Chris Walker, vice president of Interact Communications, is an award-winning marketer and digital leader who has nearly 20 years of agency experience with a focus on web development, digital strategy, and media.
In this episode, Chris and Cheryl discuss the evolving world of digital marketing and how colleges can utilize the latest tools to maximize results.
Chris Walker, vice president of Interact Communications, is an award-winning marketer and digital leader who has nearly 20 years of agency experience with a focus on web development, digital strategy, and media.
In this episode, Chris and Cheryl discuss the evolving world of digital marketing and how colleges can utilize the latest tools to maximize results.
Announcer: 0:00
Marketing for community colleges is tough. But after 20 years of working solely with two year technical and community colleges, we've learned a few things. Now we want to share them with you. Welcome to the Community College Marketing MasterClass Podcast. If you're looking for expert insights from industry experts, you've come to the right place. Bringing more than two decades of marketing and communications experience, please welcome your host and Interact Communications President Cheryl Broom.
Cheryl Broom: 0:29
Hi, welcome to the Community College Marketing MasterClass. I am super excited about today's guest, Chris Walker, who has decades of experience setting up digital campaigns. And, yes, by decades, I do mean decades. He was actually setting up campaigns and doing digital marketing back when it all started, and he has seen it evolve into what it is today. On another note, right now, we're right in the middle of running our media preferences survey, and we have dozens of community colleges across the country participating this spring. And if you haven't heard about Media preferences tool before, head on over to media press dot com and take a look. The survey gives you insights into what, exactly students want, how they learn about your college, what type of marketing they consume, how you could do better at retaining them if they read the newspaper. If they like Q R codes. Hint, hint. They don't. Anyway, it's a fantastic survey. If you want to give it to your students, let me know, and I could explain how it works. Or if you just want access to the national database, we're gonna have about 40,000 student responses in there. You can get access to that database, so reach out to me. Hit me up we'll tell you how it works. I'd love to show you a demo. I think you'll be really impressed.
Cheryl Broom: 3:29
So let's talk about today's podcast and the guest, Chris Walker. Chris is a digital marketing expert, he's an award winning marketer and a digital leader who's had nearly 20 years of agency experience, and he's focused on Web development, digital strategy and media. He's worked with a number of amazing organizations across the country, and we're really fortunate to have him working right here at Interact Communications as our vice president. So I asked Chris to come onto the show because I'm asked a lot by our community college clients and just by colleges across the country how to set up landing pages, how to get campaigns going, how to track success. And that's exactly where Chris's expertise lies. So for those of you that are new to the digital marketing arena, you're gonna learn a lot. And for those of you who have been involved for years, or who have your own expertise. You're still going to get some great nuggets from Chris things that you can start doing right away to improve the quality of your own digital marketing. So I think you're gonna learn a lot from Chris, and I'm really excited to welcome him to the show.
Cheryl Broom: 4:40
All right, Chris, thanks so much for being here today.
Chris Walker: 4:42
My pleasure.
Cheryl Broom: 4:43
Now you are Vice President and Interact Communications. Find out you tell us a little bit about what you do for the company and how you got here.
Chris Walker: 4:52
All right. Well, I started working with Interact kind of via proxy with you. We were building lots of websites for the career education initiative, and at that time it was evident that the company needed a stronger presence around their digital campaigns. And so that's kind of how I came on board. Was managing digital, taken on clients and then also managing what development projects. So now, in the past year, I think I'm actually coming up on my one year, which is coming up soon, February 15th I think? So another couple weeks. Now, I manage key accounts. I manage the account executive team and I'm still overseeing our digital marketing as well as our development projects. So essentially A E plus all things digital.
Cheryl Broom: 5:41
And you've had really quite a very digital background, not just working with community colleges, but working in a wide variety of sectors.
Announcer: 5:50
Yeah. You know, I started in digital back in 2008 working in pretty much strictly S E O project management, where we worked across a lot of different types of industries. And what was good about that, is it let me learn how to really research a demographic like by just diving into their key words. So I've marketed everything from brain surgery to maternity jeans, to candy, to you know, legal services attorney services like you name it, we've covered just about every demographic you could think of. And a lot of people, you know, 2008 doesn't seem like that long ago, but it's hard to remember that there wasn't even really Facebook yet. It was still the newcomer on the block. They were brand new. We were actually doing social media campaigns for MySpace. And I thought about this example earlier as we were getting ready for this one of the first social media campaigns we ever ran. We did custom MySpace html for a rapper named Ice Block out of Virginia and you know, it just it just goes to show you how quickly things change and you know how the tactics changed but been doing it for a long time.
