Team update: 9 – 22 July

Posted on 22 July, 2015 by Anne

It’s time again to find out what we’ve been up to over the past couple of weeks.

Go Mobile programme

Work continues on the Undergraduate migration project – with more research into:

content types and requirements,
content design on course profiles and
auditing of how the site works

There’s a lot of planning (and work) ahead for both the Web Team and Undergraduate marketing.

Emma C has been working with the editor from the Information for Schools and Colleges website. She’s had her training and is now getting stuck in to editing the site in T4.

We’re putting the final touches to the Go Mobile demo site after moving it into T4. We’ll use it to test the go live process over the next couple of weeks.

Design and technical developments

We’ve built a range of boxes to create the layouts for home pages and landing pages.

Different combinations of columns, colours and content will give each website a unique look. We’ve started applying the layouts to sites in T4 and they’re looking good!

This latest addition completes the major set of components needed to build most websites.

Training and support

Go-Mobile – we delivered two-days of training for eager editors from:

Marketing and Student Recruitment
Social Renewal
Biology
Institute of Neuroscience

We’re continuing to get great feedback from the sessions – one editor said:

“I’ve found myself thinking about the website in a completely different way!”

Anne and Emma C also ran a drop-in session for Go Mobile editors.

We’ve received 27 support requests through the NU Service Helpdesk and have resolved 14 of them.

Campaigns and web developments

That business as usual is still coming in….

Linda provided advice to HR on how they can improve their web content. They are planning a review and revamp of their core content.

The Clearing website has bee re-launched with a new look and feel. The campaign design runs through the website and social media activity.

Linda’s written a couple of blog entries around improving your calls to action. Coming up in the next week or so – ‘why you shouldn’t use ‘click here’ in your text’; and ‘5 ways to improve your calls to action’.

The new international pages went live on the Pre-Arrival website.

Lisa has been looking at the analytics for the Open Day website to help inform developments for the new site in the Go Mobile programme. To learn about her findings read her post Improving Web Content with help from Google Analytics.

Plans for the next few weeks

It’s holiday time, so the team will be running at reduced capacity for the next few weeks – but there’s still plenty to do.

We’re running weekly Go Mobile drop-in sessions from now until the end of August. These sessions will support editors who are working on sites in T4 CMS, as part of the migration project.

There’s also a Contribute workshop scheduled for next week.

See you next time!

5 ways to improve your Calls to Action

Posted on 21 July, 2015 by

A Call To Action (CTA) is a way to get your reader to complete a task or reach a business goal on your website.

It might be as simple as a hyperlink or it could be an embedded form that you want them to fill in.

The words you use and the placement of the content will all influence whether you get the results you want.

Here are our top 5 tips to make sure a CTA works for you.

1. Think about where you place your link text

We recommend adding links to further content at the end of a page, paragraph or sentence.

That way your reader has understood what you had to say and can make a decision whether to follow your link or not.

If you embed the link at the start of a section they don’t know whether to click first and come back or read first then go back to follow the link. Either way, you’re making them work harder.

Bad example: We have a Conference Team who provides help with managing and planning conferences.

Good example: We provide help with managing and planning conferences: contact the Conference Team.

2. Make your call to action stand out

You could also use a different style or design for CTAs. We use buttons to help highlight them on the University website:

If you are using something that’s designed like this, be consistent with its placement. Our link buttons could become intrusive if we used them everywhere.

3. Make sure your call to action is relevant to the page

Don’t include lots of links ‘just in case’ someone might find them useful. Think about what you want your reader to do next.

If you have a clear next step in mind and you add lots of extra links – you are reducing the effectiveness of your CTAs.

For example, on a page about booking to attend an event, imagine if you included all these links:

Book your place (essential)
Watch a video (a distraction at best – they might forget to sign up)
Find out more about the event (this link should be further up the page)
Contact us (why? The aim is to get them to book at this point)

4. Be active and descriptive

Make sure the language you use encourages people to complete the action. Use words they’ll be familiar with and include a verb if possible.

