Speakers

Ronald Barba – Sr. Manager, Branded Editorial at The Chronicle of Higher Education

Corey Reed – Director of Web Management at Texas Christian University

Jeff Dillon – Higher Education Strategist at SearchStax

Transcript

Ronald Barba  0:01  

Good afternoon, y’all, and thank you all for attending. I’m Ronald Barbara, the Senior Manager of branded editorial at the Chronicle of Higher Education, the state of higher education. Websites key challenges, AI’s role and content discovery solutions, a webinar provided to you in partnership with search stacks, colleges face ongoing challenges, from trying to sustain enrollment numbers to making sure their students are engaged and staying on path to earning their degrees, to finding ways to just keeping overall costs down. And unfortunately, things were getting easier, particularly for folks within enrollment and marketing functions at higher ed institutions. An enrollment cliff is projected to start next year that will reduce the number of high school graduates by about 13% by the year 2041 and as we’ll touch on later in the conversation, colleges are also facing a so-called Search cliff that will make it even tougher for institutions to find and recruit students. Today, we’ll be focusing our discussion on the University website, a key part of every institution, but it’s a part that’s often overlooked as a priority for colleges. In a recent survey of more than 225 higher ed professionals across colleges, conducted by the Chronicle Brand Studio, 93% of respondents believe that improvements to their institution’s website experience will impact key student success metrics, including recruitment, retention and engagement. Which leads us to ask, Where’s the disconnect, right? And what can colleges do to improve their website experience, to help them solve some of their current challenges? In today’s webinar, we’ll dig deeper into those questions, and we’ll also preview some of the findings from the survey that we conducted throughout this discussion. Please submit your questions and comments in the Q, a, and I’ll try to raise as many as I can, but also what’s happening or what you’re seeing at your campus, and when it comes to the issues that we’ll discuss in today’s webinar, we’ll also, after the webinar, you’ll also receive an email with a link to this recording, as well as a copy of the report that goes through our survey results. So I’d like you. I’d like to introduce today’s panelists. We have Jeff Dillon, a higher education digital strategist at SearchStax, and we have Corey Reed, the director of web management at Texas Christian University. Thank you, Jeff and Corey for taking time to join us today.

Corey Reed  2:16  

Thanks. Ron, yeah, happy to be here. Ron, yeah. So let’s

Ronald Barba  2:20  

get off the conversation. So the university, the University website, right? You know, whether you’re a prospective student, a current student, a parent, faculty member or just a community member, you’re faced with this kind of digital wilderness when you approach their institution’s website. Every person has their own individual needs. They have their own goals for why they are going through a college’s website and it’s just this one big, complex kind of bot. Jeff, you know, what has someone who has worked with a lot of colleges and universities? You know, could you talk more about, kind of like, what has led to that, the complexity of a college website?

Jeff Dillon  3:06  

Yeah, we should start there. I was a web director, so I lived this and saw that really, if you go back 10 to 15 years ago, when the CMS was this new, great thing, it starts with content management. I think we had to take the weight off of our webmaster. It was just too much for them to update content. But after years of managing a content management system, there’s hundreds of people that are probably managing content on campus websites. We haven’t a lot of these systems that haven’t evolved too much, or we’re in an evolution process now. We’ve grown, and we have all these data silos, and so we have a kind of content sprawl is one, and the content is in all these formats and all these silos everywhere. But then you combine that with the personas we’re trying to reach, right? We have our students. We know that prospective students are really important. We have all these internal audiences too. We have community members and, you know, and then we have the disparate, different, I would say, sub domains in colleges. So I’ve worked in other industries as well, and I would say higher ed is really complex, just because of this decentralization and the number of personas that we have to be able to work with and satisfy

Ronald Barba  4:26  

Corey in your job and your, you know, in your role at TCU, is that, you know, what Jeff just described, is that something that you’re seeing is that kind of what you’ve experienced,

Corey Reed  4:35  

it is, and it’s interesting, because you think those that aren’t familiar with TCU. We’re, you know, we’re a private university. We have about 10 and a half 1000 undergrads, right? We’re kind of small to mid size. You’d think that maybe our problems would be small to mid size, but it’s not. I think across the board, higher ed’s probably just. All in the same boat. Maybe it’s a slightly different scale, but we definitely operate in a decentralized way. So you’ve had the CMS, but you know here, it’s not even just one content management solution. I mean, over, if you look over the past decade, we have several, I mean, we have several at play right now, concurrently. And you have Tom, you know, page templates. You have a page schema that’s all over the map as well. You know, you have different products that support different features, and it is kind of wild and wooly out there.

