truthypr.com

Constance isn't going to the prom, but her fans wildly outnumber the population of her hometown.

2010-03-17T10:30:20-07:00

The typical social media advice you hear from Facebook gurus is that your brand should setup a fan page and then start recruiting your customers as fans. But that seemingly simple advice works for only the simplest cases. What if you don't have an ongoing relationship with your fan base, but you interact with them in a transactional manner?

LendingTree.com is a website that allows consumers to comparison shop for mortgages from different lenders. They do not themselves make or hold loans, but simply facilitate the transaction. Your or my relationship is entirely transactional and brief, so a long term relationship is not appropriate. This is why this company with more than $200mm in revenues in 2009 only has a Facebook page with less than 400 fans. While Facebook is valuable to LendingTree, it's the eyeballs reached through advertising, and not a fan page, that is the right vehicle for them.

Becoming a fan of an organization that does a tremendous amount of work in many different places or issues can pose the same problem. The American Civil Liberties Union has a policy briefing book as big (or bigger) than the Yellow Pages, and odds are good that no ACLU member agrees with all of them. Becoming a fan of the ACLU, especially in a social medium where all of your friends see that you have become a fan, means tacitly endorsing their entire agenda.

The ACLU presumably recognized this and recently tried a different tactic: they created a hot-button single issue fanpage around their defense of Constance McMillen. Constance tried to to take her girlfriend to her high school prom in Fulton, Mississippi and was told that they could not come together and they could not slow dance together even if they arrived separately. The high school eventually canceled the prom entirely rather than deal with the legal consequences of their discrimination.

Instead of merely updating their fan page with their work on this issue, the ACLU created a Facebook fan page called "Let Constance Take Her Girlfriend To The Prom". The affirmation and narrow focus of the issue meant that it was very easy for people to decide how they felt about the issue, and become a fan. Of course the viral nature of becoming a fan on Facebook meant that every time someone became a fan, all their friends saw both the policy message and were given an opportunity to join.

As of today the Constance Prom fanpage has over 328,000 fans. The ACLU national fan page has around 28,000. Both of these dwarf the population of Fulton, MS, which has a population of around 4,000 people.

A similar tactic was recently done by the Trust for Public Land who ran a campaign to save undeveloped land around the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles. To make their point, they wrapped the globally recognized letters with a new message "SAVE THE PEAK". The mission-focused name and single issue of the campaign garnered over 23,000 fans as of today. The Trust for Public Land's fan page has a little under 3,000.

So the technique works, but what are the challenges? In particular as the campaign progresses, or even if you're successful, you've got to find a way to migrate the individuals who have become fans into your larger, more general fan base. Many of your campaign-specific fans don't want to be a part of your larger supporter base. You have to handle them carefully, and gently message them about other related work once you've won your initial goal.

Some may never move into your general supporter population, and you need to look for opportunities to give them another, similar cause to rally around if they do not wish to be mainstreamed.

But I think these are good problems to have, and I suspect that TPL and the ACLU would rather have these large fan bases to experiment on than not at all. If you've got a big campaign coming up, here are three things to remember when considering a single issue Facebook fan page:

Use a narrow, mission-focused fan page name. Ideally the page name should be a call to action.
You're in it for the long haul: You're going to have to maintain this fan page along with your own main organizational page, and you can't just copy everything you do.
Consider the end game: When this campaign is over, think about the audience. Will you have other similar campaigns in the same mission that you can promote to this audience? Start thinking early about creating crossover appeal. Something as simple as branding the Constance page profile photo with the ACLU logo reminds fans who is running this campaign.

Yield Software: Optimizing paid search campaigns, organic pages, and landing pages

2010-03-08T16:03:22-08:00

Paid Search: It can help you optimize your paid search campaigns (including Google Grant campaigns);
Organic Search: It can help you track and optimize your organic search terms, and give you a sense of what terms you should be working on; and
Landing page optimization: It has a very convenient graphical interface to let you conduct multivariate landing page optimization.

To do all these tasks, I believe you'd still need an analytics guru, or an analytics-enthusiast staffer around, but if you do, these can help make their time much more efficient. I've made a short 2.5 minute video with a quick intro to the product by the product manager herself.

