80-20-ruleBack in July I shared my major takeaway from the AISAP Summer Institute 2012 after listening to Ian Symmonds.

I need to follow the 80/20 Rule!

What is the 80/20 Rule?

According to Ian a high performing admission office should spend 80% of their collective time on action and 20% of the collective time on analysis and reflection.

So Far I’ve Failed

I have to say that in the fall, when my office was less busy than it is now, I was doing pretty well at following the 80/20 rule. Even though my time split wasn’t exactly 80/20, I was pleased that I was taking time each week and month to reflect on and analyze our work in the admissions office.

Since coming back from the Winter Holiday, I’m ashamed to say I haven’t spent a single minute to step back and think about our work. We’re a small office, and time is valuable, but I promised myself in July that I would stick to the 80/20 rule for the whole year.

I could even make the case that now it is even more important to take a few minutes and analyze our efforts to see if there are any gaps, problems, or even opportunities, that we need to address.

Will You Join Me?

Are you following the 80/20 rule? If not, let’s do it together.

I’ve always found strength in numbers and if we do this together my hope is that it will become a habit for both of us.

Let’s begin…

This month I’d like us to both take a look at our Google Analytics (or the web statistics package your school uses) and note and compare a few metrics I’ll list below. If you aren’t familiar with Google Analytics you should be! I encourage you to make an appointment with your IT department to sit down and look at this information together.

Set the time frame for the current month

  1. Click on Traffic Sources > Sources > Referrals (See what website are sending you the most web traffic.)
  2. Click on Traffic Sources > Search > Organic (See what keywords people are using to find your website.)
  3. Click on Audience > Mobile >Overview (See how many people are looking at your website on a mobile device.)
  4. Click on Content > Site Content > All Pages (This will show you the top ten visited pages for your selected time frame.)

Now click on the gray triangle next to the date range in the top right hand corner of the window and check “Compare to” and change the selection to previous year and click apply.

This setting will allow you to check all 4 metrics above as they compare year over year.

Your Turn

I hope you’ll consider joining me in following the 80/20 rule and I hope you’ve found this shallow dive into Google Analytics illustrative and informative. If you found something interesting in your analysis with Google Analytics please consider sharing it in the comments section below. I hope that if we are open and share with each other it might make following the 80/20 rule a little easier for each of us.