Cheryl Broom: 7:03
I know you also worked for a company that sold baby products online.
Chris Walker: 7:08
Yeah, way back when that's pre y two k? No, no, it was after 2000. Very, very early. Two thousands. We were the second or third largest baby product Internet website at that time. So we sold cribs and car seats and, kinda like the larger ticket items. Set up uh, fulfillment for diapers. But it was really kind of like the larger things. But at that time, everything was html. Everything was drop ship, and that's how we started. In pay per click, we actually ran pay per click on what used, I don't even know if it's still there is called Overture. That's before Yahoo and Google and all that stuff. But yeah, babies having dot com shot out to John Carter.
Cheryl Broom: 7:49
So from, from babies to brain surgery to meat because you worked with a meat company.
Chris Walker: 7:59
Allen Brothers. Yes, yeah, ran a lot of media For Allen Brothers. It's mail order prime steaks.
Cheryl Broom: 8:02
And now to community colleges. Any similar threads you see, in the digital marketing between all of those?
Chris Walker: 8:10
There are always similarities across campaigns. You know the tools that you have to reach a demographic. The scaffolding is pretty similar. It's just kind of who you go after and how you go after them that changes. So the tools have evolved. But there's actually a lot of similarities. You know, you might use a combination of pay per click and SEO and social media targeting and, you know, digital media buys and then, of course, getting in traditional with television and other things. So there's a lot of similarities. It's just with the community college. It's the first time that I've ever worked in capacity where our demographic was quite a bit younger, which I actually like, because we get to use some of the cool new tactics and we get to evolve and stay on top of what's new in hip with the students. So you know, there's quite a bit of similarities. It's just the meat and potatoes of the key words and the messages and the things that really differ quite a bit.
Cheryl Broom: 9:06
One of the reasons I wanted you on the program is I've been thinking a lot about the curse of knowledge. And the curse of knowledge is when you've been doing something for so long or you've been teaching something, that you forget how difficult it is for people who are just learning it.
Chris Walker: 9:23
Sure.
Cheryl Broom: 9:23
So you have this assumption, you know, even in marketing we throw out like PPC, SEO, metrics..
Chris Walker: 9:27
Yes.
Cheryl Broom: 9:28
Like this is nothing but a walk in the park. And it's so it just is too much for people to handle. They don't understand just the basic foundational building blocks. And now that you're as old as the Internet.
Chris Walker: 9:44
Me and Al Gore, baby,
Cheryl Broom: 9:47
I thought gosh. This would be a great opportunity to really help colleges go back to the beginning of what they need to even get involved in the digital marketing space and just explore some of the important decisions they could make just set themselves up for success. So with that, I thought, Gosh, what is the first thing you have to pay attention to before you book advertising? What do you have to do?
Chris Walker: 10:10
Yeah, So I think that the important thing to remember with digital marketing, particularly as you've kinda got two different postures, right? There is push marketing. And then there's pull marketing, right? So pull marketing is you know, somebody is out there actively looking for something, and you're attempting to capture that, that that prospect at that time. And so when we think about pull marketing, I'm usually thinking about search, right? So somebody is in your demographic or in your service area. If somebody is searching online for a community college term or a program term or something, it's really a good place, where for you to be there to collect that traffic. And you can do that through a combination of pay per click and you know, S E O optimization. The pay per click gives you the ability to bid on keyword terms and pay for those placements. Now a very small percentage of people actually end up clicking on those, but the ones that do are very motivated to do something in that moment. So as we start to look out into what are the tactics we want to go after? I think it's important that search is usually kind of first on the list, right? That's the pull. We know they're interested. We know they're looking for something, and so that's probably usually gonna be the best traffic that you can get for the money that you spend. Pay per click, also, you know, it lets you target a lot of keyword terms, right? So even if you don't have individual pages for specific keywords thinking about like a SEO strategy, they want, you know, one or two key words per page. Maybe you don't have all that site infrastructure. You know, the paperclip lets you bid on lots and lots and lots of terms, so that's that's really first. And then there's push marketing. Push marketing is, you know, you select your demographic, whether it's ages, genders, zip code, your college service area and you go out and you push a message out to everybody. Similar to broadcast, similar to radio. The digital is the same way. People may not be necessarily in a posture, at that moment, to engage with college, but they might see a message or they might see something on that peaks interests. So having that push marketing gives you a brand push, it gives you the ability to reach people en masse on a much larger scaled in search might. Right? So the combination of those two things and balancing those, I think, is a good framework through which to start to look at how you're gathering the traffic that's available in your area.