Ronald Barba  5:39  

Yeah. I mean, I haven’t been in college for a long time, and, I mean, I remember as kind of an undergrad and graduate student. I mean, they’re just navigating my way to kind of, you know, like an academic department’s website was really confusing, and then they always felt really off, right? They did feel disconnected, and they felt like a completely different entity from the kind of the main website that I entered. And there were times where I would sit there and think, like, am I even in the right spot? Like, am I like, is this the right site? Like, is this, or is this, like, the, like, an illegal place, right? Like I, you know. But so when we think about the college website, and we think about kind of where we are right now in higher education, right? And, you know, we have the demographic cliff. I mentioned earlier that we have the search cliff, and these are things that are kind of impacting one of the key metrics of universities, which is student enrollment and student retention. Jeff, could you tell me more than explain kind of the audience for people who don’t know, like, what that search clip actually is and what that impact can look like for colleges.

Jeff Dillon  6:45  

Yeah, yeah. I think we’re all pretty much aware of the enrollment cliff. But what’s preceding that is this, the College Board student search service no longer has access to all these names that schools used to build their incoming class with when the test went digital last year. It’s just a state level test. Now it’s digital, so there’s less names, there’s less students coming to college. So it’s just kind of this perfect storm right now. Combine that with our current environment, with the federal government supporting higher ed less in so many ways. You know, these are things that we can’t control. Some things you just are out of our control. We’re kind of at the mercy of the environment. But our website, our digital experience, is something we can’t control. So we thought this research was really timely, and it’s kind of turned into a little bit of a gap analysis with all these things that we discovered,

Ronald Barba  7:42  

yeah, and when we had a previous conversation, Jeff, you had mentioned that because of the search cliff and because of the impact that it has on the marketing functionality and marketing function of the university itself, and, you know, the struggle to find and recruit those students. You’d mentioned that, you know, colleges kind of really need to lean on their websites more, because it is a way for this generation, this generation Z, this Gen Z that has grown up with technology in their hands, and who are very kind of digital first. So it’s an opportunity really, for colleges to really lean on that and try to improve it. Yeah. I mean, is this a TCU Corey, how have you seen different audience buckets, particularly for the younger audiences, so for current students or prospective students that you see visiting the TCU website? What? What does the user behavior look like? What do you think? Does it kind of align with what our expectations are around how Gen Z should be interacting with technology,

Corey Reed  8:45  

I would say that we’re consistently surprised by some of those user journeys. Right? Like we have, we have a common project process where we try to map out a user journey. You know, you start with your personas, you come up with your top tasks, you try to map out what those user journeys might look like, or set up your conversion funnels. And what’s interesting about anytime we take those out to live user testing, is it’s almost shocking at the way that people approach this carefully crafted experience that you, you had in mind, right? We conceive this, this happy path, sort of user journey. And you think, oh, they’ll definitely start here, and they’ll drill down here, and they’ll step through here, they’ll go to the menu here, they’ll click on this, they’ll get to our form, they’ll convert. And, you know, magic will happen. But when we look at traffic patterns, when we do the user testing, I’m just consistently surprised at how, you know, search centric, it is like, how quickly, even when maybe they know, because they’re taking this test for us, that we’re looking. For certain actions and activities. How Search centric their behavior is? You know, they’ll skip all this carefully crafted page design that we’ve worked on and lovingly crafted for them, and they go to search because, essentially, they’ve been conditioned, right in a good way, but they’ve been conditioned to ask question, get answer, and I think the paradigm of browsing a website is fading on us in this era. That’s what we’re seeing.

Ronald Barba  10:32  

That’s fascinating. So it’s basically you’re putting in all of this work to try to figure out, like, how can we structure our website and our web pages in a way that students can better, like interact with them and find certain things. But at the end of the day, what ends up happening is they’re just turning the search, they’re just going, they’re staying at top and then typing in whatever they’re looking for. I mean, when you see that, I mean, are there, what are the kind of the common things that they look for,