Thanks!

The Modern Internet Success Meme: United Breaks Guitar, Breaks Open Career

2010-03-03T09:08:27-08:00

Late last night I caught the release of the last of the three songs from Dave Carroll about United Airlines baggage handlers breaking his guitar through negligence. After a year of fighting with United Airlines customer service, and them refusing to take responsibility, Dave Carroll swore he would write three songs/videos, put them on YouTube, and strive for a million views to shame United Airlines.

His first video garnered nearly 8 million views and media coverage that made his career explode. The second video did a million views. The third video should do at least half a million as well.

This is the Modern Internet Success Meme: an underdog of some sort is wronged by a large corporate entity and if done carefully, spins it into public fame. I don't mean fame among Internet people, but real "Today Show" caliber fame.

The options for the protagonist in these situations are clear:

Apologize immediately to defuse it (aka Motrin and Circuit City); or
Hope you can paint the victim in a negative light; or
Tough it out.

Sometimes these choices are made for you. In the case of United Airlines, Carroll's year spent dealing with customer service eliminated option #1 for United Airlines, and that plus his innate Canadian niceness (and some savvy PR sense) kept #2 out of United's reach as well.

The best advice I have on this is for PR people to become friendly with their customer service teams. The escalation path nowadays for support problems is not to the head of support, but to the VP of Communication via the Internet. Customer Service departments should be reporting to Communications, and Communications should be managing them.

For Carroll's part, this is the biggest break he'll ever have. He's adopted this broken guitar image as his logo. If you peruse his website you'll see he's for hire to do corporate events and custom write songs as a customer support motivational speaker. In addition Carroll has tons of fan mail with customer service horror stories that could provide him a lifetime of material.

If I were managing his career (though he clearly doesn't need much help), I would suggest he take one or two, egregious stories out of his mailbag and write songs about them and do promotional videos to go with each new album release. He can write 10 new songs that fit his personal musical muse, and 1 or 2 that function as publicity vehicles for the album. His reach will continue to be tremendous.

What's the most popular "next page" for any given page of my website?

2010-02-24T14:15:50-08:00

Do you have one of these pages on your website somewhere?

This is the online services list for the city of San Francisco. It goes on for another screen full. Somewhere out there user experience people everywhere may be cringing. As a citizen, it's a show stopper. You have to stop and try and process all of it to find the thing you want.

If you decided to make it simpler, you might find yourself talking to a User Experience person who would redesign it any number of ways. If you had neither time nor budget to do so, you might do what the city of San Francisco did: take the most popular choice and bold it.

No way, so simple! But how would you know what the most popular choice was? You'd use your web analytics of course! In this video below, I show you how to easily find the most popular next page link that users go to for any page of your website.

Three ways to measure social media

2010-02-09T15:53:24-08:00

Measuring social media is very big right now. The ways people suggest they're measuring social media don't always stand up to what people typically think of when they think of measurement elsewhere on the web. If you're trying to measure social media, or about to embark on a process to do so, it would behoove you to stop and consider the technique you're applying before you get your answers. Let's examine the three ways to measure social media.

Approach #1: Measure the direct benefits with your analytics package

Measurement Technique: In almost any analytics package, it's trivially easy to see if someone who clicked on a link from twitter or Facebook came to your website and gave money, bought product, etc. This is the most direct form of social media measurement.

Pros: It's really easy to measure with almost any analytics package. People across the organization, even those who don't understand social media, will understand it if you simply compare it to any other venue. For example "You know how we got 25 donations the last time Brad Stone covered our cause in the New York Times Technology section? Well we have a fan page on Facebook and when we unveiled our new product there, we got 25 donations."

Cons: Odds are good that your facebook and twitter work isn't generating numbers comparable to the work you put into the venue. By presenting the straight up results to the uninformed, you may be afraid of giving your social media efforts a bad grade, and someone who wants to cut your budget the ammunition to say "social media is a failure!"

Product vendors at play here: Google Analytics, Omniture SiteCatalyst, WebTrends, etc.

