This caused an outcry in the web analytics world. Before November 1, analysts knew the keywords users entered in search engines to get to their website. And that was pretty powerful information. If 10,000 visitors came to your website by using the search term “xyz”, but 9,000 of them bounced, you knew you had better do something to fix up that landing page.

But this information is essentially no more, or at best, flawed. Google claimed the security change would affect a “minority of your traffic” in Google Analytics, but that’s not what we’re seeing. After a few months, the curves show the results for “not provided” climbing astronomically. For most, “(not provided)” becomes the #2 result for organic search, usually behind the branded search. In some cases, it is even ahead of branded search. That is hardly a minority of traffic.

This is an example “dangerous free“. We had very valuable data and now we don’t. But what can we do? It was free. Google had no obligation to give us this data.

I recommend reading Avinash Kaushik’s blog post on the topic. He helps you get beyond your missing data and find other ways to come up with actionable insights in the presence of (not provided).

I’d like to welcome Lisa Kaneff to the Beaconfire family as one of our Senior Marketing Consultants. She joins us from PointRoll, a interactive marketing solutions agency, as their Brand Marketing Manager.

We also have the following open positions. Know someone who is passionate about helping nonprofits accomplish great things on the Internet? If so, please pass this message along.

Online Campaigns and Marketing Director
We’re looking for an experienced, cause-driven interactive marketing professional who can leverage their consulting expertise and leadership skills to lead our online campaigns and marketing service line, and help our nonprofit clients shape and execute breakthrough online campaigns.

Interactive Marketing Client Manager / Consultant
We’re looking for a smart, cause-driven interactive marketing professional who can leverage their marketing experience and project management skills to help our nonprofit clients shape and execute breakthrough online campaigns.

PHP Web Developer
We’re looking for a Software Engineer with PHP skills, who will work closely with our project teams to develop and implement websites and applications for our nonprofit clients. Knowledge of eZ Publish or Drupal a plus.

Multi-Channel Analysis
Now native to Google Analytics 5, this series of reports allows you to see how your different marketing efforts are working together to drive conversions over a 30 day period. Of these reports the three most interesting are as follows:

Multi-Channel Conversion Visualizer

Assisted Conversions Report

Google analytics natively uses last click attribution. This means that the last click the user makes before making a purchase, donation or completing any other goal receives the credit. With multi-channel analysis, you can see how multiple marketing touches impact conversion and more important you can attach a value to the assist. This can be particularly useful in evaluating paid media where a user might visit your site, but come back later via an unpaid medium.

Top Conversions Paths

This report allows you to easily see the paths your users take to convert on your website. You can even create your own custom channel groupings (I’ve highlight the link above) to distinguish between marketing touches such as branded and non branded keywords or group your Social Media referrals.

2. Filters are much easier to manage in Google Analtyics 5. Create the filter once and apply it to multiple profiles.

While we are on the topic of filters, there are two filters you should consider applying to your data. The first solves the problem of untagged email coming through as referral traffic through any of the major webmail providers (i.e. google, hotmail and yahoo.)

The second solves the issue of organic social traffic (or social traffic that you didn’t place a campaign tag on) also coming through as referral traffic. These filters allow you to update the medium to Email and Social. You can see how this can help give more clarity to your assisted conversions report.

Remember that filters only work going forward and you should always apply them to a test profile and make sure they are working correctly before applying them to your profiles that you use for analysis.

3. Native Social Engagement Tracking

See how your users are promoting your brand and content.

It does take some work to properly tag tweets and facebook posts, page likes and unlikes.  This post does a great job of showing you how to set up this tracking: http://www.ian-thomas.net/tracking-social-engagement-with-google-analytics/. Also, tools such as Gigya and ShareThis can be automatically configured to push engagement data directly to Google Analytics.

Custom Report with Social Actions

Social actions can be applied to any custom report as seen here. In this case you can see how your content drives social interactions and ultimately helps you drive conversions.

4. Search Engine Optimization

Link your Google Analytics Account to your Google Webmaster tools account and see organic Google search impression data for your keywords. You may find you have high performing keywords with a low visibility. You might want consider optimizing these keywords or creating a paid campaign with them.