Corey Reed  11:02  

it’s interesting, they are consistently looking for academic program content, right? Like, that’s something that throughout the year, it kind of ignores seasonality, right? A lot of a lot of things kind of ebb and flow according to the calendar year. But that’s something that they’re consistently after, if they want to understand, you know, who we are as a university, what do we offer and what are those next steps? Right? So there’s a big demand for that. And then to Jeff’s earlier point about additional audiences, right? Obviously, there are plenty of transactional kinds of traffic patterns that we see where people want to know where’s the academic calendar when I sign up for classes, how do I tour the campus, those kinds of things. So which is great because those are conversion goals that we have and have set for ourselves. And traffic activity does tend to focus around those areas, which is great. So our marketing efforts are working hopefully, but it’s how they get there is so it’s where it really diverges materially from the way that we kind of plan it out, right? We think, oh, this might be a three click process, or maybe we can get that down to two clicks. And the students and the perspective say, I don’t want to click at all, you know? I just want the answer, right? I have other things I need to do. I’ve got to get to the gym. I’ve got a yoga session, you know? I have a report to write, and I need to get this done, and I need to do it in these little micro transactions as well, right? We used to look at Google Analytics data, and we were focused around time on site. Oh, this is great. We’re getting great user engagement because people are spending 46 seconds on our site during a session, and now we’re seeing that number come down because we have all these little micro transactions with our users. And some people started to kind of hit the panic button about that go, oh, no, we don’t. We need sticky content. And it’s like, well, let’s, let’s analyze this and make sure, as long as people are converting, as long as we’re connecting people with the answers that they’re seeking, let’s not get overly concerned with time on site, right? We like Ronald, if you had a question for me, and I was like, I could either give you that answer in three seconds or I could make you wait a minute. Which would you prefer? And Jeff’s laughing because he talks to me enough he knows that I like to stretch things into a minute, but I mean, appreciate getting it, getting it more quickly.

Ronald Barba  14:00  

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Jeff. I mean, from what Corey was describing, I mean he seems he, what he has just described, is a very, almost, very meticulous approach to it, right? And it’s a very thought out approach to, how do we improve our website experiences? But you know, from our survey that doesn’t seem really be the case that, you know, institutions don’t seem to really be prioritizing the website experience in your work. Have you what have you seen and kind of, what are the challenges that they face when it is something that they do want to prioritize?

Jeff Dillon  14:35  

Yeah, that’s, I mean, that’s where I think we need to go next is, you know, they’re trying to prioritize it. But what’s happening is there’s this disconnect with Let’s redo our navigation and rebuild our site and make it look really great, but search is often left out of that. So it’s these year-long projects. And you know, if you talk to a lot of agencies now, the agencies are getting it, they’re. Like they will scope in search when they’re doing a site for a school, because they know it’s going to make them look more successful. So, you know, yeah, a lot of schools are still using the free product out there, Google to for their search bar, but we’re seeing so many more schools scramble off of that because we’re running things like, hey, we can’t control this. We can’t, you know, we have all we’re past the days of 10 blue links, right? If you’re looking for a marketing degree or business degree or comms degree, those are often internal departments as well. So you search for that term and you come up with all these administrative results. And I’ve seen even schools, you know, they have to separate that out. So the best schools are realizing that. I’m realizing, hey, we don’t really know when someone’s searching for a business, are they looking for a business degree, or are they looking for the administrative, business office? So that goes back to that complexity. But yeah, they’re not. They’re trying to keep up. But there’s so many reasons why it’s been so hard for them, and I think, you know, it’s just a challenge that we have to tackle in a lot of different ways.

Ronald Barba  16:07  

I want to throw it back out to the audience. You know, based on everything you’ve heard so far, what have you guys experienced? Is this what you are seeing at your institutions? Are there any questions that you have so far for our panelists that we can try to answer for you, but yeah, it’d be really helpful for us to kind of understand, kind of, you know, where is everyone right now, and kind of, what does that progression look like? So, you know, when we are coming to an institution and we hear that, hey, we, we do want to try to figure out how to improve this. What can those improvements look like, right? And so how does an institution approach that? Corey, I want to shoot this one to you, because I know at TCU, you’ve done a lot of really great work of really trying to revamp the whole digital experience with those different user buckets in mind. So can you talk through, kind of how you kind of overhauled that whole experience and what that looked