Approach #2: Attempt to assign the overall benefits of the site to people who have interacted with your social media

Measurement Technique: Using a little advanced and/or sneaky technology, you can figure out if visitors to your site who convert in some way (donations, purchases, etc) have visited your Facebook fan page or clicked on one of your tweets. Then,, when they do convert, even if they didn't click right from Facebook or Twitter, you still can attempt to ascribe credit for that donation/sale to social media.

Pros: This can give you some expanded justification for your social media presence and may find many people that validate you by looking at your social media presence, but then go type in your website address and give, which would be otherwise untrackable.

Cons: There are two big ones. First, you're not going to pull this off without significant in-house or vendor technical assistance. Second, just because someone looked at your Facebook or Twitter presence doesn't mean that's where the credit should lie for the donation or sale you got.

This methodology can only demonstrate correlation, not causation. Critics will say "Sure you got a donation from someone who looked at your twitter messages, but how do you know the motivating factor wasn't a piece of direct mail we also sent that drove them online to give? Or perhaps a friend mentioned that they had just donated to us, why aren't you measuring that?"

And they'll have a point. Since you're not measuring the entire media intake of your donors, you'll never really know what motivated them to give.

Product vendors at play here: Tealium + analytics vendors above

Approach #3: Skip actual results, and only measure soft numbers

Measurement Technique: You could just throw your hands in the air and say "Oh to hell with it, I'm just going to measure how many visits I get from twitter and Facebook and how many followers and fans I have". This is typically the most common approach used today, and frankly it drives me bonkers. Non-monetized followers aren't worth anything on their own, though it's good for your ego. (Monetized followers, as demonstrated in the Theory of 1,000 True Fans, however, is worth a good living.)

Pros: Making improvements in this area is very easy, just ask Ashton Kutcher. Anyone, with time on their hands, can amass followers and fans.

Cons: You've actually not accomplished anything that serves the bottom line of the organization yet, and until then, you'll always be at risk of someone cutting your social media budget or asking you to do more work in addition to social media work, since you haven't demonstrated that twitter or Facebook has value yet.

Product vendors at play here: EVERYBODY. Seriously, who doesn't have a product that measures social media? However most of them don't measure much of anything that matters.

What's your recommendation?

Since I don't really enjoy being a curmudgeon let me be clear and say that I think that the answer is to treat your social media work like your email marketing funnel. And by that, I mean a funnel that looks like this:

Top of funnel: number of followers/fans
Middle of funnel: number of visits you generate to conversion (sale/donation) pages
Bottom of funnel: number of conversions (sales/donations)

I can tell you, without even looking at your data, that your start-to-finish conversion rate is probably weaker than any other channel you've got (email or website visits). That being said, this is still a young medium and experimentation here merely costs you content. It isn't as if you have to give the US Postal Service $2,000 every time you want to try another appeal, just craft it and post it online.

What you will need to pull this off is story telling and writing talents. If you don't have those in your organization right now, you need to get them right away. Social Media is a conversational media, and if you're still using the old, broadcast style of communicating your organization's priorities, you're going to get ignored pretty quick.

If you'd like assistance from me in setting up measurement of your social media work, drop me a line at shabbir -at- safdar.net or at 415-683-7526.

Flickr photo from user hannibal1107

Four must-do analytics tasks for every nonprofit to start 2010 right

2010-02-01T16:19:39-08:00

So often I come across nonprofits and trade associations that are interested in analytics but don't know where to begin. I've listed here a few small must-do things that you can tackle at the beginning of the year to lay the foundation for becoming an analytics-driven organization in 2010.

Being an analytics-driven organization means you'll be getting better results with the same resources. Who doesn't want that?

Establish Key Performance Indicators that your management understands

You need at least one identifiable goal that doesn't have to be explained in techspeak to your management and is an undisputed benefit to the organization. Here are some good ones:

Number of donations to the website or number of donations to the website per 1,000 pageviews or visitors.
Or if you're an advocacy organization: Number of letters to Congress on an issue in key districts. Note that if you feel comfortable with the geo-segmentation Google Analytics does, you can actually compute a conversion rate based upon geo-traffic, and make this "number of letters generated from web visitors from key legislative districts".
If your organization recruits people for a campaign, like the Business Software Alliance's whistleblowers campaign, you could use the number of incoming web leads or the rate of those per 1,000 pageviews or visitors. (Disclosure: The Business Software Alliance is a Virilion client)

And here are some bad Key Performance Indicators. Most of them fail one of my colleague Shayna Englin's SMART tests, because they aren't: strategic, measurable, ambitious, realistic, or time-bound.