Cheryl Broom: 12:52
Great, So let's talk about some products, you know, search engine marketing, the push type marketing. But what about on the colleges side? You know, we see so many colleges quick to want to jump into booking ads, but their website, it hasn't been updated since you know, 2008 or they don't have a landing pages. Well, how important is the website itself? And do you need to develop landing pages for your campaign? Or should you just rely on your home page? What do you think works the best?
Chris Walker: 13:24
That's a really good question, and it seems like more and more colleges are becoming aware that they really do need landing pages the short answer is, you know, if resources are available, I would always recommend having a landing page for a campaign. A lot of people think that the advertisement and the segmentation is going to do the heavy lifting of converting the user, right. It's so whether they fill out an application or a form or whatever, they file their FAFSA whatever the conversion is, often marketers think that the banner message is what's going to do the heavy lifting of that. But in reality, it really is the landing page or the page on which you know they visit at their college site. And so if you're running an application type of campaign or an enrollment campaign or a financial aid campaign, you really want the potential student to fall onto a page that talks specifically about the ad that they saw out there. And so, landing pages. You know there's a science and there's an art to those. There really is no one capital R right answer on which landing page is perfect. But there's definitely building blocks that you can use to at least give yourself a pretty good step forward in attracting you know, visitors and getting them to a page that ends up doing the heavy lifting of convincing them to take the action that you want them to take. So it's an important question, and one that people should consider is really devoting time and resource into a landing page scheme that lets them utilize some best practices, lets them curtail messages to specific demographics if they can. But ultimately that's driven toward a single action with a single message that's very pointed toward what it is they want to accomplish.
Cheryl Broom: 15:18
I think that's a hard concept for our colleges, this single message and single action cause we, we tend to kill them with kindness in that we try to incorporate every single thing that they should or should not do in order to become a student or to apply for financial aid. So in many ways it makes it more difficult for the student because there's just this over abundance of information where I think a landing page is supposed to be relatively brief and more persuasive in nature. So if you were to offer a college some, some advice on their landing pages or how to structure, or even even design them. What are what are some tips that you follow, or ones that you have seen that have done really well in in converting traffic?
Chris Walker: 16:04
Yeah, that's a great point. And I understand the onboarding process of the student getting into college really is multifaceted. It has multiple steps, and there are students that are at different stages of that process. Maybe they've already filled out an application, but they need to talk to a counselor or they need to fill out their financial aid or they need to register for classes. So in a perfect world, the landing page will illuminate the steps necessary for the students to get enrolled but still provide them with whatever that next evidence step is in a simple call to action, right? So from the basics of landing page, what I like to think about are simple blocks and methodologies in how you set these things up. Now, some people would tell you that a landing page should only have one single button. They call that like buy or die right? So if you don't click on this button, then you just close your browser and go on about your day. I'm not necessarily a proponent of that. I like to have one, maybe two calls to action, with a potential link in the logo of the landing page, up at the top left so they could go back to the home page if they don't want to go ahead and take the action at that time. But whether you do a single call to action, which is recommended, maybe, two. You know, you just want to make sure that those call to action buttons a really big, they're very visible and that it's evident on the page what they're there to do! And then in supporting that there's messaging and there's directional graphics that you can use. The first one is echo messaging. So generally you want your headline to echo what the students saw in the advertisement that they might have clicked on, or they might have seen so that when they landed, they know they're in the right place, right? So maybe the subject, the person in the image is the same. The messaging, whether it's enrollment, you've got an enrollment headline there, and then even directional graphics. You might have arrows or the subject of the photo is actually looking toward the button? There are cues that you're giving the user to essentially reinforce what you want them to do. And then the last thing is envisioning a landing page you've got, a good size header graphic. Maybe it's a picture of a person. A key message and then a primary call to action. Some people would say, That's enough. Now again, we have a kind of complicated process in converting users, so usually you're gonna have to have some supplemental information. And so what I would suggest is very simple, quick to digest blocks, using very strong value statements like, Get started Now, it's super easy. You could be a student in two hours or two days, get