Corey Reed  17:02  

like? Sure, so I’ve been in this role for about seven and a half years now with the university, and when I first started my priority task was really addressing digital accessibility concerns, right? And so I started by taking a look at the oldest sites that we had, which was one of the oldest websites in our network. So I wanted to take a look at where our core web properties were right. People tended to say like the TCU website, and I was looking at it behind the scenes going, they don’t understand the complexity of what they’re asking us to do, right? So at first, I had to get my arms around it, and then, like you would do with any large, kind of daunting project, you try to understand the full scope and then break it down into pieces. So we split it into basically a three year plan to say here how many pieces of this project we think that we could do in year one, year two, year three, try to prioritize it based on traffic, right? And then with each one of those projects that we took on, we would go through a content strategy framework where we try to understand, for this particular piece of the web network, this slice of the pie, who are those top audiences? Is this principally prospective students and their families? Is this a little bit more internal? You know, this is serving current students. What are those top tasks? And then within those top tasks, we try to make the content around those that answered and supported those top tasks as clean, as friendly to the robots, as I like to say, so take a look at it and say, Do we have the HTML tagging Correct? Is there? Is there more that we could do to this type of information to help other technologies understand it better, right? So when we started this seven and a half years ago, you know, no one, no one out in the public is really talking about AI yet, but people were talking about search, right? Seo was still a very top of mind kind of thing. And also, voice search was becoming more popular. Marketers were liking, like to talk about voice search, and what’s that going to mean? Amazon, Echo, you know, how do we talk to our kitchen table speaker and get it to answer questions about TC? Like, that’s a great question. I have no idea. Let’s find out. Let’s dig into that and understand it. And that really started a journey that has paid dividends. It is today because it’s trying to think about your content, deeper than just surface level. So everyone likes to look at Photoshop style comps of pages and go, Okay, I like how big the logo is, I like the colors, I like the fonts. But we spent a lot more time thinking about, what does it look like behind the scenes? What is it? What are the tags look like? You know, how are we structuring this data in a way that it can carry more meaning and context? And that’s really helped with organic search. It’s helped with Site Search, and it’s, you know, helped with Voice Search, and it also helps with AI and it, it has really helped us with digital accessibility. So it’s really paid off to spend some more time looking behind the curtain to try to understand how we’re formatting things behind the scenes. And then we’ve just done that on every project. So there’s the two phases, you know, our design, our designer and our graphic designers talk a lot about making sure we have that branded experience just the way that we want, and then we spend more time thinking about, you know, are we using the right markup? Is everything clean and modern and machine accessible? Right? Because I could my, my boss thinks that I’m being a little aggressive, but I’m like, at some point, people will stop browsing websites, and they’ll think, Oh, how quaint, and how passe that is to think that I’m going to navigate your menu. I’d rather just give them a big search box right on the home page and say, like Google did. When did Google do that? Right? The google.com has been like that for a long, long time. It’s just a big page with a giant search box, and it’s like, what do you want to know that’s on the internet? You go to ChatGPT, what do you get? You get a prompt that says, What do you want to know about life? I mean, I just think that that’s the new paradigm that’s coming, and it makes me sad, because I was trained, you know, as a graphic designer. I think I’m a visual person. I think in pixels, right? I like that part of it. I still have a passion for that piece of it, and it’ll still exist, but I know that that’s sort of like me wanting to tell Ronald a one minute story instead of giving you a three second answer.

Ronald Barba  22:45  

Depends on how engaging the story is, right? Jeff, I mean, what are you seeing in terms of what other institutions are kind of doing that maybe are working really well, versus some approaches that aren’t working as great. I love

Jeff Dillon  23:02  

listening to Corey’s story. So, you know, I started talking about this earlier, about, like, implementing a solution that you can have some control over, like Corey talking about, let’s make sure our content is really structured. Well, you know, there’s so many people, there’s a myth that Cory even comes to dispel there, that your search is just being used by external people or by internal people like it’s only people that are here. Everyone else is going to be using AI tools. So I want to, I want to dispel that. And Corey was saying, Yeah, academic programs are being searched. So when people are getting to your search now, or your home page, or your search, they’re probably a bit more qualified. They’re a little more interested, because they’ve already done all the research through all these other tools elsewhere. So we’re seeing, working with dozens of institutions or more over the last year that they are getting 10s of 1000s of searches on their search, on their homepage. So it’s, it’s, it’s a tool. It’s almost that last mile that’s not being addressed, like we’re doing all these, all this SEO and this social media, but your content is your biggest asset. And we know it’s kind of messy, right? We all acknowledge everyone’s saying, you know, we have the data to back this up, that they know they’re not delivering a great website experience, but they’re kind of paralyzed. And what we’re saying here is, this is the low hanging fruit. The ROI is huge, and it’s so what I’m seeing schools do well is when they realize that, yeah, search can really help us. They’re picking, you know, there’s a couple things they’re doing. They’re saying, let’s create an exemplar, you know, search result page. So the people know, like, Okay, wow, I just searched for nursing. And here’s the nursing and here’s the nursing programs. But guess what? There’s a link for the faculty too. There’s the nursing faculty. They have 40 faculty in nursing, so they weren’t looking for that. But we can build value in and say, Well, I just built more credibility for my program, because I showed everything related to that nursing degree. And so we’re seeing schools even use them. We have some data where schools aren’t tapping into this data, where they can get to like, who’s not getting what they want, no results, searches. That’s huge, and Corey has some stories about that. But if programs are being searched, and if they’re not finding anything while looking for an academic program, we’ve seen schools that are investigating adding that to their curriculum because it’s so highly searched. So doing that with using your search data to make strategic decisions is probably the big thing that we’re seeing. More and more schooled, especially over the last year, they’re realizing this is a gold mine, like we have. We have this on her site, so that makes this experience more intuitive for the end user. So getting access to the data to use, to use it for your own data driven decisions, and then making that experience more more elegant and more efficient on the front end is this way we love having Corey here, because we love how TC is using their search and it’s great to show that

