JISC XCRI-CAP Project

Before Christmas we put together a bid for JISC funding around the implementation of XCRI-CAP formatted course data. Many, many intensive submission writing sessions later and we're pleased to say that we have been awarded the funding! This is a brilliant project with some very interesting potential outcomes. The first being the automated process of passing well formatted course data to our website in a feed format shared by multiple univerisites.

The idea behind this is ultimately to create the possibility of a 'compare the uni' type website that will allow students to directly compare the same course across multiple institutions. This has huge advantages for potential applicants and could mean a more engaged and informed application.

So, all we need to do now is start mapping out how we're going to get to that point. A fair proportion of the work will be focusing on internal processes that will need to be in place in order for the system to work. so, whilst the display of courses on the website may not immediately change we're be busily building in the admin side!

Watch this space, there's going to be some rather interesting outcomes over the next 12 months!

Targeting trial complete!

Three weeks ago I started a trial using the Google DFP system for targeting the banners on our homepage for our internal audience, something of a try it an dsee approach.

Well, the good news is that it has worked rather well! Using the IP check with DFP we targeted anyone within the beds.ac.uk domain. This has reaped some interesting results:

 

Up to a 1.1% CTR on internal banners which has been great for promotion of our internal services!

Below is a screenshot of the external site as seen by an internal viewer:

 

If you compare this to the live external site (beds.ac.uk) then you can see that the messaging is very different!

The only outstanding question now is how much more can we do with the system, text snippets that are changed on IP or country details would work or maybe looking at the idea of selling some spare impressions off...?

Our social media activity is now award winning!

After a rather speedy taxi ride to the Oxford Belfry on Friday night the UoB digital team attended the CIPR PRide Awards (yes, the uppercase R is on purpose)! The evening was fantastic and we walked away with a Silver Award for 'Best use of Social Media'. A fantastic endorsement of the work that the digital team have put in over the last 12 months and hopefully enough of a reward to spur us all on to win again next year!

Congratulations to the team, we'll now need to find more space on the wall alongside our other awards!

It's time to target our content!

With the launch of the new homepage design on beds.ac.uk we also rolled in a new banner management system (Google AdManager) at the same time. This runs the four banner buttons underneath the Course Finder search. The idea initially was to look at running UK & International variants of banner content using the geographic filtering options available within the system. For example, if you are coming in from China you would see a different banner to someone visiting from London. Clever stuff, especially as the creatives can be totally different and draw on local preferences on colour, tone of voice, etc.

But, the option we didn't initially think about was far closer to home! We know from our analytics that the externally facing website receives traffic from our internal audience, current students, staff, etc. So why not target banners for them! AdManager allows us to target on IP address or domain name, so our first trial is to put up a banner, targeted at our internal domain, that points students to their Gmail account.

It's simple to put in place and will allow us to highlight events, services and information to our current students without it interfering with our marketing message to prospective students. A win win situation for all and incredibly easy to implement!

We're on Google+

I've finally created a profile for the University on Google+ anyone know what to use it for yet...

Hello new homepage!

The new homepage is live!

We've made a number of changes to our new homepage:

• More social! Twitter, YouTube & Share/Like buttons are now on the homepage
• Scrolling news articles
• Four new buttons (Google DFP powered)
• Easier navigation to courses

It's been a major tweak rather than a redesign but allows us to present a number of key areas in a much clearer way.

Getting social


We have always been keen to promote our social media channels and so are using 'Share This' to embed a number of social buttons in the footer.

More news!


We've added in a new scroll n the news stories, this replaces the tabbed layout and allows for additional news stories to be displayed.

New button banners

The four new buttons across the middle of the page are running from the DFP Ad Manager system from Google which allows us to keep track of the number of impressions and clicks the banners get. More exciting is that it allows us to run a number of visuals to test which one generates the most clicks with weighting options built in! It also allows us to run banners with scheduling and impression counts on them so no more calendar notes to take banners down!

The part we are most excited about is the geo-targeting options which allows us to localise aspects of the site for our international audience. EU and International banners are substituted in should the visitor be from outside the UK.... genius!

Course links

Alongside the course finder we now include links to the listings for FD, UG and PG courses.


So that's the initial refresh of the homepage done, next on the list is an improvement to the course finder and ideas around how to improve the homepage banner!

Course layout page is now live!

The new course layout page is live on the website!

Following a number of feedback sessions, usability testing and a review of the importance of structuring our data we have rolled out the new course description layout and it's looking great!

You can see a live example here:

http://www.beds.ac.uk/howtoapply/courses/undergraduate/applied-psychology

That's another project ticked off the list, next we're looking at the homepage design!