The refreshed guilford.edu and its GA4 analytics are the engine of the plan's fifth pillar — Telling Our Story — which names the website upgrade directly and ties storytelling to measurable outcomes. Each outcome is mapped here to the site behavior that moves it and the metric that proves it, so the reporting speaks in the trustees' language.
Telling Our Story lists the plan's measurable outcomes — inquiries · applications · yield · retention · alumni engagement · donor participation · media visibility · campaign readiness. Every one has a GA4 metric; the target chips are the Board's own figures from “Measuring Progress.”
Prospective-student journey: program pages → Request Info → Apply Start → Apply Submit; visit scheduling.
request_info, schedule_visit, apply_start, apply_submit (cross-domain); Admissions funnel; program-page engaged sessions; assisted conversions by channel.
Reach + convert non-NC prospects; surface out-of-state-relevant content.
Region/metro on conversions (not just traffic); out-of-state share of inquiries / applications; campaign geo; audience “Out-of-state prospects.”
Current-student & family self-service (the ~60% direct/repeat) + belonging + findability.
Current-student engagement (My Guilford, resources, calendar), search-success proxy, returning-user engagement, service-page bounce. Leading indicators — retention itself is an SIS number.
Give journey + the newly prominent Give CTA; alumni / events engagement.
donation_start → donation_complete with value (cross-domain); giving funnel; average gift; alumni/events engagement; campaign attribution.
The plan's eighth outcome, media visibility, is the reputation layer — organic + branded search, direct traffic, and news/referral engagement, the same signals the parallel branding project moves. Phase 9's Looker dashboard rolls all of the above into a one-page “Thriving Together” board view, refreshed weekly to senior leaders and shaped to the trustees' “Measuring Progress” dashboard.
Folds into the Analytics Measurement Plan (#2) and the GA4 runbook (#6) — and reports up to the Board's “Measuring Progress” dashboard.
The plan itself asks to “connect storytelling to measurable outcomes.” Reporting in the Board's language — inquiries, applications, yield, retention, giving, and visibility — gives the website a visible seat at the Thriving Together table, not just a traffic chart.