Ronald Barba  25:59  

that’s a really great point that you bring up in terms of, you know, it is the value of the data and forming kind of your strategy at an institution with the data that has been provided to you through kind of the search function and kind of enhanced functions that is super valuable, especially as you know, colleges do try to navigate some really tough challenges coming up. So right now, we’re gonna launch a poll for the audience shortly. Take some time to provide a response to that, but while that is up, we let’s answer one of the questions from the audience. So for both of you guys, how do we get our leadership and faculty members to understand the purpose of the college website, and then and that bullets are better than paragraph after paragraph, so I’m assuming kind of, kind of around content design of a website. Yeah, I mean,

Jeff Dillon  26:59  

Rory, you want to start with that one or

Corey Reed  27:03  

Sure, I just assume, Jeff, that you solved this because you moved it. I would love to have a 100% reliable way to convince people of what a good content strategy means, and why it makes a lot of sense and how to write for the web. So my web team, we’re housed inside of the central marketing and communication division, and so I have some colleagues that will work with me on a project and support me in speaking to the principles like best practices for writing for the web, one of the biggest challenges that we face pretty much with each project, is to convince people that the primary audience for most of the public facing Web network is for prospective students and their families, you would think that would be less challenging of an argument to make, but you would be wrong, at least in tcu’s case, like there’s so many people that feel like the internal audiences are the ones that matter the most, and obviously they do matter, right? We need to answer people’s questions. But I think reaching out for some there’s a lot, there are a lot of great resources out there, you know, places like the Chronicle places, there’s a lot of market research out there that will validate and support the fact that you do need to bulletize your content. You do need to pare it down, you know, reduce those reading times to make things more snackable, right? Because, like I mentioned earlier, we’re seeing that time on site that the average session duration continues to go down, right, but we’re still seeing good conversion. So that just means that people need those interactions to be to the point, right. And so I would just lean on that, because faculty respond to research. So if you can find good research, and you can address this objectively with data. I think they tend to respond more favorably to that than just going in as a war of opinions, right? Because I don’t win those.

Jeff Dillon  29:33  

I gotta add on to that one too, because this is kind of a buzz word out there, I know, but it really does start with, like, you know, improving the maturity of your digital governance, whatever that means for your school. And I was somewhat successful with this in my last role where giving campus wide representation to say, Okay, we own the homepage. Who is it for? And having that bring those discussions down a level, if you can, to get some consensus, because it even used to be we couldn’t agree on whether it was for internal. Were external audiences. Back in the day, most schools realized, okay, it’s not in one page, it’s not internal, but it’s easier said than done, but it’s possible.

Ronald Barba  30:10  

Great. All right, so let’s end the poll, and let’s see the results. All right. Jeff Corey, I mean, does any of this surprise you or, I mean, any insights you guys have for this?

Jeff Dillon  30:26  

No, I not surprising if we look at limited step and budget and content updates leading the way. I want to point out this kind of goes along with we’ve realized in this research that there’s a, I would call it an agility gap. So content updates falling behind. That’s really hard when we have so many people managing content. So that kind of talks to that in that sometimes it takes over a week to get content updated through our research by, you know, you’ll get the report. It’s a huge number of people cannot update contact quickly, and that matters for search too, not just getting web pages update, but when things may be taken down quickly or added quickly. I think none of us are surprised about limited staff or budget. That one’s always pretty high, but even more right now, right we have to do more with less. So we think this is a pretty relevant conversation. What do you think? Corey,

Corey Reed  31:25  

I agree. And I think the other challenge that isn’t always reflected in this is people will often ask like, how do I What can I do to get my project moved up in the priority list, or, How can I accelerate my project? I know you, you all are busy. How can we move my project forward? I have a little budget. Could we, you know, team up with someone to help and in some of these, some of these content challenges are difficult to try to outsource, in some cases, to try to expedite a project, because for something like content updates, you need input from the subject matter experts in order to make the content updates right. They’re not all just things that just anyone from outside could come and help with. And oftentimes, getting the time and attention of those subject back matter experts is kind of more where the project bottlenecks are, right? All our internal projects suffer from this where it’s like, I know you’re busy. I mean, you have classes to teach, you have research to work on. You have, you know, administrative responsibilities and things. But I really need to know how to update this content, right? Or let me help you to pare it down, or to archive it or repurpose it. So I’d just say that that would be the one thing. Not everything is curable with budget, right? Some it’s sort of like the myth of the man hour, or like, you know, takes, takes a, you know, a human baby takes nine months to incubate. You can’t just add eight more people and get the baby in a month. You know, they’re just some sort of things that can’t be accelerated. It’s also a challenge. So

