Three Analytics to Monitor on Your District Website
Your school district website is one of the most powerful tools your district has to engage parents, students, and staff. Rally’s websites received millions of visitors last year. But how do you know if your website is effectively engaging visitors? You should have access to some kind of analytics on your website. Your provider might have a dashboard built right into the Content Management System or you can add Google Analytics to your website. Google Analytics is free to use, and just requires the addition of some code onto your website. Here’s three analytics to monitor to track engagement on your school district website.
New & Returning Visitors
The easiest way to measure engagement is to see the number of new and returning visitors to your website. You’ll likely see a steady number of new visitors as parents see if your district is a good fit for their child. But the real sign if you’re effectively engaging your visitors is in the number of returning visitors. If people have a good experience on your website (it’s easy to navigate, and they can find what they’re looking for), they’ll keep coming back to your website when they need more information. If they have a poor experience, they’ll call your office or send an email rather than go through the hassle of navigating through your website.
Typically, you want to see your number of returning visitors at 30%. This shows that visitors are finding what they’re looking for and view your website as a trusted source of information. If your number of returning visitors is below 30%, take a look at your website: is it easy to navigate? Do you have the seasonal content front and center? Put the content that’s most important to parents in high-visibility areas to ensure it’s easily accessible.
Read More about Engaging Parents
Top 5 Pages
Take a look at the pages visitors are going to most on your website. Your homepage will likely be the top page, but you can learn a lot about what other pages are popular with your audience. This is a great way to see what’s important to your web visitors, and ensure that your content is meeting their needs.
Are there any pages that should be in the top 5 that aren’t? If a page isn’t getting the traffic it should, review its placement in your website’s menu. Would parents know to look for it here? Does the page name accurately reflect the page’s content? If you can add a link to it on your homepage, that can be a great way to direct more traffic.
Take a look at the popular search items on your website too! It’s a great idea to monitor frequent searches, you can add content that visitors want! Don’t have access to popular searches on your website? Here's what parents were searching for on Rally websites.
Acquisition
How are visitors finding your website? Your acquisition stats are a great way to learn how users navigate to your website. The options here can vary but usually include direct (users type in the web address directly), social networks (clicked on a link from a social media platform such as Facebook), search engine (clicked on a result from Google), or referral (clicked on a link on another website, such as a school).
It’s great to know where visitors are coming from. This helps you to see what other platforms your visitors are active on, and how they might engage with your brand on those platforms. These metrics are also great to track the effectiveness of your other outreach initiatives - you can see if you’re getting clicks through social media or email campaigns.
Analytics are a powerful tool, but it’s easy to get overwhelmed at the amount of data you can review. Keeping an eye on the number of new and returning visitors, your top 5 pages, and visitor acquisition can be a great way to measure engagement on your school district website and identify any areas for improvement.