More email addresses: you can have a 1 million address email list, and still not raise a dime from it. This is not strategic, nor is "more email addresses" a measurable goal. How many is "more"?
Double our unique visitors in the next year: Very few organizations have mere traffic as a goal. The Kaiser Family Foundation may be one example, but even then, there's plenty of traffic that has no benefit to your organization. You need to segment out your visitors more and give them specific goals.

Configure your web analytics product to measure that goal

Most of the work of 2010 should be about figuring out what contributes to your success of your Key Performance Indicator. Is my success newscycle driven? Do endorsing blogs play a key role? Do my supporters come in droves because of a specific part of my mission? Do my visitors who look at my "About page" give more than those that don't?

You need to setup your web analytics product to measure that goal, because the rest of the year will be spent learning what works and what doesn't, analyzing the data trails of people who did what you asked.

You'll need to give reports to your management showing what works, and most importantly, what doesn't. "Wait, Shabbir, you just told me to give my management a report showing that I'm doing something that doesn't work. Isn't that bad for my career?"

Here's the thing, if you're doing it, and it doesn't contribute to your goal, you probably know it already, and you continue doing it because your bosses haven't seen that fact. If you make a point of demonstrating what parts of your work are effective and which ones aren't, that's the first step to getting your managers to make your job less frustrating.

(If you work at a place where you nobody cares about effectiveness, then you'll have to look a little harder for a champion.)

Apply for a Google Grant

A Google Nonprofit Adwords grant is the most under-utilized tool for bringing in supporters I've ever seen. Most nonprofits spend no more than $1k-$2k per month of their $10,000 maximum spend using the default ad campaign the Google Grant team setup for them.

If you don't have a Google Grant, you need to apply for one right away. Approval won't happen overnight, and the sooner you apply the sooner you can start generating good traffic with it.

Start measuring your rank on core keywords

Odds are good there are search keywords out there that you want to rank high on organically. After all, if you do microloans, and Google searches on "microloans" and "microcredit" show your website 7th, six other organizations are enjoying your donors for lunch.

Take a moment and look at your website (and your mission) and come up with some core keywords. Then use a tool such as KeywordSpy to look at the keywords of competing organizations. Set your list for the year and then use a free tool such as RankChecker to monitor your organic search rank on these terms. Over time you will find opportunities to spot trends before your competitors and then build out a set of useful pages that rank well for both existing and new keywords.

Actionable Analytics: Your "Visits" graph doesn't mean anything, look deeper.

2010-01-25T10:46:53-08:00

Your total website visits graph is an unactionable metric

Have you ever had this experience talking to the person who does your website's analytics? (I've not only had this experience, I used to deliver this reporting fallacy).

"What you have here is your visits graph, showing that visits are holding steady (or rising, or falling, or whatever)."

Unless you've got a number of traffic-driving campaigns running, this graph doesn't mean anything. It's a combination of actionable analytics rolled up into one big un-actionable one. I had my own moment of epiphany about this when I presented this graph to a favorite client who had no blog outreach, no managed advertising, and no active SEO campaigns going. I showed her the graph of visits and she said, "Is that good?"

The answer is it doesn't matter. If you don't have a plan to generate visitor traffic, checking the visits you've got is even less meaningful than checking for rain. So let's say you've seen the light and want to turn this into an Actionable metric, what do you do?

