Studyabroad.com Newsletter - Volume 35

I. THE NEW STUDYABROADWORLDWIDE.COM - MARK LANDON

The year 2000 has been an extraordinary one for us. Studyabroad.com and Educational Directories Unlimited (EDU) continue to grow and prosper. We settled into our new office space. We grew our staff from 8 to 18 full-time employees. Traffic to Studyabroad.com has practically doubled and traffic to Studyabroad.com and Gradschools.com combined now exceeds about 2.75 million page views per month. We launched GradSchoolFairs.com, a new product. We overhauled Studyabroad.com by introducing the Studyabroad.com Portal Pages, creating an improved, more user-friendly navigation system, and an updating the appearance. And we greatly increased and improved the efficiency of our marketing outreach.

We are very proud of our accomplishments, but we cannot and we will not stand still. Our plans for 2001 are every bit as exciting and ambitious.

In 2001, we will likely double in size again, in terms of staffing, revenue, page views, marketing efforts...even office space. We have exciting new products on the drawing board, and we are planning some more large scale improvements of our existing products.

The first product improvement we will introduce next year is the new and improved StudyabroadWorldwide.com (SAWW). EDU took over the operation of SAWW, a cooperative advertising site, about a year ago. The website features nine participants, all study abroad program providers. Each participant contributes a fixed annual fee which is used to advertise the StudyabroadWorldwide.com site. In 2000, advertising was purchased on College-oriented web sites (Collegeclub.com, VarsityBooks.com and StudentAdvantage.com). The service works by generating traffic to the StudyabroadWorldwide.com home page. This page offers the user a choice of links for the 9 individual study abroad program web sites. While a good amount of traffic has been measured for this program, we are making some serious changes which we hope will result in a tremendous improvement in the value of the service.

In 2001, StudyabroadWorldwide.com will once again offer 9 positions. Each participant will contribute $3000. This time, we will invest primarily in 'pay-per-performance' advertising programs. We will establish an affiliates program, we will use pay-per-click search sites, and do some limited context-based pay per exposure advertising on carefully selected sites. Pay-per-click sites can be very cost-effective, but they require a great deal of upkeep and attention in order to work properly. Our marketing department will monitor and make necessary adjustments to the ad campaign throughout the year.

Another change for SAWW this year is that each time a user clicks through to StudyabroadWorldwide.com, one of the nine participants' web site will be displayed in the main window (we will rotate through the 9 participants so that each receives an equal share of the site exposures), and a side frame will contain navigation and links to the other participant sites. We anticipate that each participant will receive roughly 20,000 clicks for their investment, making our cost-per-click estimate for the advertiser just 15 cents. Current StudyabroadWorldwide.com participants will have the first right to renew their positions. If you are interested in participating in this program, please contact Mark Landon (mlandon@studyabroad.com) or Erica Brechemin (erica@studyabroad.com) by email or by phone at 610-499-9200.

II. STUDYABROAD.COM RECORD MAINTENANCE - JENNIFER LEWIS

Updating Existing Records

Use the following address: http://www.studyabroad.com/update/ to easily update existing records online. Searching for appropriate records through the use of Institution Name or Studyabroad.com Serial Number* will allow you to preview existing records as they currently appear online. A search will yield a list of all records within the Studyabroad.com database. Type of Program (i.e. Academic, Summer, High School, Experiential, Intensive Language or TEFL) and Host Country within this list will indicate in which directory a given record is found. As well, under the Institution Name column for each record, a link will allow you to instantly preview this record online saving you navigation time through the site. Herein, view the information that Studyabroad.com currently lists for your program. An "Edit this Listing" link at the bottom of the page allows you to link to a form which displays the static fields that Studyabroad.com offers for each record. Make any changes to your record, updating old information, adding new, etc. Take notice to the newer fields (Overview, Curriculum Highlights, Setting Description, and Program Value) which provide a great opportunity for a brief summary of your program.

Upon the submission of this update form, changes are made to your records by Studyabroad.com staff and typically reflect online within two business days. When updating your records, please be sure to include your name and e-mail address (fields at the bottom of the form) as Studyabroad.com always compares and verifies contact information before making any changes to customer records.

* Please contact us (info@studyabroad.com) for your Studyabroad.com Serial Number.

Adding New Records

Use the following address: http://www.studyabroad.com/new to submit new records to Studyabroad.com.

