Marketing and Communications Impact

Three primary content vehicles are used by the Office of Marketing and Communications for storytelling and news publishing on the osu.edu domain.

• Ohio State News – Ohio State News delivers timely, trustworthy news to connect you to Ohio State’s impact on your life, your community and your world. Ohio State News offers exclusive coverage of developments on and around campus, scientific discoveries, national and global issues, the arts and Buckeye sports. Includes content published at news.osu.edu.
• Featured Stories – Stories reflect the strengths and vitality of The Ohio State University. This content emphasizes student success, faculty excellence, institutional research prowess and other aspects of the Ohio State experience that appeal to future students and other key audiences. Includes content published at osu.edu/features.
• Ohio State Alumni Magazine – Published four times a year, Ohio State Alumni Magazine helps you stay up to date on friends and former classmates; happenings around the Oval and beyond; and local, national and international issues with an Ohio State connection. Life and sustaining members of the Alumni Association receive a print version of the magazine. Digital content published at osu.edu/alumni/news/ohio-state-alumni-magazine.

Ohio State uses Cision to track media placements across news sites and blogs. Posts on social networking sites are not included in these values. Media placements include online outlets and offline print outlets.

• Media placement – An article, as defined by the Cision platform: a piece of published content that contains a headline, content and a publish date.
• National distribution outlets – News outlets that have a national, rather than local, distribution. For our purposes, national distribution outlets are limited to those based in the United States and do not include international outlets.

Source: https://help.cision.com/help/how-news-monitoring-works

Ohio State uses Google Analytics to track web traffic and behaviors across the osu.edu domain.

• User – An individual person browsing your website (technically, a unique browser cookie). Each user can visit your website multiple times. For example, one user could create three sessions on your website, with each session containing multiple pageviews.
• Unique Pageviews – Counts a page once even if it was viewed multiple times within a single session. For example, if someone landed on your homepage, then viewed the ‘about us’ page and then navigated back to your homepage, the homepage would have one unique pageview (even though the page was viewed twice during the session).
• Shares of Content – The sum social share events captured in Google Analytics during the reporting period. Social share events are triggered when a user clicks on a link to a social source and the text or attribute “share/sharing” on it. This covers most examples of share buttons and functionality. This event is also triggered when sharing via email links often located next to social sharing buttons.
• Video Plays – The sum video play events captured in Google Analytics or on YouTube during the reporting period. Video play events are triggered when a user clicks to play a video that’s been embedded to a page from YouTube or Vimeo.

Ohio State uses Sprout Social to track social media performance and Semrush to monitor peers in the social space.

• Audience – Audience volume depicted in the graph comes from Sprout Social and represents the maximum audience volume at the end of month of the reporting period. These values represent fans or followers of the account.
• Engagement – Total engagement depicted in the graph comes from Sprout Social and represents the sum of engagements during the reporting period. Ohio State counts the following actions as engagements: applause (likes, favorites, hearts), conversation (comments, replies), amplification (shares, retweets), link clicks, immersive clicks (photo views, saves) and video plays.
• Competitive – The total engagement volume for competitive positioning is collected via Semrush and includes reactions, comments and shares from Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. For competitive positioning, we use the Semrush value for Ohio State engagement to ensure comparing data apples to data apples.

Ohio State uses Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Presspage to deliver email newsletters and email communication to external and internal audiences. The primary newsletters distributed include:

• On Campus email newsletters keep Ohio State faculty, staff and students informed, interested and inspired about what is happening at the university. On Campus is sent to faculty and staff daily and to both undergraduate and graduate/professionals weekly, during the academic year.
• Ohio State News is an external newsletter with roughly 2,000 subscribers through which we distribute research and institutional owned news.
• Roughly 175,000 alumni of the institution receive monthly emails featuring content from the latest edition of the Ohio State Alumni Magazine. These emails enable alumni to engage with the brand on a consistent basis.