My name is Paul Prewitt, I'm a marketing and communications professional specializing in e-marketing strategies in Higher Ed. I am the Electronic Communications Coordinator at the University of Arkansas Alumni Association and manage all electronic communications and marketing efforts for alumni & friends.
What the heck are the Pumpkin & the Apple all about though? You probably have heard the comment about comparing Apples to Apples, well that pretty much explains it. I found out a few days back that there is more than one ‘ROI’ Calculation (who would have guessed). As you would expect one is going to be the Pumpkin and the other is the Apple.
What you’ll notice from the above calculation is that it happens to only work for a positive rate of return, meaning that the ROI can never be 0% or Negative. Well we have all probably seen (especially with the current economics) that ROI can be Negative.
For example you spend $500 total to mail out a postcard and only get back $5 in donations (we would hope not but hypothetically speaking). The Pumpkin ROI Calculation would tell you that you get a 1% ROI for the project. However, we all can tell that $5 does not cover the cost of the $500 we spent to produce the mailer… so in short you’d have to consider the $500 a sunk cost for that calculation to work.
This calculation takes the Total Cost and removes it from the Total Revenue (yes I know accountants know that Total Revenue means Earnings – Costs but that is not the words used on the calculation typically) and then we divide that by the Total Cost (remember that multiplying by 100 just makes it a percentage).
So going back to our example of a $5 Revenue and $500 Cost you’ll notice that the ROI is now more accurately showing that we get a -99% ROI. Meaning that we did in fact lose money on this particular project (a great deal of money) and it could be categories as a Never Try this Again appeal.
Next up is the Task Completion score (comparable to Goals in Google Analytics). This is probably the most significant score you can get on the tool as it helps answer tell if visitors completed the goal they came to the site for.
Last up is probably the most complicated portion of the survey but also the very best part too. The "purpose" distribution helps us tell "why" a visitor came and if it was successful visit. Not only based on our predefined purposes/goals but also allowing for the user to define their own.
Although the free version is lacking in exporting tools for the data a little time on ones part and all the collected qualitative data can be pulled out in a usable form. After we get all the data pulled out we can run it through a Tag Cloud generator like www.tagcrowd.com and start learning what is really important to our visitors.
Also, we can see the top user defined purposes (for those not completing their task) for September 2008. The top three are: scholarship, information and alumni.
The above two clouds can defiantly help us to determine what is important to our site visitors and possibly what we should be promoting in the months ahead. Also the clouds can be generated for each of the specific purpose responses (open-ended comments collected).
The most common reason for a redirect is a "Short URL" this is merely turning a really long/confusing website address like www.dartmouth.edu/~alfund/ into something like www.dartmouthcollegefund.org. These are also known as a "Print URL" as they are much easier to "print" on publications or tell someone on the phone. Also a redirect can be used to help show partnerships with other programs like www.uclalumni.net/MasterCard.<?phpSo there you have it now we can track all sorts of redirects both to our site and going to a partner site. Also, since I'm going to be writing a MySQL version of the above script soon if you've got tips, ideas or want a copy just let me know.
//Tracking the User First
$mail_body = "Redirect: ".$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']."\n".
"IP Address: ".$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']."\n".
"Date & Time: ".date("l, F, j, Y h:i:s A")."\n\n".
"Referer: ".$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
mail("you@school.edu", "redirect name", $mail_body, "From: Redirects <redirect@school.edu>");
//Redirect the User Next
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://www.draftmotif.org");
?>
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