started on your path to success. Things like that that reinforce their decision on being persuasive to get them to take the action you want them to take. And then there are some secondary components of landing pages that some of the big publications like Optimizely, and some others that do this type of landing page testing, they talk about including frequently asked questions on the landing page. So if you can anticipate your prospects questions or objections to potentially converting, you could address those right there in a simple bullet point like a simple F A Q section, and then cut it off from that point. So all of your messaging needs to point toward the primary call to action. So through that simple kind of layout. Big text, quick to absorb. People's attention spans are very short right now. I think that is generally the scaffolding through which I look at landing pages that are the most successful. The last thing I'll say about landing pages and I've done this personally in my work is if you go look at websites, you know, if you're in marketing these, these entities will probably make sense to you. Websites like HubSpot, websites like Salesforce, websites like Optimizely, even Amazon. You know, if you go search for a term that is specific to that website and you get a landing page, take notes because they're testing the heck out of that page. And what you're seeing is a very evolved version of what's being published online. So you might be seeing the 150th iteration of that landing page that has evolved such through that A B testing and you know, through a lot of research and through a lot of work. And so if you're gonna, you know, make your own landing pages, I would say, Take a look at some of the big boys and don't be afraid to emulate what they're doing, because again, what you're looking at is evolved, and it's evolved out of data and out of usage information on the pages,
Cheryl Broom: 21:01
And we at Interact do A B testing for some colleges. But most colleges don't have the time or the resources to test out different concepts. If somebody did want to do A B testing well first, can you just explain what that is, What is A B testing? And if they want to do it, we have maybe sophisticated college. Maybe they've got a digital marketing person on staff and they want to do it. How do you set that up? And what exactly are you testing and looking at?
Chris Walker: 21:30
Sure, and so the. There are a lot of technologies that do this, and I think probably the most accessible one is Optimizely. It's a simple piece of Java script that you put onto a page, and then what you're able to do is essentially set up different iterations of the same page using different elements. Right?
Cheryl Broom: 21:51
So you have a page A in a page B, but they're the same?
Chris Walker: 21:55
Correct. So Optimizely is swapping things out in real time to the users and generally when you're doing A B testing. And we definitely recommend this because A, It's very interesting to learn. But B, obviously you're evolving your performance, and I think that that's really important in digital marketing. But you really want to be testing kind of like the bigger elements of the page. So what does your headline say? Right? Is it a statement versus a question? Is it this word versus that word? You know, you can write different headlines of that primary message that they see at the start and then Optimizely will test. How many people ended up clicking on the button after they saw that message? You can also test things like images. You know is the subject on the left. Is it on the right? Is the form, you know, in a box? Is it not in a box? Is the button orange? Is it Red? Is it green? What does button say? You know, there's all kinds of things that you can get into, with testing a page. But I generally recommend starting with the key value propositions that you're saying on the landing page and testing some of that stuff. One of the other things I definitely recommend to people is that they introduce text links into their landing pages, too, for their primary calls to action. So a lot of people, you know, they only have a button on the page and that generally will suffice. But in some of the data that I've seen and I've actually done some testing around this. That people tend to trust text links more than they trust buttons. And so having a link within the paragraph copy, may be it's below the big primary headline message, with a simple text link. It might be the same action as the button. What I've seen in my results is that it ended up leading people to actually click on the button more so we had people clicking on the text link at a certain percentile, more than if obviously the link wasn't there. But across the board we had more conversions, More people taking that initial action just because the text links were there and they tend to trust those more than just a button. So that's one sample of a simple test that you can set up. Just add a text link there and then test the two against each other. So you know, if people are interested in going down this path with testing, we can certainly talk about it more. There's a ton of detail. It isn't particularly technical work, but it does take a good amount planning to do it right. You also have to be feeding a good amount traffic to these pages in order to get enough visitation to give you statistical significance and what you're looking at? It might be, a hundred visit or 1000 visits to the page in order to confidently say the green button outperforms the red one. But it's a good start, and it's a good way to just kind of show your higher ups that you're evolving your process, and it actually could be pretty fun to do too, and very interesting.
