The way prospective students “shop” for an education has changed. The program page has become one of the strongest sales tools. It needs to convey the right information, drive prospective students to learn more and, of course, look great. We have worked with a number of schools that have launched newly redesigned, feature-rich program pages and wanted to know exactly how users are engaging with the new elements.

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Tracking

We use Google Analytics event tracking to gauge the popularity of these new page elements. Event tracking utilizes a snippet of code that is placed around an action on your site. Things like button or link clicks, video plays, accordion dropdowns, slider scrolls, picker selections and even page scroll can be tracked through event tracking.

Event code can be placed “by hand” into your site’s code. We like to use Google Tag Manager and Auto-Event Tagging to place those tags dynamically. This approach is often best because if you change your page content, the events typically still fire. It’s also much easier to implement and organize.

We recommend tracking all elements of your program pages to see what’s being used most frequently. Here are some examples of program page elements we’ve tracked:

Reporting

Once the Event Tracking is in place, we recommend putting together a dashboard for easy access to the data on this page.

Use the Event Category to pull in only the relevant events:

Use the Event Label to show the details on a specific event. For example, this is a list of the FAQs that was clicked on this page:

Finally, you can pull in aggregate event activity to understand the overall usage of your new program page elements:

Program pages are one of the most important pieces of higher education recruitment websites. They are often a labor of love that include contributions from many different stakeholders. What works for an undergraduate journalism program page at a private liberal arts school in the Midwest might not work for an Executive MBA program page at a Big Ten University on the East Coast. The best thing you can do is test against your own audience. Find out what resonates, what’s popular and what works.

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Looking for additional ways to improve your program pages? Check out these five tips for creating amazing academic program pages in this throwback post.