Schools need more than a digital presence.

They need a site that actively engages potential students and their families, guiding them effectively from visitor to applicant. 

In this post, we’ll dive into how to conduct a school website analysis to improve performance, identify opportunities, and use actionable data to drive meaningful results.

We’ll cover: 

Requirements for Conducting a School Website Analysis

Before jumping into the analysis, there are two key elements you’ll want to keep in mind:

  1. Have a clear question before diving into reports

Approaching reports with a specific question keeps you focused and on track. Think of it as heading to a store with a particular item on your list. Instead of browsing every aisle, you go directly to what you need. This approach not only saves time but also prevents information overload from irrelevant data.

  1. Set Up Conversion Tracking in GA4

While you can still analyze performance without conversion tracking, you’ll be quite limited. Setting it up as soon as possible is key, as it lets you monitor the most important actions on your website, like form submissions or applications. For example, if people are filling out your contact form, improving this process can really strengthen your lead generation efforts. Instead of trying to improve everything, you can focus on what directly supports your website’s goals and make a real impact on your overall performance.

For this you’ll first need to clarify your goals.

Do you want to increase inquiries, encourage event sign-ups, or boost application submissions? Or All of them? 

Clear goals will guide your analysis and help you focus on what truly matters.

  1. Do your best to know your averages for your key metrics if you have enough data.

    For example:

    Number of Active users or Total users per month (or week)
    Number of pageviews (ex: Views for a sales page)
    Number of key events (ex: generate_lead, downloads etc.)

Measuring this data helps you quickly identify performance trends, providing valuable insights for further investigation.

How to Conduct a School Website Analysis: A Step-by-Step Guide

Most school websites today are powered by GA4, so this guide will walk you through analyzing your website using GA4’s tools and reports. Remember that there’s nothing set in stone regarding data interpretation. However, this is how the structure of our analysis generally is:

  1. Analyze Traffic
  2. Analyze Referral Sources
  3. Explore User Behavior Insights
  4. Analyzing Your Content
  5. Automating Your School Website Analysis
  6. GA4 AI: Analytics Insights

We’ll explore each of these in detail in their own sections.

1. Analyze Traffic

Traffic Overview

A quick health check for any school’s website often starts with understanding how many people are visiting and where they’re coming from. It’s something we all do to get a general sense of performance. 

  1. Go to Reports
  2. Click Reports snapshot


Note: take advantage of the Insights card, which uses artificial intelligence to identify anomalies and spikes in your data. More on AI later in this post.

Traffic Sources

Two key reports to analyze your website’s traffic are the User Acquisition and the Traffic Acquisition reports.

  1. User Acquisition Report

This report shows the traffic sources for users visiting your website for the first time. It highlights the channels that brought new users, making it helpful in understanding how first-time visitors discover your site

  1. Traffic Acquisition Report

Unlike the User Acquisition Report, this one includes all users, both first-time and returning visitors. It provides a broader view of your traffic, showing the most popular sources overall.

You’ll usually spend more time analyzing the Traffic Acquisition Report to answer questions like What are our most popular traffic sources?” 

However, if you focus on understanding what drives new visitors, the User Acquisition Report is where you’ll want to look.

To access them, go to: 

  1. Reports
  2. Expand the Acquisition section
  3. Chose either User Acquisition or Traffic Acquisition

How to Analyze Traffic Reports

Let’s look at the Traffic Acquisition report to understand better where our users are coming from and how our marketing channels perform.

First, you want to change the grouped channels into ones broken down even further. 

  1. Click the primary dimension called Session primary channel group (Default Channel Group)

  1. Then select Session source / medium

Now let’s do some analysis. 

The first step is identifying which traffic source brings the most users or visits. The Traffic Acquisition report measures this by sessions, which you can think of as the overall traffic volume, though it’s not exactly the same as users. 

To answer this question, focus on the Sessions column and sort the data using the arrows to rank traffic sources in ascending or descending order.

Next, analyze Engagement. 

Engagement can mean different things to different people. To illustrate, it could be a button click or a scroll. 