5. Site Speed Report

No one wants to believe that their website is slow. Most of us believe that our content is so compelling that our users will wait for it. Unfortunately, if your page takes more 4 seconds to load you will lose about a third of your users.

This report can help you find problem pages so that you can fix them.

There is an excellent article in the Washington Post by Cecilia Kang on what happens to your data when a service goes under or is acquired. The results range from the good (Google takes over, imports all your data and makes the user experience even better), the bad (you’re data gets sucked into a vortex never to be seen again), and the ugly (your data is sold to the highest bidder).

So remember – what is free today may be gone tomorrow. Always good to have a backup plan.

Some of the tips were basic things that, if you read lists like this you’ve come to expect.  For example, an old favorite, create small attainable tasks for yourself instead of a great big complex one.  I, personally, enjoy the satisfaction of checking things off my To-Do list and have been known to add a task to my list simply to experience the momentary feeling of satisfaction that comes with checking them complete. Shower, Check!

However, there were some new and interesting tidbits on this list.  Specifically, how detrimental multitasking can be to your productivity.  As a project manager, multitasking is almost written into my job description.  Or is it? I have to wonder if the expectation that we need to multitask is hurting us – both as a profession and as a society?  Is the expectation self-imposed (or self-inflicted)?  The article recommends turning off your email for an hour – or (gasp!) three.  Could you do that?  As a company we are making a concerted effort to update the status message within our IM or sending out an email to staff (heads down – trying to concentrate – emergencies only) when we can’t have interruptions.  Doesn’t the fact that we have to tell people we are concentrating indicate that most of the time we don’t have the luxury of being able to do so?

The article states that when you multitask, your IQ drops by an average of 10 points, 15 for men, 5 for women. Besides explaining a lot about my husband, I found this kind of shocking.  It feels like a catch-22: I don’t want to shut off communication avenues in case I am needed, however, I could be a more productive employee if I did.

Is the pendulum of multitasking creeping toward its edge? How far will the propensity to multitask have to go before the pendulum swings back?  Personally, I am going  to be better about using the offline mode with email.  Checking email hourly is reasonable and a solid first step in inching my pendulum back toward center.  I’m curious what the expectation is in your work environment – and does it differ from what you feel comfortable doing?

Use these super-simple but astoundingly powerful tips and techniques to bump your mobile sites from mediocre to magnificent.

1. Speed up rendering by harnessing the GPU.
Mobile devices have very powerful gpu processors, but they’re only used by mobile browsers if there’s an animation-esque style(s) to trigger them. Toss -webkit-transform: translateZ(0); in your css to make it happen
via html5rocks.com

2. Scale images in the browser.
By default, images will stay fixed to their original size. With a tiny little css we can tell the major browsers to scale these images in relation to their container with max-width:100%;.

3. Fix safari landscape to portrait resize bug.
Sometimes safari fails to scale correctly when rotating from portrait->landscape->portrait. That’s bogus. Update your meta viewport tag with the fix via stackoverflow:
<meta name = “viewport” content = “user-scalable=no, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, width=device-width”>
<meta name=”apple-mobile-web-app-capable” content=”yes”/>
via stackoverflow.com

4. Put Content first
Switch the order of content and navigation using display declarations:
@media screen and (min-width: 30em) {
body {
display: table;
caption-side: top;
}
[role="navigation"] {
display: table-caption;
}
}
via adactio.com/journal/4780/

5. fix page navigation
empty a tags <a href=”#”> won’t moving pages to the top of the page like they do on desktops. If you have pages with long content, help folks jump around wiht a little js
$('#jump-to-top').click(function(e) {
window.scrollTo(0,0);
e.preventDefault();
});
$('#skip-to-bottom').click(function(e) {
bottom = $(document).height();
window.scrollTo(0,bottom);
e.preventDefault();
});

Beaconfire is expanding its Online Campaigns and Marketing team! We’re looking for one or two smart, passionate interactive marketing professionals to join our family.