Step 1: Look deeper at your Search traffic

The first step should be to look at the components that make up your visits. Most analytics products break these up into "Direct Traffic", "Referral Traffic", and "Search Engine Traffic". Search Engine traffic is a great example of this. Your search engine traffic is probably one fourth to one third of your traffic. Even if you don't have a paid search campaign going, you need to keep an eye on this. Here's the search engine driven traffic graph for my personal website (www.safdar.net) from Jan. 2009 to Jan 2010:

If you look carefully, you'll see a long term trend of decline over the last 12 months with that spike earlier in the year. This clearly means I need to pay attention to my search engine rank if I want to continue bringing traffic into the site, but even this graph is deceiving. What I really need to see is the report of which keywords are increasing in traffic, and which are dropping. That's easily enough done with the "Compare to past" function in Google analytics. Here's the data for my personal blog:

An article I wrote last year about the season finale of Battlestar Galactica was the biggest driver of traffic, but has since plummeted. (Oh, the nerd in me is revealed!) This trend on my blog follows the larger, worldwide trend of declining interest in the series now that it's concluded, as I've shown here with Google Insights for Search:

Other phrases are rising. If I wanted to continually drive traffic to this site, I should examine the phrases that are increasing in traffic, and develop more articles similar to them. See how that works? When the results of an analytic measurement can be acted upon, it is actionable.

Step 2: Look deeper at your referral traffic

Your referral traffic, once you remove search engines from it, is a sign of your link-popularity on the web. Let's look at an example of my referral traffic from Google Analytics with a focus on source and landing page:

When you look at your referral traffic, you can learn what's actually working at sending you traffic. This shows that some of the images I post get indexed by Google, and that they drive traffic to my website. (Remember that next time you're writing something, a compelling photo can draw in visitors!) The knowledge that this drives traffic is what drives me to include posts with my blog posts. (That's actionable!)

Another thing to look for in this report would be links from other sites, like my first link from www.pokerstove.com. That link is an enormous driver of traffic for me. I worked with that site owner to place that link on purpose, but if it happens that I got that link just because he liked an article I wrote, I would want to plan to write more articles of that style, to give him more meaningful things to link to.

Step 3: Rinse, Lather, Repeat (the actionable items)

You don't need to spend a lot of time looking at your analytics every week, just look at what's successfully driving traffic to your site, learn from it, and incorporate that knowledge into your work every week. Simple actionable things like attaching photos to all your blog posts, identifying keywords that are working, and cultivating relationships with the sites that send you traffic are simple things you can do in a few minutes every week, and will help your long term traffic trends.

Actionable Analytics: Keyword research that brings more traffic to your website

2010-01-11T15:25:22-08:00

How many times have you had someone give you a "keyword report" from your analytics product and not known what to do with it? Top keyword lists fall into the realm of analytics data whose purpose is not immediately obvious. Also in this realm are visitor "traffic reports" and "top content" reports. Unless you have an active program going to generate traffic from your keywords, then such a report is useless to you.

For example, I once had a client say to me:

Client: "We had xx thousands of visitors come to our website last month. Is that good?"

Me: "Do you have any kind of organic marketing program that can influence that number?"

Client: "No."

Me: "Do you have a paid media campaign that gets scaled up or down based upon your traffic?"

Client: "No."

Me: "Do you have any commitments to funders or partners about how much traffic will visit any part of your website?"

Client: "No."

Me: "Then it doesn't matter, you can ignore it for now."

Data like visits, visitors, top content, and top keywords only matter as a barometer for measuring the ongoing work you are doing that may effect them, or if you have some kind of commitment to maintain a particular performance level. If you have no intention of doing anything to generate more traffic, it's mostly a wasted act to obsess over your traffic reports to learn anything.

Today I'm going to show you where to find the top organic keywords report, which shows what keywords are delivering visitors to your site from search engines. Then I'll show you how to research these keywords to find similar ones you should be incorporating into your content so that you can get even more traffic.

Of course, every reporting period you can look at the keyword report to measure your progress, which is what makes it an actionable analytic.

Step 1: Find the top keywords/search phrases bringing traffic to your site

This is trivially easy. On Google Analytics just go to Traffic Sources->Keywords and make sure you click "non-paid". You should have a report that looks something like this if you select "Landing Page" as the second column item:

If you're using Omniture SiteCatalyst, go to "Traffic Sources->Search Engines - Natural".

