• Higher Education Consultants

• Partner to launch non-credit certificates

• Marketing and Recruitment partner

Today’s agenda

• The Website Benchmarking Initiative

• Results and observations

• Next Steps

No lack of marketing metrics

Average time on site

Pages per visit

Unique visitors

How many visitors

do I get each day?

Should I be

getting more

visitors?

Should I be

getting more

traffic from

search engines?

How many visits do

I get from search

engines?

How many pages

does each visitor

view?

Do visitors leave

too quickly?

Race toward Results

Research scope

3 years

21universities

34.5 million visits

Two areas of research

• Quarterly State of the Industry Trending Reports

• Visits, Visitors, Pageviews, Bounce rates, Traffic sources

• One-time Insights Reports

• Operating systems and browsers

• Mobile device traffic

• Search engine traffic

• Social media traffic

• Conversion rates

0K

15K

30K

45K

60K

Visits

2013

2012

2011

Visits increased each year

3.00

4.00

5.00

6.00

Pages per Visit

2013

2012

2011

Pages per visit decreased each year

50% OF VISITS RESULT IN A BOUNCE

Your Website

20.0%

30.0%

40.0%

50.0%

60.0%

Bounce Rate

2013

2012

2011

Pages per visit decreased each year

2010 2011 2012 20132014

(projected)

Desktop 98% 95% 89% 82% 75%

Mobile 2% 5% 8% 12% 16%

Tablet 0% 0% 4% 6% 9%

Tablet Mobile

Desktop

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%Mobile Device Usage

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat

Visits by Day of Week

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat

39%

40%

41%

42%

43%

44%

45%

46%

47%

Bounce Rate by Day of Week

12AM 2AM 4AM 6AM 8AM 10AM 12PM 2PM 4PM 6PM 8PM 10PM

Visits by Hour of the Day

Google 90%

Bing 5%

Yahoo 5%

Actual Visits to CE sites

Google 67%

Bing 18%

Yahoo 11%

Ask 3%

AOL 1%

Market Share

Source: Oct 2013 comScore data

Organic Search visitors bounce less than average

Paid Search Visitors bounce more than average

Industry Average

0%

25%

50%

75%

100%

Organic Search Paid Search

Search engine bounce rates

91% OF SOCIAL MEDIA VISITS TO CE WEBSITES COME FROM FACEBOOK

X

Our paid advertising sample

Combined data from 8 clients with a total

spend of $430,000 generating 384 million

impressions and 220,000 clicks

Inquiries Conversion

Rate Cost per

Inquiry

Bing Paid Search 706 4.7% $57.80

Facebook 676 1.1% $107.47

Google Display 1094 1.4% $76.46

Google Paid Search 3291 6.5% $61.07

LinkedIn 744 6.0% $44.63

Total 6511 3.0% $66.24

• Questions

Questions??

Chart Your Own Success!

• Create your own

benchmark

• Year over year data

• Differentiate “type of

data”

Making the Comparison

• Examine trends

• Examine

percentages

• Identify anomalies

“The price of light is less

than the cost of darkness”

- Arthur Nielsen

Join the Initiative!

• Questions

Questions??