• Senior Interactive Marketing Consultant who can leverage their consulting expertise and leadership skills to help our nonprofit clients shape and execute online campaigns.
• Interactive Marketing Client Manager / Consultant who can leverage their marketing experience and project management skills to help our nonprofit clients make their campaign ideas a reality.

Check out our Career section on our website for more information on how to apply.

Or, if you know of the perfect person for the job, please pass this along.

Here’s a few key takeaways nonprofits can use, along with a link he provided that will create a custom mobile report within your own Google Analytics setup.

Mobile Outreach Strategies: Online and Off

QR codes (image) allow you to build deep relationships with consumers in contexts where you previously had much more limited opportunity for engagement.

Individuals shopping for strawberries in the supermarket can also become fans of your facebook page or engage in other Calls to Action (CTA) with a QR code.

Nonprofit Takeaway: Be creative about opportunities for leveraging mobile. When canvassing a neighborhood or street corner, people are likely to throw out the paper you hand them. If you can get them to download your app, your organization just got a whole lot stickier in their mind. When someone is bored and waiting at a bus stop and sees your billboard with a QR code, chances are significant they’ll click on the link. Where else can you reach mobile users? The possibilities are limited only by your imagination.

When people do a search for snow conditions on their phone, Skull Candy has a paid ad that points directly to their iPhone app. By taking advantage of the analytics SDKs, you can track whether people follow through to actually download your app, allowing for calculations of advertising conversion rates (and ROI). Once they download your app you’ve gained critical real estate on their mobile screen, enhancing opportunities for building brand loyalty and other CTAs.

Nonprofit Takeaway: Brainstorm about what potential donors and advocates might be searching for, and design apps that provide a benefit to your constituents while simultaneously supporting your mission.

As people peruse TVs in their local electronics store, LG includes a QR code where you can learn more information about the product. In addition to providing a sense of validation by displaying customer reviews, prospective customers can also save the link on their phone and deliberate further on purchasing your goods later if they decide they need to do more research before purchasing.

Nonprofit Takeaway: Next time you organize a big event, be sure to incorporate prominent QR codes that link to your donation landing page in your collateral. If you’ve set up a text to give campaign, QR codes can prepopulate people’s phones with the text number and message that will send a donation to your organization.

Mobile Targetted Search Ads

Search ads can be targeted to mobile consumers and include CTAs that take advantage of mobile devices. When searching for a locksmith, one company uses their phone number as the primary CTA, rather than their website. When people are locked out of their house and need a locksmith, they don’t want a website: they want the phone number of someone who can get them back in their home. Mobile users clicking on the link have that phone number automatically loaded into their phone dialing app, allowing for one click ease for a sale.

Nonprofit Takeaway: If your nonprofit provides services to the public, include your phone number. Even better, you’ll be able to track the length of the phone call (a frequently useful metric for ROI). Adwords (and other ad providers) can direct people to a temporary phone number and then forward them to your phone number, allowing for tracking call length for each ad variation. You can then compare ads to determine which leads to the longest phone calls (if using that metric for calculating ROI).

Other ads are more easily adapted to take advantage of another mobile-enhanced experience: maps. When people are in the market for a road bike, a search can lead them to geographically targeted ad for a bike shop near them. Even better, the ad can contain the address on a map, allowing for the phone to take advantage of GPS and immediately plot out directions to the bike shop.

Nonprofit Takeaway: If you provide services from a physical location, make it easy for people who need your assistance to find you.

Tracking How Your Website Performs for Mobile Users

Once visitors click on the ad, how well is your website designed to change mobile users from prospects to completed sales? Too often companies send visitors to their non-mobile optimized homepage. Do it right — create customized landing pages for your campaign!

Make your site easily usable by mobile visitors and, just as with desktop design, show a clear CTA, and you’ll find bounce rates drop dramatically while conversion rate hits the roof.

Nonprofit Takeaway: Create mobile optimized donation forms, and follow mobile usability best practices.

Determining ROI for Mobile Users

If your ad contains multiple CTAs, adwords tracks each CTA (and conversion rate) independently. As you test multiple versions of ads, compare CTAs and weight each ad based on the value of each action.