Ronald Barba  33:20  

one thing that I found really fascinating about kind of the study and going through, you know, in kind of working on this report, was, you know, Jeff, you had brought up the notion of, kind of, like agility and needing to be fast and Corey, you know, you really kind of just talked about, you know, there is, you know, we have small teams and small kind of designated people to work on certain things, and we need to know who’s in charge of what, and kind of who’s doing what. And one of the things I find fascinating, what I find interesting is kind of, when we’re taking into consideration, kind of where we are right now in higher ed, and the challenges the higher ed is facing, it is this kind of the looking at the evolving role of the marketing function within the institution itself, right? Because I think increasingly, as we’ll see, you know, enrollment and marketing will really just have a tough battle ahead. And so as we are, kind of moving forward. Where are you seeing? Kind of the marketing function plays a greater role in enrollment and kind of, what are the opportunities for them? How can they try to fight for, you know, a bigger voice and try to get attention from university leadership?

Jeff Dillon  34:42  

That’s a great question. I think what we’ve seen over the last few years is that marketing, it wasn’t the case five plus years ago, 10 years ago, where you know it was the IT department would say, hey, come get trained on the new system, like they’re kind of driving the show. It’s not. Way marketing not only has a seat at the table, but they need to really be bringing solutions to the campus they know, like, what, what CRM they need, what search tool they need to be on the edge of that. So it’s probably a little bit intimidating sometimes, because maybe they’re not used to that, but they’re very data driven. Marketers are very data driven, like we want to see results. So that’s where, that’s where we can connect this, you know, this initiative to say, this could be your, your low hanging fruit, to really make some progress and really convert more of your prospective students. There’s different types of things we want them to do on our website. We can set up, we can track that. So I think, you know, I think there’s, there’s somewhat of a, of a plan they can follow is start gathering the data now and then. We can, you can, you know, if you don’t have it, there’s a problem, right? Often, you might not have a data, but get started getting your search data now and then, find what are your goals, and really map out what you’re trying to do,

Unknown Speaker  36:14  

or you got me to add, or, well,

Corey Reed  36:15  

yeah, I was just going to say that we had mentioned earlier that we do live user testing, and that’s been very insightful for us. In a similar vein, search data being able to have helpful real time search data of the on site search right so we can get something like Google Search Console to see what kind of organic inbound traffic’s coming in through Google. And that’s interesting, and that tells us a lot about things like how familiar people are, right? Are these all branded searches that are coming in? But when we look at our on site search analytics, it’s really like being able to peek over someone’s shoulder unobtrusively and understand what they’re looking for, and then to know with pretty decent accuracy if they’re finding it or not finding it. And then I can take that data, and I can then go to the marketing team or the content owners and say, here’s a gap here, here are things that are getting a decent amount of search volume. People are looking for this. They’re asking these questions, what can we do to fill in these gaps? And that’s amazingly helpful, right? If you want to increase, enhance the customer experience of your website, knowing what people are looking for and not finding it can be more informative and helpful than just keeping an eye on what they are finding. Right? If you’re just looking at page views on key landing pages and you’re like, hey, great. I’m doing such a nice job. I built a great landing page. But if you can see search analytics that say people are looking for this campus resource or that faculty member or this academic program page or what have you, but not finding it, then that’s a pain point. That’s something they might not report to you, might just be frustrated and leave. But now you know that there’s a gap. Now you know that there’s a problem that can be solved, and then you can go hunt down the person that could best answer that question. So if someone comes and asks again, there won’t be a gap.

Jeff Dillon  38:32  

And when you think about it, when you talk like when you’re talking about search data, you’re that’s direct data versus indirect data, like page views and, you know, Geo, geo information, keyword rankings device, that’s good data, but when you have someone on your search bar that they’re telling you exactly what they want. So I think that’s really important. One of the findings in the survey also was that 64% of these respondents never look at their top queries. There’s top search queries and 90% 92% ignore their no results term. So those are two starting points, I think, you know, make sure we ‘re getting that data consistently.

Ronald Barba  39:14  

When we think about kind of just the sheer amount of data that these on site search systems need to go through, where can artificial intelligence and machine learning kind of fit into that and kind of help improve that? Right? Whether that is happening currently or kind of what is possible for institutions to implement,

