Double Time On Site Through Offline Campaigns and Clicktracks

Founded in 1886, Ouachita Baptist University (OBU) is a church-related liberal arts university located in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. Like all universities, they've had to move quickly to effectively incorporate the Internet in their overall marketing strategy. Lannie Byrd is Web Manager for OBU, tasked with helping the University's marketing department make the most impact during their heavy September-December marketing season.

"We'd been using Deepmetrix, and while it was great for giving us some of the basics, it wasn't that adept at helping us follow user paths. I read about ClickTracks on a web developer's listserv and decided to give it a tryÉand we've been using it ever since" says Lannie.

Tracking Offline Marketing Online
Much of OBU's marketing is done the 'traditional' way, via mailings and postcards sent to prospective students. Lannie explains, "During any given time, we'll have a number of different campaigns—or more specifically, one campaign with several unique themes. We'll send out postcards related to those themes—and on each of the postcards, we have a unique URL that leads prospective students to a customized landing page."

Using ClickTracks, Lannie and his team can compare and contrast how our different campaigns are working. "We can see, for example, that one campaign leads to twice the time on site as another campaign. We can also pinpoint 'typical' paths that visitors take as the result of a particular campaign—seeing which themes are most likely to further explore the site, taking a look at the university programs or watching informational videos."

Replicating Success by Repeating What Works
All of the information ClickTracks provides Lannie and his team lets them make tweaks and changes to the marketing campaign as it is occurring. "What we learn based on looking at ClickTracks in the end of September can have a direct correlation to the call to action or landing page design of a campaign going out in October. This means that we're constantly learning and improving our marketing with each mailing that goes out. And because it's so easy to label visitors who came from a specific campaign, seeing how one fares against the other is simple"

Time On Site Doubled; Page Views Up by Almost 50%
Since using ClickTracks to better understand how particular marketing efforts are working, OBU has realized huge jumps in both time on site and number of pages viewed—both metrics that are key to determining visitor interest and campaign effectiveness. "After making changes based on what we uncovered using ClickTracks—like adding more videos and making navigation more user-friendly—our average time on site has more than doubled from 160 seconds to 360 seconds. We've also seen our average number of pages viewed go up from around 3.8 to more than 5.3."

ClickTracks has helped the OBU web and marketing teams to better serve their customers—the prospective students who are getting ready to make a big decision. "For us, the main focus of our site is to help build a relationship with a student in a way that they feel comfortable, and a way that works for them. The insights ClickTracks gives us helps us do just that," concludes Lannie.