However, you can look at Engaged Sessions and Average Engagement Time per Session for a quick overview, although I usually focus on Average Engagement Time to see which channel brings the most engaged users. 

Without changing anything on the table, you can already spot which channels outperform the overall average.

In the following image, for instance, if the average engagement time is 59 seconds, and google /cpc (paid search) shows a significantly higher average, this channel performs well.

On the other hand, if a channel is underperforming, you’ll want to explore why and think about improving it based on what works for your top-performing channels.

Finally, move on to Events to determine which channels users who fulfill your website’s main objectives come from (e.g., users who purchase, click a specific button, etc.). You can look at either All Events in the Event count or Key Events columns.

Before drilling down, glance at the columns to see which traffic sources contribute the most to events in general. 

We can see google / organic and google / cpc contribute to most Events:


To get more specific, click on the arrows next to All Events to filter by individual events and analyze which traffic sources drive specific event interactions.

  1. Click on an the drop down arrow for All Events

  1. Select your event (we’ll chose course_file_download)

Do the same for the Revenue column.

However, many higher education institutions don’t have revenue data as they use more lead generation strategies.

2. Analyzing Referral Sources

We’ll stay within the same traffic report as in the previous section. However, due to its importance, we believe referral traffic deserves its own section.

Referral traffic in GA4’s Session source/Medium dimension is frequently overlooked but indicates potential partnerships.

Even if the traffic numbers are low, the sources driving these users can lead to collaborations that drive more qualified traffic in the future.

By experience, we often notice that these referral channels bring higher engagement across industries, not just in our example.

These websites bring traffic to us and should be contacted for collaboration. As you can see, they get some of the highest engagement in terms of time spent on our site: 

  • vastocean.blog
  • oceanrifts.ch
  • deapsea.org

3. Explore User Behavior Insights

Tools like Microsoft Clarity provide deeper insights into how users interact with your website. Clarity helps you understand why users do what they do by giving session recordings, heatmaps, and other analytics features.

With session recordings, for example, you can view videos of how users navigate your site, click on specific elements, or scroll through pages. This helps you pinpoint areas of frustration, like slow load times or confusing layouts.

You can also use heat maps, which will color your pages with different gradings, pinpointing where you need to focus your attention. 

Identify Frustrations and Opportunities

By reviewing user sessions, you can identify where users get stuck or confused. You can also find areas where visitors show high interest, providing opportunities to enhance the content or layout to meet their expectations.

Best of all, Microsoft Clarity is free and doesn’t affect your website’s load speed, making it an ideal tool for schools looking to enhance their digital presence without breaking the budget. What’s more impressive is that you can use its built-in AI to summarize the main points. 

In case you’re wondering, Microsoft Clarity is free!


4. Analyzing Your Content

Analyzing your site’s content is critical to understanding your visitors’ experience. In the context of schools, this analysis is even more essential, as the content directly influences prospective students’ decisions and the overall perception of your institution.

Crucial types of content include program details, faculty profiles, admission guidelines, brochures, and blogs that showcase the school’s achievements, culture, or student life.

Tracking how users engage with these pages can reveal which areas of your site resonate most with prospective students and parents.

For example, high engagement on program pages may indicate strong interest in specific courses. File downloads, such as brochures, signal that users are actively considering your school.

There are two reports in GA4 that are especially useful for this:

  1. Landing page report
  2. Pages and screens report

To access these reports, go to: 

  1. Reports
  2. Expand the Engagement section
  3. Select Landing page or Pages and Screens

Pages and screens vs Landing page reports

The Pages and screens report provides insights into all the pages users visit on your site, regardless of whether they were the first page viewed. This is a report where we usually spend the most time when it comes to content analysis.

This report answers the question, “What are our most popular pages?” or “Which content category resonates most with our audience?”

The Landing Page report in GA4 shows you the top entry points to your website. These are the first pages users land on when they visit your website. You can consider it as users’ first impressions of your institution, so optimizing them is crucial.

How to Analyze Content Reports (With Examples)

To accurately spot trends, review at least 3 months of data. For a more comprehensive understanding of seasonal patterns or long-term performance, it’s recommended to analyze 6 months to a year of data.

