place. Monitor how many people complete these forms after downloading a prospectus. This will give you a conversion rate.
Open Day Bookings
Perhaps the strongest signal that a school website is converting visitors is open day bookings. This is because booking an open day is something that requires ‘effort’. People don’t book open days on a whim. It is because they are seriously considering a school.
Open day bookings can be tracked via a landing page, something your website developer will be more than happy to set up.
Contact Clicks
Track when people seek out contact information. Phone numbers, email, or WhatsApp. This indicates that a person wishes to get in touch with the school. This, again, is something that requires effort. It is more than just browsing.
Returning Visitors
Finally, keep tabs on returning visitors. This likely means people are carrying out research on the platform.
Which Pages Should Schools Monitor Most Closely?
While it is a good idea to have an overall view of how your school’s website is performing, there are some pages that you’ll want to focus on the most. These are your ‘high value’ pages i.e. the ones that could potentially lead to new admissions for the school.
Admissions Pages
Any page related to admissions needs to be tracked heavily. This means key information about how the admissions process works, details about the school, etc. This will often be your site visitors first port of call.
Prospectus Pages
As we mentioned previously, prospectus downloads, or page views, indicate that a person wishes to know more about what the school offers, likely because they are considering sending their child to the school.
Open Day Pages
Always track open day pages. Schools will want to pay special attention to who books an open day via the website. Anybody booking an open day is close to offering a ROI, as people tend only to book open days if they are in the final decision making process.
Sixth Form or Nursery Pages
Nursery pages and sixth form pages need to be heavily tracked. It is at this stage that parents are often considering more about where their child attends school. Nursery pages are often a ‘big’ one for schools, since most students will join at nursery level.
Fees Pages
If your school has fees, they need to be clearly listed. Parents will use this as part of the decision making process. If you’re seeing very few people continue with the admissions process after viewing the fees, this could indicate that either the fees are too expensive, or not clearly labelled.
How to Measure Website Conversions
A good website developer will implement multiple methods in a website to track data. Conversion tracking is rather simple. You compare the number of website visitors vs the number of people completing a set action. The higher the number of people that complete the action, the better your website is performing.
We recommend that schools track the following, as all are indicators that a person is serious about the admission process:
- Prospectus download completed
- Open day booking submitted
- Admissions form sent
- Contact button clicked
Turning Website Data Into Marketing Decisions
Collecting data isn’t enough. Schools should work with their data to improve how their website performs.
Improve Low-Converting Pages
Any pages that seem to be low-converting may need to be changed. Schools must decide why a page may be low converting. For example, it may not provide the right information, or there may be no obvious way to continue with the conversion. Many schools will engage in split testing. This means developing two versions of a page, and seeing which one converts the best. They continue with this split testing, hopefully producing higher and higher converting pages.
Identify High-Performing Campaigns
Use your tracked stats to determine which advertising campaign works best for your school. Invest more in this campaign, or work out why others are underperforming.
Optimise Open Day Promotion
Not many open day conversions? Then there may be something wrong with the open day promotion, marketing, or the pages that lead to open day bookings. Determine what may be causing the short fall and establish a campaign that seeks to boost open day conversions. Optimise marketing campaigns to really focus on the ‘benefits’ of attending an open day.
Refresh Popular Content
Content that is popular and converting highly should be regularly ‘refreshed’. Do not have out of date information on your website.
Common School Website Analytics Mistakes
Many schools, most of whom are new to website analytics, often track the wrong information. Let’s run you through the common pitfalls.
Focusing Only on Traffic
Don’t measure just website traffic. In the grand scheme of things, traffic doesn’t matter too much. What matter is how much of that traffic you are converting. Remember, most of your website traffic won’t convert. Most won’t care about your school all that much. They may have landed on your website randomly. This is why you need to track conversions instead. Use website traffic as a tool, but don’t rely on using it to determine how well your site is performing. You could have 1,000,000 website views and 0 conversions. This wouldn’t mean your site is performing well, right?
Ignoring Mobile Users
Mobile users are just as important as those visiting from their computers. Don’t forget to track them.
Not Tracking Enquiries
Many schools will track the number of people admitted to their school, but this should not be the only thing you track. Also track enquiries. This indicates somebody is interested in the school. If enquiries are high and admission conversions low, then this indicates there could be a problem with how enquiries are handled.
Measuring Vanity Metrics
This means useless information, such as website traffic. Basically, any metric that won’t give you important information about how your website is converting.
How Often Should Schools Review Website Performance?
Ideally, there should be some form of performance review every single week. We recommend the following:
- Every week keep tabs on the number of enquiries and open day bookings. If there is a fall over the course of a few weeks, try to work out why. It is better to fix the problem sooner as opposed to later.
- Monthly check whether website conversions are trending up or down. Remember, there will be some parts of the year where conversions will be naturally higher, often around the time admissions open up.
- Termly: check how your school admissions are. See if any parts of the admission process on your website are performing poorly. Fix the problem.
- Yearly will be your ROI review. See how things are shaping up for admissions via your website, and whether the website is generating you a return on your investment. If everything goes to plan, it should.
How School Website Analytics Supports Admissions Growth
Your school’s website should have commercial value. It needs to work to bring in admissions which, ultimately, means more money from the school. Properly analysing your website’s statistics can lead to a boost in enquiries, open day attendance, and to properly inform marketing decisions.
We highly recommend that you use a CMS for schools, such as ÌÇÐÄVlog´«Ã½, which have in-built reporting and conversion tracking, allowing you to always stay on top of how your school’s website is performing for you.