Cheryl Broom: 25:06
I could see that being a really fun report to give to cabinet or to marketing committee on campus, where you can actually say we tested this landing page and in version A the student was an older student and she was looking down and in version B it was a younger student and she was looking up and more people on A clicked the button. And it's kind of interesting research. And I didn't know that there's a plug ins or software out there that can do it for you. I guess I haven't been getting my hands dirty and the actual ability to the campaigns for so long that when I did A and B testing back when I was at a college, I actually built two pages.
Chris Walker: 25:46
Sure, Yeah,
Cheryl Broom: 25:48
But now you don't do that anymore.
Chris Walker: 25:49
You don't have to. I mean, there's still merit, you know? I mean, Optimizely is not free. So if you don't have budget than you have to, not to see that you didn't have a budget. But if you don't have a budget for A B testing per se than you are kind of forced to do that and split up your traffic and just look at the merits of the pages. But unfortunately, you don't really get any solid data on what actually happened, you know? So Optimizely will show you on a percentile basis. Who clicked on what on the page. Right. So this is not an advertisement for Optimizely, but I just love the research and the data portion of it because it doesn't require any opinion. It eliminates opinion. And it just lets people focus on what actually happened in the statistics and the facts of the of the research in the project. And I always enjoy that, you know, just saying, Well, this is what happened. You can think what you think, but this is what the data says. And I always enjoy that conversation.
Cheryl Broom: 26:48
It is really interesting and this is off topic from digital marketing, but I feel compelled to share it. When I was at the college, we got run a mailing in the full printed class schedule, which was over 100 pages, and we determined we were printing something like 150 million pieces of paper every time we mailed it. Yeah, so it's kind of was a budgetary, but also an environmental decision. To eliminate a full schedule and we went down to this mini schedule, which was just 16 pages, and that just listed the classes we offered and didn't list the timing or the faculty names. And we were doing that for a while and we did it in a full color and it was still the same price. We weren't saving any money. But we were meeting that environmental part of the goal of switching over from the full printed schedule. Well, I wanted to do post card because I wanted money to put into digital marketing. And people on campus felt very strongly about this mini schedule. So I A B tested my mailing, and I worked with my mailing house. And not only did the randomized the codes, we like randomized it down to the carrier routes so that people were like, in the same neighborhood, half were getting the postcard and half were getting the schedule. And then we had dedicated landing pages to each and dedicated phone numbers, and I was so excited to see what my results would be. And it turns out the schedule outperformed the postcard by, like, 40 to 1. So I was disappointed by my experiment, but I felt like, Okay, this is a cost. At least I could justify, at least I can know, I randomized my survey and I had a, I mean, we were mailing 180,000 households so it was, you know, big mailing and uh. It gave me the data to make a really good decision going forward.
Chris Walker: 28:35
Yeah, it's valuable insight. You know and I understand you're being compelled to, you know, cut the paper and the costs and things like that. But the proof's in the pudding, you know, and that's what these statistics give you. But it's refreshing in a way, you know, because you have an answer. It's not circumspect anymore.
Cheryl Broom: 28:55
You're not guessing. Or or saying, Well, gosh, I like green buttons.
Chris Walker: 29:00
Right. Or the Amazons button is orange. Hint hint, that is a strong takeaway from Amazon, orange buttons people. But your users may respond differently and having that confidence, you just keep improving, you know, and so landing pages is a big topic. A B testing is a big topic, but I want people to remember, too, that it can be very simple. You know, if you have a Web master who's pretty good and you know the experiments take a little bit of premeditation to set them up. But it's a plug and play type of thing online. It's all very accessible, you know, and it's something that, as we look to evolve our work in attracting community college students. It's just something to think about and definitely. Of all the levers that we pull in marketing, the landing page really does the heaviest lifting, and it deserves a good amount of attention. I think.
Cheryl Broom: 29:56
So here, the chicken or an egg type of question, is Do you do the landing page and then the campaign, or do just launch a campaign and work on the landing page when you have time? Is it a prerequisite for a successful campaign?
