New School Analytics

When planning and organizing a national conference that relies entirely on online registrations make sure you include a few bright minds with web analytics and website optimization skills in your planning team. Doing so not only provides you with a better understanding of the dynamics of the registration process (how often do they come to the website, before they register? Do they actually look at our conference content when registering? Which content is most crucial? etc.) but also offers you the opportunity to work on optimizing your website during the conference registration process.

With those simple goals in mind – find out how people are interacting with the website and how can we improve the registration process to have more people sign up – a small team of the Hawaii-Pacific Evaluation Association (Full disclosure: I am the part of this web analytics team and was acting Secretary at the time) began to evaluate their own non-profit website in three straightforward steps:

1. Understand process measures (visitors counts, traffic sources and page-views)
2. Set Macro (the important big stuff) and Micro (the small but still important stuff) goals for your website and measure your conversion rate (how many visitors out of all your visitors achieve this goal/do what you want them to do)
3. Optimize mission crucial parts of the website Read the rest of this entry »