Why your analytics reports are not answering leadership's real questions

As universities face mounting enrollment pressure and a shift toward zero-click, AI-mediated discovery, leadership teams are demanding more meaningful insight from analytics. Yet many institutions still rely on standard KPIs and channel-based reports that struggle to explain what is actually influencing awareness, consideration and enrollment. When discovery unfolds across content, campaigns, SEO and AI search long before a student ever converts, the challenge is not collecting more data, but knowing which questions to ask and which metrics can genuinely demonstrate progress and impact. In this session, JAKALA and Old Dominion University share how the team redesigned its approach by anchoring measurement to leadership questions rather than predefined metrics or dashboards. Drawing from ODU Global's recent redesign and analytics transformation, the session explores common disconnects between reporting and decision making and demonstrates how to select the right metrics across multiple analytics sources to reflect today's fragmented prospecting journey. Through practical examples of how ODU and ODU Global reframed reporting around enrollment priorities, you will learn how to redesign your own reporting approach to better support executive decision making and clearly communicate success in an evolving discovery landscape.