Chris Walker: 30:09
In a perfect world, I would say that you planned all of it together, right? So that you've got your ads. You know, obviously, a campaign is gonna have a color palette and a font and the style and an imagery base and the landing page should kind of follow that, right? So And, you know, every college has its own branding guidelines and how it works and how it produces its own marketing materials. So obviously that will fall in with those things. But the more things you can plan out, I think, ahead of time, the better. Worst case scenario. You know, it's always better to launch a campaign and get people interested in going, you know, I think Reed Hoffman of LinkedIn famously said, You know, like if essentially and his comments were around a product. So But I think it also translates to campaigns is that if you wait until everything is perfect to launch, You've waited too long. You know, you could have been doing business as usual under the old way as you evolve into the new. So if you have an enrollment campaign or if you have a program that you really need to push, I would say Just send the traffic there if you absolutely have to. But if you have the luxury of hanging onto that budget and planning out something that's a little bit more comprehensive where you're doing both, that generally is gonna yield a better result in long run.
Cheryl Broom: 31:31
Okay, now you've done your campaign, and now you want to look at how it performed. And so hopefully you have Google analytics installed. Some colleges have proprietary software that they use instead of analytics. But you have something that's measuring the traffic to your landing page, and we don't wanna get super technical. And for those you listening, Chris and I are married and,
Chris Walker: 31:57
Yes, we are.
Cheryl Broom: 31:58
And our, one of our first dates actually been dating for about a month. You started talking to me about Google analytics, and I literally fell asleep.
Chris Walker: 32:07
Yeah. I learned that that was a nighttime bed story. I don't remember why we were talking about analytics, but I do remember that that put you right to sleep.
Cheryl Broom: 32:16
I fell asleep during the conversation and I woke up like, two hours later with a blanket on me.
Chris Walker: 32:23
And then I was in doing analytics work probably.
Cheryl Broom: 32:27
So we won't repeat that for the podcast, but it was actually really fascinating.
Chris Walker: 32:33
I forgot what you asked me, but you asked me. So I just want people to realize that this is not my bedside talk is like, Hey, let's talk about UTM parameters in time on site. But you had asked me something about it, and then you just zonked out, about two minutes into my explanation. I probably went on too long anyways, but.
Cheryl Broom: 32:52
So you have analytics account. What's? There's so much you could look at. S just like a high level. What are some important things to pay attention to?
Chris Walker: 33:01
Yeah, that's a really good question. And so I'm analytic certified, although it was a while ago, so I should probably do my certification again. I'm sure some things have changed. So the first thing you know, obviously feeding information into analytics is important so that you could mine the right data out of it. So when you're setting up your destination URL, so if you have a banner and you say when somebody clicks on this banner, I want them to go to that page, you can append the URL with some parameters. Most digital marketers would be familiar with this. They are UTM parameters and it sets up. What was the source? What was the medium, what was the campaign and what was the content? We can put this in notes if you want, but it's like UTM underscore Source equals Facebook. UTM underscore medium equals story ad and then UTM campaign equals spring 2020 and UTM content equals enroll call to action. So those four things, you're telling analytics from where is the traffic coming? The medium can be the ad type, it could be social versus search. Medium sometimes doesn't really matter. But these are all things. Once you have those parameters in there, you can slice and dice the data based on what those things are.
Cheryl Broom: 34:30
So let me ask you a question before we go on. If you have one landing page, but multiple ads are pointing to it, can you put something different in the UTM so that you can differentiate which ads sent people to the landing page? Or is that not what that does?
Chris Walker: 34:46
It would take a little bit of slicing and dicing, but yes, so let's just talk about the sources for a minute. And then I'll talk about the analytics reports, right, because it's a good question and the answer is yes, you can definitely do that. So when I go into analytics, the most important thing that I'm looking at, the report that I'm looking at is on the left side. There's a button that says acquisition, and then under that it's traffic. And then there's source and media, right? So that's the report. That's always the most important to me. From that view, I can see all of my traffic sources, right so I can see email, pay per click, organic, direct, social media, whether it's Facebook, instagram, Snapchat, whatever. All of those are in a single view so that you can get a general performance guideline about how the tactics themselves are performing. From there, you can look at quality metrics like time on site, bounce rate, gold conversion. Those are the things that are important. If you're having to make a call on, Do I spend money at Snapchat versus Facebook or Instagram? Those are the types of numbers. If you don't have a solid base of conversion numbers, you're kind of forced to deal with some of those softer metrics and say, I can tell through the time on site and bounce rate that pay per click traffic is better than Facebook and instagram traffic, right? Now, you could make an argument that those two things are different. The reason that you do those things are different, and there is a valuable place for both of those sets of traffic, and I would agree with that. But that source in medium report is an important one. If you want to start to look at landing page performance, then you go into the content part. I believe that's under behavior and the left relative analytics. You've got site content and you can start to drill into what are the pages at the website that people are looking right? So, your landing page might be, you know, enrollment 2020 or whatever, right? And so within the report, you can see there's my enrollment 2020 page. And here's the number of people who hit that page. And then, if you pull up a secondary dimension from that report view and we'll have to give more detail about this, you could actually also toggle on source and medium so that you can say, All right, everybody who viewed this particular landing page, Here are the sources for each that sent traffic to that page and then here those additional metrics. So it's an extra layer in there to evaluate a specific page. But it's all there, and those, I think, are probably the two most valuable places that you can go to measure the success of a campaign.