Tracking mobile users against all site visitors can be useful. Google Analytics includes a built in advanced segment for mobile users. If you find that certain devices are showing higher ROI, you can create additional segmentation based on user device, OS or resolution (i.e. tablet vs. phone). Custom reports can be developed to show performance between browsers across three critical areas: acquisition, behavior, and outcome.

Avinash provided a link to automatically add the mobile performance report into your existing Google Analytics account. By looking among the tabs you can quickly review mobile user performance at a glance.

Nonprofit Takeaway: The nonprofits we support have seen a dramatic increase in mobile visitors, and they’ve responded by working with us to develop great mobile sites. In the next couple of years the number of mobile website visits will surpass desktop usage, and it’s important to be ahead of the curve. Your supporters are increasingly looking to engage with you using their mobile devices – are you prepared for them?

It may not be news to most of you that Beaconfire really values the people who work here ☺ … However, some of our really talented colleagues have had to leave the DC area, but we didn’t want to lose them.  So remote working was born!

How has it worked out?  And what do you watch out for?  Keep reading…

Long standing tradition and practice has dictated that the most productive methods of output and collaboration revolve around teams being physically located together.  A recent global trend, however, is driving that understanding in another direction.  The Internet, highly advanced collaborative worker tools, improved communications, and a new working culture are allowing people to come together on teams that are no longer co-located.

Here’s what we have learned in the process and consequently look to establish for remote teams:

#1: A sense of being a Team
Team members can feel isolated and independent even if they are working in the cubicle ten feet away. However, if team members know they are part of a team working on common goals and common deliverables, they tend to be more actively involved.  So let those remote workers know they are part of the team, and ensure they are invited (even if they have to webcam or call in) to team meetings and discussions.

#2: Establishing ground rules
It is probably more important for remote teams to exhibit a common and acceptable set of functioning behaviors.  Ground rules may include expected hours for working, lunch times, determining which meetings are mandatory (in-person, web-based, or via telephone), and establishing expectations for communication turnaround times.

#3: Leverage technology
Technology is available and improving all the time to support virtual team members.  This includes fast access to the Internet, audio conferencing, videocams, collaborative software, and shared directories.  At Beaconfire, the inclusion of video chat has been a major success.  Some remote staff even like to have video chat on during the day while they work to keep the conversation going and limit the barriers to communication.

#4: Give people shorter assignments, and check in often
Instead of assigning a six-week activity to a remote team member, assign the work in three two-week activities.  And you’ll want to check in, ideally, on a daily basis on ensure progress.  If the remote worker is working closely with other team members on smaller or more modular tasks, it reduces risk of timeline expectations not being met.  Check-in often, and especially point out deliverables that on the critical path.

#5: Communicate, as much as possible
Be extra proactive to ensure all team members understand what is expected. Remote team workers can start to feel isolated if they do not receive regular communications. The communication lines on a virtual team must be opened up especially wide.  And keep in mind the following best practices:

• Pick up the phone.  Typically, our instinct is to try and have conversations over IM/email, but very often things move much faster and people feel more engaged on both sides when we actually pick up the phone (and/or webcam) and have a conversation with someone.
• Keep it interesting – Use a variety of communication techniques.  Pick up the phone , Video chat, etc.

#6: Tips for the Remote Worker:
And what the remote worker can do to himself/herself to help -

• Be uber responsive and available.
• Use Instant Messenger to make yourself available at all times during the work day. Even if you are busy, take a second and say “in a meeting” or “on a call” or “crunching on something, how important is it?” It makes people feel less like you are remote and no one can complain that you are hard to reach.
• Communicate to your team members about your availability/status/whatever you’re working on – it really helps put people at ease when they can’t actually see you.

It’s worked well for Beaconfire so far, and we are witnessing some of the dynamics of ‘team work from afar’ and how it has reshaped our working relationships within the company.

Have a best practice that has really worked for your remote team? Feel free to share.

Build. Community is Easy, Saving the World is Hard

UX Smackdown! User Testing Techniques in the Ring

Shit Code: When Good Code is Betrayed

Change Happens: Improv for an Unpredictable World

Be a Design Superhero: Vanquish the Wasted Pretty

See you in Austin!