Examples:

Call us now: 000000000 (a call to action might not be a hyperlink)
Fill in our application form
Watch our student services video

You should also make sure that the text you hyperlink is descriptive. This helps with Search Engine Optimisation. Google will rank your content according to the words you hyperlink. I’m guessing you don’t want to be top for the word ‘more’:

Bad example: Learn more about research opportunities at Newcastle.

Good example: Learn more about research opportunities at Newcastle.

Click Here for… and Click Here for… are particular pet hates of mine. Don’t do it! We’ve a blog post coming up on why click here is the worst call to action you could use.

5. Measure success

Decide how you will measure the success of your CTAs. Did your carefully crafted words work? Did your readers pick up the phone, book their place or fill in your form?

The University uses Google Analytics to track use of the University website. We assess where people went after reading our content. How many people left straight away without following our links? How many people completed an action?

You can also try out different combinations of words to see which ones are most effective. Why not try a link called “Fill in our application form” for part of the week and then swap it to be: “Apply now” later? Which one has the highest completion rate?

Get in touch

Do you write your Calls To Action like this? What sort of success have you had? Let us know in the comments – we’d love to hear your thoughts.

Read more

You might like to read about how micro content (often used on our CTAs) can improve your website.

Improving your Web Content with Help from Google Analytics

Posted on 16 July, 2015 by Jiajun

Like many of our web editors, I found Google Analytics a bit daunting at first. The vast amount of information available made me think, where do I start? And how do I use and interpret the data?

Earlier this week Emma wrote about how our standard dashboard is a good starting point for analytics in her post How to Create a Customised Google Analytics Dashboard.

I’m going to take this further to focus on how we can use analytics to help evaluate and improve web content. To do this, I’ve looked at the standard dashboard for one of the sites in Go Mobile – the Undergraduate Open Day website. The data referenced is from 25 May to 28 June (about a month before the Open Days).

Read on to learn about my findings…

How visitors get to your site

The analytics show that around half of the visits (50.1%) to the site were made through a search engine, such as Google. This shows the importance of search engine optimisation (SEO). For advice on improving your SEO read our posts on search.

If we look at traffic to the site from social media the analytics show that the majority of visits via social networks came from Twitter. The Open Day team need to decide whether they want to concentrate efforts on the most popular social network or to focus on increasing traffic from other networks, like Facebook.

Keyword searches

Our standard dashboard shows keywords people searched for to get to your site, both in search engines and in the onsite search.

Some of the keywords identified for the Open day site were:

campus tours
medicine
law
accommodation

These words show the types of content visitors were looking for on the Open Day site. It’s therefore important that the site contains content on these topics, even if it’s just to provide some context and a link to further information on another University website.

The keyword search also shows the terms visitors are using to find this content. Using the language of your visitors increases the likelihood that they will find the information they’re searching for.

Most popular pages

As part of our Go Mobile training, we’re advising our editors to prioritise the content they’re editing on their website. To help identify which pages to prioritise we’re using an idea called the Core Model. This identifies pages where user tasks and business goals meet – these are the core pages of your website. You should focus your efforts on improving these first.

The main user task for the Open Day site is to book a place at the event, and the main business goal for this site is to increase Open Day bookings. The Book your Place page is therefore a core page of the site and the analytics supports this.

The most popular pages in this period were the Book your Place page, followed by the Open Day homepage and the Traveling to the University page.

Finding out which pages are most popular can help you to identify and prioritise core pages.

It’s important that you don’t take this data at face value though – just because a page isn’t popular doesn’t necessarily mean that the content isn’t important to yours users. Look again at the page. Is it easy enough to find? Does it use the language of your users? Does it contain all of the relevant information? Is the content engaging and clear?

Devices used to access site

The analytics show that 50.7% of visitors viewed the site on a desktop during this period.The remaining 49.3% were accessing the site via a mobile or tablet. This is in contrast to the Undergraduate website where 66.1% of visitors accessed the site via desktop during the same period.

The split between desktop and mobile could be more equal for the Open Day site because it’s an event website. It is therefore used in a different way by prospective students. Visitors are more likely to quickly check key details on their phones when they are preparing for or travelling to the event.

This reinforces the idea that we need to write web content that translates across devices so that we don’t exclude any of our audiences.

Summary

What I’ve found about using Google Analytics is that it all comes down to what you’re trying to achieve with your site. This will inform what data you need to look at.