Cheryl Broom: 37:40
Now you mentioned Bounce, and I had explain this a 1,000,000 times, so I've had to do and ensure everybody out there has had to as well. What's the difference between bounce and exit?
Announcer: 37:50
That's a really good question, and I can't say that I have a definitive description and front me. From what I understand, a bounce is somebody loads a page and then doesn't do anything. So they fall asleep on their keyboard, they get up and walk away. Maybe they close the browser. Maybe they go to another site, I don't know. An exit is actually the browser registered that they clicked out into something else, right? I could be totally wrong about that. But to the best of my recollection, that's how they're defined.
Cheryl Broom: 38:22
Yeah, I always thought of it like bounce is like I'm out, I'm bouncing.
Chris Walker: 38:26
Yes, it's true.
Cheryl Broom: 38:28
I'm gone.
Chris Walker: 38:28
It is a bounce. They didn't know anything.
Cheryl Broom: 38:30
The didn't do anything, they're out of there.
Chris Walker: 38:31
Nothing. Fell asleep.
Cheryl Broom: 38:33
So you basically, your content sucks.
Chris Walker: 38:37
Snooze fest.
Cheryl Broom: 38:38
Wasn't for me, for whatever reason. Maybe they'll come back later.
Chris Walker: 38:41
Yeah.
Cheryl Broom: 38:41
Okay, so there's a lot of ways to dig into analytics to see where your advertising is making an impact by looking at where people are coming from when they get to landing page and then taking a look at some of those secondary measurements like bounce rate was really high. You know, high bounce rate, something's wrong. Are they clicking on a button? What's their next action. How much time are they spending? You know, we set up some landing pages for clients where they're like, we don't want them on this page very long.
Chris Walker: 0:00
Sure.l
Cheryl Broom: 39:13
Like, let's get him out. They should be out of here by 30 seconds on to where they where they want to go, right? So it's gonna be different depending on the goals with your campaign.
Chris Walker: 39:21
Yeah. I mean, it's a great point. If the page is converting 20%, That's amazing. But that might also mean an 80% bounce rate, which some people would say is terrible, right? So it just depends on what's going on.
Cheryl Broom: 39:33
It really is an art and a science.
Chris Walker: 39:35
Yeah, so just to kind of summarize, I wanted to quickly mention. So when we're setting up our ads, you know, generally you want to be running a couple of ads against each other in a segment, right? So maybe it's an age bracket and a gender and your service area or some combination of the general demographics. You generally want to have a couple of ads running so that your A B testing those against each other. So those you're looking at, what's the message of the ad, what's the call to action and which one's getting clicked on, more? So that you can then establish a new control, create a new treatment. To kind of continue to drive that as well. Then, where you place those can be evaluated based on the sources. So is Instagram better than Facebook? Better than Snapchat? Better than pay per click? You can evaluate those things. And then, as we talked about evaluating the performance of a page, you could just look at the aggregate page stats and say, this landing page is doing better than that one. Do the conversion rate, but you can also evaluate the sources within that view, too. So all along the way, when you have the data set up correctly and you sort of mapped it out, you're giving yourself the ability to improve over time.
Cheryl Broom: 40:52
Excellent. So for you as we can wrap up our conversation, what would a really successful campaign look like?
Chris Walker: 41:01
100% enrollment? That's it.
