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Google Analytics: Migrating to GA4

You’ve probably heard that Google’s Universal Analytics (UA) – the version of Google Analytics (GA) that so many of us have used and loved for so long – will sunset on July 1, 2023.  That means as of July 1 next year, UA will stop processing hits. Like it or not, the new version, Google Analytics 4 (GA4), is looming on our horizon.

If you’re like me, you’ve been meaning to begin contemplating and planning your migration to GA4, but there’s always been something more pressing to do. With less than one year to go, I’ve finally gotten around to thinking about the migration. Following are a few thoughts. Please bear in mind that this is not a GA4 tutorial; there are plenty of great tutorials out there. These are just tips for a less chaotic migration.

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What’s Taking So Long?

You may have noticed a hiatus in my posting. I’m certain you’re not losing sleep over it, but do rest assured that more posts are in the works. Future topics will include:

  • Balancing Authenticity with Authority in Higher Ed Comms
  • Moments of Truth in the Higher Ed Experience
  • Differentiation for Your Institution
  • The Long and the Short of It for Higher Ed Marketing
  • Aspects of Content Strategy for Higher Ed

Be sure to check back!

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Making Sense of Metrics, KPIs and Insights

How much importance do marketers place on data and metrics? Try Googling “marketing metrics” – when I did, about 317,000,000 results were reported.

Clearly there’s a lot of focus on metrics, and for very good reason: they are essential to effective marketing. And who doesn’t love a spiffy dashboard, with numbers, graphs, and red or green arrows? Modern marketers can easily become awash in data, with a proliferation of dashboards and reports. Speaking as a recovering dashboard addict, I know the feeling.

Data is not an end in itself, and brings value only insofar as it fuels optimization of processes toward defined business/organizational goals. For those of us in marketing, conversion rate optimization, user experience and related endeavors – yes, even in higher education – I think the best understanding of data is one that is user- or audience-centric: data is a representation of user/audience preferences or behavior.

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User Intent is Key to Understanding User Journeys

User intent has been “a thing” in the realm of SEO for quite a while. For years, Google has made it clear that the aim of their AI is not only to understand search queries, but to understand the intent that lies behind those queries: not what a user types or says necessarily, but what they want. And the algorithms do, indeed, seem to be getting ever-better at achieving that understanding.

However, user intent is not limited to the realm of search. For the purposes of broader marketing communications, user intent can map quite meaningfully onto the venerable marketing model of AIDA (Awareness > Interest > Desire > Action) or even the simpler ACA model (Awareness > Consideration > Action). Either will help provide insight into where users are in their journey as a prospective customer or student. Have they only just learned of your brand or offering? Or they further along in that journey and seeking details? Are they showing interest in converting?

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Email in 2021: Prepare for What is to Come

2020 was something of a boom year for email, with people sheltering at home and spending more time online. It seems that many industries/verticals saw an increase in email open rates, and click or click-to-open rates, and higher education was among them . For example, according to benchmarks from Campaign Monitor, open rates for higher education increased from ~23% in 2019 to ~34% in 2020, with click-to-open rates showing a smaller increase.

For what it’s worth, I’m never sure what to make of such benchmarks for higher ed, we send so many different kinds of emails to so many different audiences. Do the above numbers reflect only external comms, or also internal comms? Do they include admissions and enrollment? Undergraduate and graduate? Alumni and advancement? Event invitations? Solicitations? Newsletters? My guess is that they may include all of the above, which really limits their utility.

But I digress.

For all the disruption brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, email engagement rates saw a boost in 2020, and I can confirm that our college saw increased rates of engagement in our admissions and advancement email communications.

So, let the good times roll? Probably not.

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Messy Middles and Customer Journeys

A recent Marketing Week article really caught my attention. The author proposes dealing with the “messy middle” of your marketing funnel by examining probabilities of various paths through your content. What struck me – and forgive me if this is self-congratulatory – is that I’ve actually been working toward a very similar concept, albeit specifically regarding website content.

As has been repeatedly lamented, the neat and tidy marketing funnel has been edged out by the customer journey. For website content this has been driven largely by the evolution of search and its increasing focus on satisfying particular user intent, but also by social media. Indeed, your efforts to design a step-by-step top-down funnel, from awareness to interest to engagement to consideration to conversion, goes largely out the window if people can enter the funnel at any step. And they do enter at any step, especially your website content. And they do want to create their own journey through your content.

For marketers, this means your job is to facilitate each customer’s journey, making it easy for them to find content that meets their needs, while simultaneously shepherding them toward conversion.

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