Find one or more keywords or phrases that is actually appropriate to you, such as "fundraising metrics" is for me. If you're constantly writing and publishing, that is an organic search engine optimization program. How do we find more words similar to this that people search for?

Step 2: Use the Google Wonder Wheel to find similar keywords and phrases

There are indeed a lot of ways to do keyword research. There are paid tools, and free tools, but one of the first you should look at it the Google Wonder Wheel. Go take your phrase, like "fundraising metrics" and run it through Google. Click the "Show Options" link above your search results and you'll see a line of options down the left. Look all the way down to where it says "Related Searches", and click it. Your results will look something like this:

From this I picked up the following related search phrases:

donation metrics
fundraising measurements
charity metrics
metrics nonprofit fundraising

Copy these down in a list with the original "fundraising metrics" and set it aside. Now click the Wonder Wheel option right below "Related Searches" and you'll see another way of viewing related searches visually. (I love the graphical presentation of the Wonder Wheel) It will look something like this:

The results won't be different, but you can easily expand out to explore related terms. Don't go too crazy, remember your core term. After looking at a few of these, I concluded that I should also add "fundraising analysis" to my list. Let's review the list of phrases:

fundraising metrics (the phrase I'm currently using)
donation metrics
fundraising measurements
charity metrics
metrics nonprofit fundraising
fundraising analysis

Now we're ready to research them.

Step 3: Evaluate keywords with Google Ad Keywords

The best tool for this is the "Keyword" tool that is built into Google AdWords. Go get a free AdWords account and find it under "Tools->Keyword Tool". Copy and paste your list of current and potential phrases into it, and the Keyword tool will tell you incredibly useful things about those phrases, in particular, what is the monthly volume of searches. Here are the results I got:

This is a great big "DOH!" moment for me. I have used the phrase "fundraising metrics" in my latest ebook about nonprofit fundraising web analytics without checking to see if that's a highly searched phrase in Google. Now that I look, I should have used the phrase "fundraising analytics". That has 10 times more searches than "fundraising metrics" does.

Lesson learned.

Be careful about letting the AdWords tool suggest additional phrases to you. It casts a very wide net, and you'll find that it suggests phrases that are not appropriate to your content, which can be a waste of time if you're buying ads. (If you're developing the organic content for it, then it's a fine idea, though it's suggestions can include extremely competitive and generic keywords.)

Once you've identified some phrases that look like they have potential, you can start to incorporate them into your writing, which is the first step of any organic search engine campaign. Also if you're going to start doing any AdWords purchases, whether its through a Google Nonprofit Grant or through actual budgeted ad dollars, you already know what phrases you want to be advertising on.

Actionable Analytics: 3 ways nonprofits can target a competitor's web visitors with Google Ad Planner

2010-01-05T14:31:03-08:00

The recent launch of Google for Advertisers is really just a wrapper a number of useful Google tools you already knew about. But it gave me a good excuse to spend a little time with Google Ad Planner, a good basic tool for figuring out some demographics about who is visiting a website, or how to find the surfing habits of particular demographics.

(To find contrarian views on why you might not want to use Google Ad Planner, go to the end of this document for my "On the other hand" take on the issue.)

There are some really useful things you can do with Google Ad Planner. I've identified three here, but there are a ton more.

Compare the demographics of the audience of two competing websites

This is really easy. Go to Google Ad Planner and type in a URL for an organization, like Doctors Without Borders. I've done this for you. Notice how it skews for heavily female in its audience, as well as with higher levels of education. Now compare it to UNICEF.org by following this link. (Disclosure: UNICEF USA is a client of my firm, Virilion) Most of the demographics look very similar, until you notice the age breakouts. UNICEF.org has a significant amount of traffic in the 0-17 year old demographic, whereas Doctors Without Borders has none.

While this may be simply be a problem of audience measurement with Google Ad Planner, it could also indicate that Doctors Without Borders is not developing the next generation of its donor base. UNICEF has historically done very well in this area, with the Halloween Trick or Treat box and the new J-8 (Junior G-8) summit program targeting younger potential donors.

Remedying this hole should be a priority for Doctors Without Borders.

