It has been six months since the launch of Saint Mary’s new website. In that time, thousands of changes and improvements have been made with continuous improvement the name of the game for the university’s top channel of communication.
As was noted upon the launch of the site, the focus of the site is reaching prospective students and providing them with a top-notch experience during their visits – and hopefully repeat visits.
The site is functioning well and more data is being captured, which helps marketing and communication prioritize fixes and enhancements with the goal of driving engagement and ease of navigation.
Improvement Highlights
Compelling and targeted content is being added to the site along with navigation enhancements for adult learners. Thanks to increased data collection capabilities, the web team learned more is needed to attract and engage adult prospective students.
Data-informed decision-making is evident in a more effective content strategy being implemented to engage users on academic program pages. At this time, work is ongoing to revise the layout of each program page to create a better user experience.
With better data syncing, we can now track visitors further in their journeys on the web and can follow them through the point where they request information.This was not possible before due to lack of integration with data systems, which had stymied our capabilities. Another tracking win is knowing customer journey behavior through the stage of applying from our advertising campaigns.
Tracking shows that visitors are spending more time on the website and viewing more pages each visit. The site has had more than 40,000 returning visitors since launch and these users have revisited the site three or more times, which is a direct measure of increased engagement. Also, someone coming to the site is able to quickly get information with a “load” time of one second, while the industry standard is 4.7 seconds. This high-speed entry option supports our efforts to move visitors through the site to ask for information or apply.
Marketing and Communication also created a new tagging strategy for the website’s calendar, as well as stories in the newsroom. This tagging strategy will allow calendar events, news, and stories to be automatically populated throughout the website on well over 100 pages.