Analytics is a useful tool and can tell you a myriad of things to help improve your web content, but it’s always best to look at the data in context. If visitors aren’t engaging with a page or piece of content in the way that you expect don’t just write it off as unimportant. Instead think about why it might not be working, and whether you need to re-think the content or where it sits on the site.

How to Create a Customised Google Analytics Dashboard

Posted on 14 July, 2015 by

Most of the conversations I have with our web editors about Google Analytics start like this:

Editor: I’ve got access to Google Analytics but I didn’t know where to start. There’s so much data, it’s overwhelming!

Me: We know how daunting Google Analytics can be, so we’ve created a standard dashboard you can copy and customise to get all the key metrics for your website.

It’s true. With our standard dashboard you can get data on:

how people are getting to your site
the keywords people are using to find your site
what devices people are using to access your site
the location of your audience
your most popular pages
the total number of visitors to your site
whether your visitors are new or returning

Here’s an example of what your dashboard will look like. This one is set up for the About section of the University website.

Customised Google Analytics dashboard for www.ncl.ac.uk/about

Once you’ve got the dashboard set up you can:

view data for different time periods
download the report as a PDF
schedule reports to be emailed to you on a regular basis.

The first step to getting the dashboard is to request access to the University’s Google Analytics (University login required). Once you have access you can customise the standard dashboard for your website. We’ve got step-by-step instructions on how to do this, plus a demo video on our website (University login required).

Our next post will cover how to make use of the data in your dashboard. If there are other analytics topics you’d like us to cover please leave us a comment below.

Team Update: 24 June – 7 July

Posted on 8 July, 2015 by

Time sure does fly when you’re having fun. I can’t believe it’s time for our fortnightly update. Here’s what we’ve been up to…

Go Mobile programme

Linda has been planning the Undergraduate migration project. As well as needing design work and content development, this website has the added complexity of being in T4 but not using the Go Mobile content types.

We’ve been finalising post-migration work on the Schools and Colleges, and Open Day sites. This is to get them ready to hand over to their editors later this month.

Jane has been working with her editors for the Research website. Exciting times – both have now had their training and are using their new skills to get stuck in with T4. Stop press: for the first time we have a site purpose for the Research website.

Technical developments

Linda has reviewed the pre-migration template and tagged up some test content for the Undergraduate migration project. We should be testing this out this week.

Training and support

We ran another T4 show and tell session which covered:

what happens when you delete a section that is linked to from other sections
some end user sign off (events and publications)
an update on the T4 in-line help we’ve been adding to the system

Anne ran a T4 training session, with support from Emma C, for editors from Schools and Colleges, and the Press Office.

We’ve received 36 support requests through the NU Service Helpdesk and have resolved 10 of them.

Campaigns and web developments

Alongside Go Mobile we’re still working on business as usual. In the past two weeks we’ve been busy.

The Clearing website first phase is nearing completion – Linda has been working with the Clearing content editors on the site.

Jane was very proud to attend a presentation of the results for the Postgraduate Web Research and Evaluation. It showcased the results of in-depth user testing, external experts review and competitor analysis. And the results show that we have an outstanding website, that performs exceptionally better than the previous one – with the stats to prove it! So it was worth all the hard work then…

Emma C updated the external facing Engagement website and made further updates to the website for our London campus. She also met with colleagues from Marketing and Student Recruitment to plan homepage messaging up to the start of the new academic year.

Lisa is finalising the new international pages for the Pre-Arrival site which are scheduled to go live at the end of the week.

Jane and Gareth met with the University’s Research Impact Officers to discuss our plans for the Research website as part of Go Mobile. They were also really interested in ways to get research active staff online using social media.

Steve updated the Science Central pages to include content on Newcastle as a future Smart City.

We sent out our monthly blog round-up for June. If you’re not receiving this and would like to then you can sign up to our mailing list from our website (University login required).

Plans for the next few weeks

We’re getting into peak holiday season with schools breaking up at the end of next week. So while we’ve still got our full complement of staff we’ll be:

running the next round of Go Mobile training
reviewing our content standards
designing custom homepages for Go Mobile sites
testing the go live process for sites in Go Mobile