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EDUCATION SITES

Business Objectives:

Moonstone owns and operates several websites in the higher-education space. Our sites provide prospective students of higher education with the information they need to make informed application and enrollment decisions. We looked at our traffic patterns and saw potential to increase the number of site visitors, improve our conversion rates, and increase information disbursement.

Services Provided: Search Engine Optimization Link Building Directory Placement Custom Web Design Innovative Web Development Database Design and Development Email Campaign Management Maintenance Reporting Results: The Result: Higher Website Pull-Through, More Actions

In addition, we improved our search engine rank from lower than 30 to “Top 3” for fifteen key words on Google, and Top 3 for 12 key words on Yahoo.

This is just an example of the type of improvements that we have achieved. We were somewhat staggered by the rapid improvements, and the process contributed to our growing body of knowledge about how to go about building websites that work.

Project Description:

Higher Education Information and Lead Generation
Moonstone owns and operates several websites in the higher education space that provide prospective students with the information they need to make informed application and enrollment decisions. Most of these sites profile a college’s accreditation and programs of study, and some also provide financial aid and career information.

As prospective students review college profiles on a Moonstone site, they may request application information from any school that looks good. When they do so, we take them to a web page we call “launch” which routes them to an online information request form.

As we implemented more sophisticated website campaign tracking and began to analyze the results, we realized that a few of our sites in this space were underperforming. We dove more deeply into the analysis of one of the sites and found that while it was attracting a lot of visits, even return visits, it was not generating a lot of inquiries.

Approximately 25% of site visitors were reaching the site’s “launch” page, from which they could make an inquiry. We set ourselves the goal of doubling that pull-through in 2 months’ time.

We audited our own site and found inefficiencies in its interface and some ambiguity in its calls to action. One by one, we implemented changes designed to lead the prospect more directly to the action, and we measured the effect of each.

While generally sensitive to the hard-sell, we decided in this case that we weren’t being direct enough. We made the calls to action more explicit, we added navigational aids to lead the interested student more directly to the action. In the process, we also eliminated some visual clutter.

We looked at the website’s copy, and we found that it was generally quite strong, and that while it needed some reorganization here or there, it was not a hindrance to action, but rather an aid.

We met our goal in one quarter of the time we expected.

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