Cheryl Broom: 41:06
Not an exceptional, Remember my fortune cookie? Where's my fortune cookie? Somewhere in my office, on my desk. Oh here it is. It said the goal should be growth, not perfection.
Chris Walker: 41:16
That's a good that's a good way of looking at it. Perfection is one of those things that I have certainly grappled with in my tenure. And so I've just learned that it's better to just throw it out there and go, learn, improve and not think that you're going to get it right. Like even if we all agree on a message on a piece of creative on whatever, the population out there is gonna have a different opinion than a group of informed people at a college would. So that's the most important test is how people are responding to what you put out. A successful campaign for me is that I'm either getting really great conversions, and that's gonna vary, right? So how do we measure? Conversions? Is at an application? Like What can we even track? Right? So we grapple with the fact that we can only track users so far into the college process. You know, we might get them at the very last click before they go into a par, and that's all I see right? So I can't give you any more information on what happens after that. Does their application get processed? What is you know on boarding look like Did they get student aid or not? Did they enroll? Were their classes available? You know, there's so many variables that go into true success on an ROI basis. So I either want to know that what I'm doing is leading to the correct action. And I'm getting a good conversion rate from the ad to the tactic or the platform to the page, to substantiate keeping going or I'm getting really good information. I'm getting executable data that I can use to reach that goal. So you know the goals for any clients gonna vary. Obviously, we all want as much enrollment or applications as we can get. But I think the right mix of digital tactics pay per click, you know, sending emails. All of those things all point to a significant spike in campaign performance. And so on a client by client basis, we evaluate that, but generally it's a tough target to hit. But we work really hard to et there.
Cheryl Broom: 43:26
That's a great answer because I literally was asked by one college. So once this campaign's over, like how many seats do I have to plan for my classes? Where it was grant fund the faculty members like I'm so excited for digital marketing. I cannot wait to get this started. How many more sections do you think I should open? How many seats are gonna fill in my class? I'm like, Well, I can't promise you anything. You know that so tough. It's the difficult part of marketing is. There's this research, there's this science. There's best practices. But at the end of the day we're talking to human beings.
Chris Walker: 43:59
Yeah, and it might be a fairly, you know, obscure program. You know that people maybe there are a lot of people interested in it, maybe there's not. But it's. That's a tough one. You know, end of the day. If you push the message out to people, you're gonna get some percentage of response. But to predict all those steps into an actual seat, that's really difficult. But you know, I stay pretty optimistic that, you know, as we evolve, we're going to dig deeper and deeper into the funnel of what we can actually influence. You know, if we get the ability to control the messages of students once they've actually filled out an application or if they apply and they didn't enroll could we email them and try to give ourselves the best opportunity to convert them later. So I feel like we're reaching deeper and deeper into the funnel. But there's still no seamless, you know, system that says this student went from, you know, a Facebook user to somebody who clicked on all of these things. And then they turned into a student. And then here's all the units that they took, you know, that would be a perfect system, right? If we could do that? But until then, we're just left with the tools that we've got. And I think the ultimate goal is that we just keep improving.
Cheryl Broom: 45:10
Right? Well, very well said. And I think that's a good place to wrap up our conversation.
Chris Walker: 45:15
Awesome. Well, thank you for having me. This has been a lot of fun. I'll see you at home.
Cheryl Broom: 45:19
Yeah, and we could continue this discussion over dinner. And I think we just started to scratch the surface of setting up campaigns so hopefully you can come back in a while and maybe we can get a little bit deeper into the conversation.
Chris Walker: 45:35
I would love to.
Cheryl Broom: 45:36
All right. Well, thank you so much.
Chris Walker: 45:37
My pleasure. Thanks again.
Cheryl Broom: 45:38
And that wraps up this edition of Community College Marketing, MasterClass and big, thanks to Chris for being such an amazing guest. And before I sign off, if you're interested in learning more about our media preferences, research and survey, or you want to see a demo reach on out to me. I'd love to set something up for you. And with that, I'm going to say thank you for listening. Thank you for the hard work you do for students each and every day. And I hope you've taken something away from this podcast. I'll catch you next time.
Announcer: 46:28
Thank you for joining the Community College Marketing MasterClass podcast. For more great tips on how to improve marketing and communications at your two year college visit, Interact com dot com and join us next time as we discuss and share actionable time tested strategies on topics directly related to community college marketing.