The purpose of a university website (or network of websites) is to get content delivered to users in a way that meets users’ needs while accomplishing the goals of the organization. To achieve this purpose, you need to identify metrics and use analytics tools to help you measure and iterate as necessary.

However, in decentralized archipelagos, you have some different problems to deal with.

You need to measure not only what your external users are doing but also what your internal users are doing.

Content Measurement

One of the biggest problems is that you have less control over content quality. In some cases, you may not have enough leverage to force the subsidiaries to follow a style guide or use a specific voice. To help alleviate this, expand your scope of what it means to measure content success.

You need to measure beyond what your end users are browsing and reading.

Since you will be auditing content anyway, running that same content through an analysis tool can help you identify content that is, or is not, meeting your guidelines. Using something like URL Profiler, you can measure reading time, grade level, sentiment analysis, and more.

And don’t forget non-digital metrics. How many calls are coming into your call center? What are the most common topics and questions? Many of your subsidiary groups will have information coming in from non-digital sources. Find it. Collect it. Bring it to the table.

The most important thing is to identify the information you need to collect to verify whether you are meeting goals or not. It’s easy to get lost in vanity metrics that look good but don’t mean anything.

Would you trade a 10% drop in page views for a 10% increase in student applications? Of course. That’s not to say page views are unimportant, but make sure you can tie measurements back to goals.

Combine and Analyze

Now you can bring this qualitative data to play alongside your web analytics. You can combine things in interesting ways that can often help you verify goals better than basic analytics would allow.

Here are some example questions you could start asking:

• What is the relationship between time on page and time to read? If something has a 2-minute read time but a 20-second average time on the page, that could indicate a problem.
• What is the relationship between readability and page views? Are users spending less time on content written at a higher page level?
• Do departments whose content averages a higher grade level get more support requests?

Answering these questions, and solving these problems, may require breaking down silos and developing some champions, but the dividends for you and your users will be massive.

Socialize

As you expand your view of what analytics are and how you’re going to bring them together, socialize new priorities throughout the rest of the organization. A great time to start doing this is during the audit process.

As you meet with subsidiary organizations, bring this data to the table. Discuss how it can help make decisions about what content to keep, what content to kill, and what content to combine. Getting stakeholders used to this data now will help you have more success down the road.

You can also socialize these metrics by adding measurements to the content authoring process. In the past, we have worked with development and UX teams to design a way for authors to see their reading time and grade level as they entered content. The whole experience now highlights the importance of the data and keeps it top of mind.

Many subsidiary teams lack data and context to understand how some metrics matter, so socializing it throughout the organization can help reframe their thinking.

Aggregate and Compare

Aggregate the collected data into dashboards that can be sorted and examined. Aggregation is the most powerful thing you can do. You can have per-site dashboards for prioritizing certain improvements, but when you aggregate them to a network-wide dashboard, critical insights can start to bubble to the top.

You can see not just the data but trends. Where are improvements happening, and where are things backsliding? Which sites have the most accessibility issues?

Being able to divide and aggregate this qualitative and quantitative information gives you the tools you need to create action plans and figure out which subsidiaries need the most attention and help.

An Irresistible Carrot

This is where things start to come together. All of the techniques we have talked about coalesce into this point.

Having all of this aggregated data brought to bear against analytics, you can have real data on the impact of bad content and subpar design. You can surface these insights to leadership in a way that is difficult to ignore.

If your umbrella organization can also solve these problems, you have a really delicious-looking carrot.