Ranjit Sidhu (http://twitter.com/rssidhu) is going to talk about justifying the roles of the web teams in challenging times.

Are institutional web team showing the value of what they do? And perhaps we need to start talking about value in £s?

‘The web is sexy’ – are we (as web managers) exploiting this? Internet overtook television to become biggest advertising sector in the UK – “We can justify increasing expenditure as we have an accurate breakdown of how the online budget will bring higher revenue than other channels: The expenditure is more efficient and accountable” – quote from someone at Honda.

Ranjit mentioning the Cabinet Office press release announcing cut of websites – highlights how much they ‘cost per visit’ – but says there is no context – it isn’t (just) about cost – it is about what you get out of the visit – maybe there is return on your investment. Ranjit says getting a quote from gocompare.com – costs Go Compare between £5-£15 pounds per visit – but that doesn’t matter – they make money!

Ranjit taling about measuring web traffic – often use ABCes – these are measures designed for the newspaper industry – who care about adverts – why are we applying these measures to public sector websites?

Ranjit stressing that ‘online’ has to be part of the University – you have to put this into context.

Ranjit suggesting Universities are different to newspapers – but perhaps not that different to a car sales website. Think about prospective students site – if you go to a car website – what does the car manufacturer want you to do? What is their conversion point? It’s downloading a brocuhre – that’s like a student downloading a course brochure or prospectus. And yet public sector/universities don’t seem to regard ‘downloading a pdf’ as value – but a car manufacturer might be happy to have a visit cost £5 if the user downloads a brochure.

Ranjit suggesting that you need to look at overall picture of student applications – so link visits to prospective students to site, to number of application form downloads, to the percentage of students who download application who apply, to percentage who then get a place and pay to attend university – linking web stats to revenue.

Ranjit saying – good to compare the ‘web route’ to other routes – e.g. do analysis of cost of applications from downloading via website to (e.g.) offering to send them a printed application form – show overall costs in comparison to other methods. [there is an issue of accessibility here? Public bodies have a responsibility to be inclusive – car manufacturers don’t]

Once you have some of these figures, can start to show how you can enable more revenue – e.g. show what revenue would accrue from converting 2% more conversions from browsing to download application – and then justify investment in developing website to achieve that extra 2% conversion.

Can also go further with ‘predictive analysis’ – how to predict how segments of audience will react – but Ranjit not going to cover today – need to get some of the basics in place first.

Some things that need doing:

• Agree standards for measuring web use – not ABCes
• Standardise monthly and end of year reporting
• Dashboard that summarises performance – in one page
  • Include industry performance as well as local performance

Interesting examples of dashboard used by car manufacturer – includes ‘Highlights and Recommendations’ – very briefly at bottom – how to increase revenue.

Ranjit says – need to start now – COI report should be used as a wake up call – don’t let this happen to your website – statistics can be used and abused – can’t afford to be sitting ducks… Need to learn from the past and become enablers rather wall builders. If the web team doesn’t enable people – they’ll work around the web team.

Online is the most efficient communication and recruitment tool available to the University – challenge is show that and therefore prove your worth.

Q & A

Q: Victims of our own success – been providing websites on a shoestring, so how to justify more investment now

A: Universities are big organisations – University of Sheffield is as big as Yahoo! There is a lot of money – it gets spent one way or another – and you’ll see it being spent – e.g. on a new cafe. You can get this money!

Q: Example – paying council tax ‘in person’ more expensive than doing by phone, which is still ten times more than doing it online

A: Agree – but look outside public sector – look at how Amazon change webpage as you go to buy a book – navigation disappears

Q: Look at using Google Analytics with goal tracking – can assign costs and also track people through your site

A: Google Analytics v good – although it is aggregated so can’t drill down to indvidual – although may not be a bad thing