New institutions can use this form to submit records to Studyabroad.com for review. In the "Comments to the Studyabroad.com Staff" field, be sure to include a web address which will aid us during the process of review. Please note that this form also provides the opportunity to request a Media Kit and a free subscription to Studyabroad.com news!

Institutions/study abroad providers who have existing records with Studyabroad.com can also use this form to submit new programs. In the "Comments to the Studyabroad.com staff" field, please note that you are adding a program to an existing record.

For information regarding the above, please contact Jennifer Lewis at 610-499-9200 or jennifer@studyabroad.com.

III. CONDUCT MARKET RESEARCH WITH YOUR OWN LOGS - LORI FAUNCE

Many people do not realize that some of the best market research can be conducted without elaborate surveys, focus groups or interviews. How? By examining your own traffic logs. Log software provides a wealth of information that few people utilize to its fullest potential.

Pages - This report will allow you to view the number of hits each page of your web site receives. Use this report to determine whether there are pages you would like visited more often and why those pages are currently not receiving an optimal amount of traffic. It may be that links to those pages need to be more prominent throughout the site.

Entry Point - This report will show you how often each page on your site is the first one visitors see. Normally, the home page has the greatest number of hits since it is the most heavily advertised and indexed page on a web site. However, the entry point will give you a clue as to how well other pages on your site are indexed by search engines.

Exit Point - The exit point is the same as the entry point in reverse. These are the pages visitors are typically on when they leave your web site. The exit point is especially important when determining problem areas. For example, if users typically leave in the middle of a five page form rather than completing it entirely, there may be a flaw in the form. Ask yourself questions such as: Does it take to long to load? Is the form confusing? Is it too long?

Steps - The number of steps allows you to see how many steps, or hits, each user takes through your site. The number of steps defines the quality of the user - the larger the number of steps, the higher the quality. This will help you determine the overall quality of visitors as well as which web sites are sending you quality traffic. The steps report is especially valuable to use when conducting an online advertising campaign. Many campaigns will send you reports stating the number of clicks and the click-through rate, but none will tell you how many pages each visitor takes throughout your site.

Referrers - Referrers are the web sites that link to you, and thus send visitors to your site. This report can help you seek out web sites that currently link to your site and form other partnerships with them. Sites that currently link to your site may also contain links to other related web sites that may be interested in learning about, and linking to, your web site. Send these sites an e-mail informing the webmaster of your web site and its content. Suggest that they provide a link to your site.

Peak Days, Time of Day - These reports are useful for general knowledge of the time most users come to your site, but are even more useful if you are planning an online event. The event should be scheduled when the largest number of users will be visiting your site.

Search words and phrases - Most log summaries list the keywords users enter into a search engine that lead them to find your web site. If the top keywords listed in this report are not keywords that you feel appropriately describe your web site, it is time to optimize!

These are just some of the reports that can help you conduct inexpensive market research. Log software products differ from each other, therefore, I recommended you read the help manual to learn more about the reports your software can offer you. When examining each of the reports, ask the question "How can this help me when marketing or improving my web site?" You will be surprised how quickly and cost-effectively you can increase traffic!

IV. WHAT'S NEW AT EDU

EDU STAFF

Due to the constant growth of EDU, some staff changes and additions have occurred within the Studyabroad.com team. Erica Brechemin, previously handling a multitude of jobs for Studyabroad.com, is now our Studyabroad.com Sales Associate. Jennifer Lewis is now coordinating all aspects of content on the Studyabroad.com website. Kara Collins has recently been added to the team, assisting Jennifer Lewis with content. In other areas of EDU, Mishka Cira has been added to the team as our Institutional Relations Coordinator and Sam Guittare has been appointed as EDU's Vice President of Operations.

STUDYABROAD.COM SWEEPSTAKES The Studyabroad.com sweepstakes grand prize winner has been chosen and will be announced soon. There were 4,573 entries this year, up from 3,427 last year. The grand prize winner will receive a five and a half week study abroad program in Cadiz, Spain sponsored by Academic Programs International and Council Travel. Studyabroad.com is making the list of sweepstakes entries. Of the 4,573 entries, 3,100 have given us permission to share their contact information with study abroad program providers and related businesses. The cost for the full list of 3,100 names is $300 for the raw data in a delimited text file.

In addition to the Full Data File, we will also sell "custom sets" of the data. We will search for students interested in your country, subject offering, or language, and send a file containing just those students who you wish to target. The cost for this service is $.25 per name (minimum order: $100.00). Contact Mark Landon at 610-499-9200 or mlandon@studyabroad.com to order.

V. NEW ADVERTISERS