Jeff Dillon  39:37  

we both have opinions on this Corey,

Corey Reed  39:40  

right? I think we’re fairly in alignment. Jeff and I, we’ve just had some conversations about this, so I think AI can be a huge time saver. There’s some things that feel like magic with AI, right? One of the things that is largely large. Large language models excel at pattern matching. Right to be able to go and comb through giant piles and mountains of data and tell you what the patterns are, so that I don’t have to suss that out and read the tea leaves. But where the robots often get things wrong, sometimes laughably wrong, is where they want to connect the dots. Like, sometimes they want to connect all the dots. And you just need some human oversight to say, I can just tell at a glance I don’t want to make that connection, right? I see where you might be going with that. But don’t make that connection. Because if you say, Hey, you search for this and sort of hit a dead end, go search for this other thing, I can tell you, like Jeff, don’t click on that thing. It’s also going to be an odd set of search results, right? Because maybe institutionally, we don’t have a great answer for that yet, right? That’s still one of those gaps. So don’t encourage people to click on another thing that’s going to produce another odd set of results and so well, I just think that that’s the beautiful, most powerful and successful combination is when you let ai do the brute force for you. Suggest those patterns like I think that the robot tells you? I think that these matches make good sense, and then have someone like Ronald or Jeff go in and say, yes, no, yes, no, that makes sense. That’s a great fit. Hey, that’s great insight. Or let’s hold off on that for a minute, maybe tomorrow, but not today.

Jeff Dillon  41:43  

Yep. So I think higher ed is kind of enamored by like, AI they’re using in their personal life, but like, what Corey is saying, like, we need a human in the loop, and so we call this practical AI, and we’ve been using machine learning and AI for years at search stacks. And there’s two ways to look at it. If you look at generative AI, which is what everyone thinks about, right? I want everything summarized for me. Look how many schools are doing that right now. There’s not many. A lot of people probably can’t find one. Why is that? It’s because what Corey is talking about, we need a human in the loop. So we’re strategically working on that, on the administrative console, into our product, to allow like, let’s say all these no results. Let’s suggest like, what could happen like, with all these no reason searches. Let’s suggest some, some results for people to just say, Yes, I want to connect that right now and in the future. And when I first thought that like, this is the way to do it, like, why don’t we just make it happen? And I love that we have humans in the loop. Because you often see, there’s so much jargon in higher ed, you know, you want an algorithm to like, I’ve heard people say, I don’t want to set it, forget it. Well, it doesn’t quite work like that. You do need access to do something. So, you know, looking at the, you know, in the back end of the algorithm, yeah, AI should be used to improve that, but it’s a hybrid approach with using the LLMs, machine learning, but having a human in the loop is kind of our thought, and I

Ronald Barba  43:09  

I think that’s what we’re seeing right now in higher ed specifically. I mean, I was at the EU GSV a couple of weeks ago, and I think the trend now is institutions are more open to using AI, but they want a more active role when integrating AI into various different campus functions, right? And so the whole idea of having a human in the loop is kind of core to higher ed institutions as a whole, when AI is a consideration for universities. So I do want to take some time to answer some of these questions from the audience. We got a bunch of them, so hopefully we can try to tackle as many as we can. The first one. Corey, I’m curious in your projects, do you start with the creative process to define the page structure, or do you start by defining the content and messaging

Corey Reed  44:03  

We sometimes do that in tandem, but we like to always start with content, right? A long time ago, the SEM folks out there said content is king or queen. You know, content is, is the secret sauce, right? That’s your IP that’s your real value proposition. Is your content. So we always start with what we call the content strategy framework piece. But that doesn’t mean you have to. You have to do them in a waterfall way. Sometimes we set a couple of folks on the task of working through the content strategy, while we also go and do some work on page structure. And when you think of, when I talk about page structure, I’m really thinking about document types, more than just a page layout, right? So I. Um, you know, we used to think about developing a theme with certain types of pages. This is full width. This one has a right sidebar. This one has a left sidebar. But we really kind of separated that out quite a bit. And so we think of more in terms of, if you look at Rich Snippets, which is what Google’s branded it or schema, you can come up with things like, this is an article, this is a product, this is a program. This is a person, right? This is a person’s profile, so making sure that we have a technical format or a go to for different types of content on the technical side. Then as the content team works through their plan, and they say, here’s what we think the site needs to look like, or the department needs to look like, and it has these types of information in it, we can then map that to what we want the HTML to look like on the back side. So hopefully that is, that answered the question that we’re looking for

Ronald Barba  46:05  

A quick follow up. Corey, have you seen significant benefit in switching from a navigation bar in your header to the menu pop up?

Corey Reed  46:14  

Well, one it’s nice because it gives us more real estate. But also, we saw in user testing that people are fairly conditioned now, I think, to look for the collapsed menu. So even when we had it open in front of them, often they would completely miss it, or they would scan over it and not see that the menu was there. But when they trigger the menu and they get it to pop up, they tend to look at it top down and that’s been a little bit more successful. We haven’t changed that user experience across the board yet. That’s that’s going to that roll out is going to take a little while, so we still have both, but we definitely have seen that kind of reinforced through our user testing that people are just they’re more successful with the sort of nested burger knave paradigm right now,

Ronald Barba  47:13  

we have one question here from audience member, as you mentioned, we operate in a highly decentralized environment, with enrollment processes taking place on specific platforms and academic programs presented across various College home pages as a faculty or staff member involved in an academic program, what are your best recommendations for managing our web presence In a way that effectively supports and improves enrollment?