Without making any adjustments to the table, you can quickly identify your top pages based on Views. By default, the report is sorted by page views, and we can see that the About Us and Meet Our Experts (faculty) pages rank high in both views and active users. The homepage, often the top result, can be excluded from the analysis.

The top-performing pages include:

  • /about-us/mission-ocean-science/
  • /faculty/meet-our-experts/

Interestingly, these pages also show strong engagement, with 1 minute 21 seconds for About Us and 56 seconds for the faculty page. Although slightly below the overall average of 1 minute 37 seconds, they perform better than most other pages.

What does this tell us?

It suggests that users are highly interested in learning more about who we are, making the About Us page a key opportunity to build trust. This page shouldn’t just focus on us but also how we can help our users. It is an opportunity to build credibility and guide users toward conversions. 

You’ll find many good articles onlines detailing how to optimize the about page such as this post on How Do You Write Perfect “About Us” Page Content? or that one on How to Create the Perfect About Page

Note: Remember to apply the same analysis method we’ve used for traffic sources to your other reports for a comprehensive understanding.

Optimize Underperforming Pages

Sort by metrics like Views, Users, and engagement to see which pages perform best and which need improvement. Compare low-performing pages to your top performers and apply similar strategies to boost their effectiveness. Low performance means pages with lower metrics, such as pages with low page views, etc.

Evaluate Engagement

See how long users are spending on each page and if they are interacting with key elements (videos, forms, etc.). If certain pages aren’t performing well, consider revamping their content or layout.

Identify Content Contributing to Your School’s Goals

In both the Landing Page and Pages and Screens reports, you can filter by event name to see which pages contributed most to specific events. This helps you understand the correlation between pages and key actions, like application form submissions or newsletter sign-ups.

To get more specific, click on the arrows next to All Events to filter by individual events and analyze which traffic sources drive specific event interactions.

  1. Click on an the drop down arrow for All Events or Key Events

  1. Select the event you’re interested in.

We recommend adding your biggest promotions to the pages with the most traffic, as they will be seen by the largest audience.

5. GA4 AI: Analytics Insights

Analytics Insights in GA4, powered by Artificial Intelligence, is a powerful tool often brushed over quickly but can provide precious insights in seconds.

Instead of navigating multiple reports, GA4’s Analytics Insights can promptly answer critical questions about your institution’s web data.

With Analytics Insights, you can effortlessly detect anomalies, spikes, or trends. It immediately highlights important events, such as a sudden increase in traffic or unexpected drops in engagement. If something stands out, you can explore further by diving into the detailed reports.

This feature offers a fast and efficient way to monitor your data and identify trends, saving time while ensuring you don’t miss critical insights.

Analytics Insights can be accessed from anywhere in your reports. Then: 

  1. Click the insight icon at the top right of your screen
  1. Select a card of interest
  2. Select one of the common questions

Note: For example, we’re interested in knowing if any new countries bring us revenue that we should optimize for. Therefore, I’ll select the card called Demographics.

  1. Demographics 
  2. Then select the question: What are my top countries by revenue? 

After clicking on the question, this is the insight we see:

6.   Automating Your School Website Analysis

After reading this post, you should clearly understand what needs to be tracked on your site and identify opportunities through various steps. Now that you know what to focus on, you can simplify your process by creating a dashboard displaying the needed metrics. 

While any tool can be used, Looker Studio works particularly well with the Google Marketing Platform and integrates with GA4 and over 1,000 other platforms for free. 

This makes reporting more accessible, allowing you to update the date range and quickly share insights with decision-makers or clients.

Alternatively, you can create custom reports or Explorations in GA4 to build reports that centralize key metrics and simplify repetitive analysis.

We’re not just another agency dabbling in
education…

Our daily work is rooted in the education sector.

With Phygital strategies, we’ve connected thousands of students to higher education institutions, driving both online and offline engagement.

Our solutions increased enrollment, especially for first intakes.

Find out how your school can get the attention it deserves and transform the way current and prospective students engage in a landscape full of distractions and choices.