Jeff Dillon  47:42  

Well, that’s a tough question. But, you know, I would say, you know, when you’re so decentralized like that, you know, focusing on the numbers you’re trying to reach, and it goes back to the data again, and, you know, is it something that can be you know, a lot of these platforms can share information, and there’s integrations we can talk about, but I think having insight into what’s happening into in all these different pockets, helps when there’s visibility across the organization where, you know, we can all have access to this set of data, and maybe there’s a little bit of a healthy camaraderie I’ve seen in some schools, that’s one strategy. But yeah, I might have to a whole separate meeting to tackle that one. I

Ronald Barba  48:42  

I mean, yeah, it’s a tough question, right? And specifically for someone who is faculty and a person who manages an academic program, they may not typically have kind of the day to day access to kind of websites or various things, and so I can see that as a very tough challenge that they’re facing. Corey, I’ve got a few more questions for you here. Corey mentioned that he belongs to a communications department at TCU. Is this where website responsibility typically resides? Where does the IT influence come in and do communications or it, I guess, do communications, or does communications, or the IT department, have control over website design, implementation and maintenance budget?

Corey Reed  49:35  

So the answer is a little bit nuanced and complicated, like not to use that as a cop out, but for the most part, my web management team, we provide that top level oversight where we’re the point people for a. Centralized piece of the governance as far as digital accessibility, code, quality, branding, branding, enforcement, that sort of thing we control. We kind of directly and actively manage the highest traffic pieces of the public facing the internet. But then we have partners around campus that they more actively control pieces of it as well. It plays for us, plays a supporting role. They work a lot on the PeopleSoft back end, right? They work to help us with purchasing. We coordinate some different purchasing decisions. They always weigh in, right? IT security, it purchasing, they always weigh in on any kind of technology choices that we make, but for the most part, the day to day management, the design, the coding, those sort of things. It all falls to my giant team of five people

Ronald Barba  51:11  

I think we might have time for one or two more questions, and then we are done for both of you. Are there any audiences less prone to rely on search for site navigation, and if so, do you find that audience specific navigation and content works better for them? For example, parents and I think Corey, you touched a little bit earlier about this, but I’m wondering if, Jeff, you could shed some Yeah,

Jeff Dillon  51:35  

I’ve seen this when I was at my last University, and it was some internal folks that were used to doing the same thing over and over. They would have the process, and they, we would change the site, and their nav path would go away, and that would be pretty challenging and frustrating for them. I would just skew a little bit to the internal people who, you know, sometimes it’s like, you know, could be a generational thing too, I would say, but yeah.

Corey Reed  52:07  

And then I would throw out that in my previous role, it was outside of higher ed, and we worked on some personalization where, where it could go up to and include the audience, segmented navigation. And I think I saw a lot of what Jeff was just mentioning. Sometimes, if someone sees it happen, there can be cognitive dissonance about, wait, what happens? Something weird is going on. Hey, Sally, hey, Fred, are you seeing this? And they pull it up, and they’re like, No, mine looks like this and that there’s power there, but it’s really easy to get kind of trip over yourself when you’re trying to actually tailor the navigation itself. I think in general, navigation design is a challenging discipline, and like Jeff said before, I think oftentimes we ask that to do too much.

Ronald Barba  53:11  

I think we are done with time for Q and A, Jeff, I think you have a few things to present. Yeah,

Jeff Dillon  53:21  

thanks for handing over. Just to reiterate, some of the few most interesting findings in this report. So 93% of respondents believe that improving their website will improve student success, but only 90% believe they’re delivering a great website experience today. 50% recognize their search frustrates users with their relevant or outdated information. So the thing about search is people often won’t report results with search, it’s a nuanced interaction, right? It’s like, if you don’t have it, they’re not going to think your search is broken. They’re just going to bounce and then 72% of respondents to the survey plan to advocate for AI tools to improve the digital experiences so early, AI adoption, I think, will separate leaders from the laggards in this digital experience. And then some overarching key takeaways, I would say for today, if you like, I leave you with anything: that great user experience, great digital experience is still a unicorn. Your homepage might look great, but it might not be hitting the mark, and every missed click can be a lack of conversion, and Site Search is the Forgotten first party data gold mine students are literally typing their needs into your search. Marketing can often just let those go into a black hole they might have. Don’t have access to that. And there’s data in the report about that as well. And then lastly, you know, AI appetite is huge, but the readiness is tiny and practical AI is going. Of our approach to that. So thank you. I would love to talk to anyone who wants to explore any more about their digital challenges, and thanks for having us on.