Find out what other websites a competitor's visitors spend time at

Another great piece of information is the "Sites Also Visited" section of an audience report. Again, for UNICEF.org, it looks like this:

Notice the correlation of visitors to hrw.org (Human Rights Watch) is 130.0x. That means that visitors to unicef.org are one hundred and thirty times more likely to visit hrw.org than non-unicef.org visitors. If you're a competitor of UNICEF.org, you should be approaching Human Rights Watch for partnerships. From something as simple as featuring non-competitive content in each other's email blasts, to joint projects. Go where your competitor's customers are, and try and recruit them.

Find out where a specific audience hangs out

Let's say Doctors Without Borders wanted to start targeting 0-17 year olds in the United States by approaching relevant websites for non-monetary partnerships to promote their new "Socially Active High Schoolers" material. (I'm making that program up, DWB has no such program) You configure Google Ad Planner to find 0-17 year olds in the United States.

Then, use the Google Ad Planner filter to select websites that fall into the category "Lifestyle -> Activism and Social Issues".

What you've got below (I've only shown the top few) is a target list of websites. You *could* buy advertising on them, but much more affordable (and non-profit-friendly) technique is to approach them to become corporate partners of Doctors Without Borders. With such a partnership could come many benefits, including access to excess ad inventory or other in-kind donations. Of course if they really love Doctors Without Borders, they might also run a donation match for their registered users.

And that's just three things...

I've just covered three things, but you can do a lot more with the free audience research of Google Ad Planner. Don't miss out on an incredibly useful free tool.

On the other hand, why wouldn't I use Google Ad Planner?

Like many Google tools, it's the startup trying to steal market share from more entrenched players. For anyone who's read The Innovator's Dilemna and the Innovator's Solution, this is a very dangerous competitor. Most everyone who sells commercial analytics tools has a bigger list of features than the free Google Analytics, but nobody who makes a product in that space enjoys watching the Google Analytics team steal market share as they slowly develop their awesome and free tool from the bottom up.

Google is attacking the problem of advertising and audience research from the bottom. So it's not going to compete head to head with more advanced services that have been around longer like comScore, but then not everybody needs comScore. Others have weighed in on this, including famed digital media pundit and player John Batelle. Wendy Hofstetter also did a piece explaining why they don't compete.

Ultimately, if you're going to drop a serious amount of money in advertising with the sites you find, you're going to migrate to comScore or Nielsen. If you're not, Google Ad Planner is probably going to be fine, and get better every quarter.

Actionable Analytics: Where is your search engine traffic coming from, and where is it going on your site?

2009-12-21T15:07:31-08:00

We've all seen this keyword report that shows you the top search engine keywords that drove traffic to your website are. It's found in Google Analytics under Traffic Sources->Keywords, and once you click "non-paid", it shows you all your organic keywords that are generating traffic from search engines to your website.

This report contains one of the great fallacies of modern web analytics, which is that it defaults to displaying this information ranked on this page by things like visits, pages per visit, and time on site.

Nobody puts up a website to maximize "time on site" or "visits", they want results! So click on that tab labeled "Goal Set 1" where you've configured Google Analytics to measure things like sales, e-mail signups, and leads, and then resort your top keywords by "Goal Conversion Rate":

Now this is useful. Which keywords are most "profitable" for you, yielding the results that justify maintaining your website?

This is useful information if you're buying keywords because that would tell you how much to pay for them, and whether or not you should buy more or less of them. But we're talking about organic keywords, now, and organic keywords don't exist on their own. Every organic keyword exists in tandem with a landing page on your site. After all, if you like (or don't like) your organic search results, and want to either emulate or improve them, how would you know where to start? Which of your pages are performing well that you can scrutinize?

The solution comes in a feature rolled out in the latest release of Google Analytics. Select "Landing Page" from the green-highlighted pulldown menu:

The resulting chart is almost perfect, except that there are a lot of single visits with perfect conversion metrics. That's too small a sample to draw conclusions from.

Use the "Advanced Filter" at the bottom to drop out all keyword-landing page combinations that are too small. While you should use a higher threshhold, I just dropped out every combo with less than 5 visits. Using the filter is easy, just click "Advanced Filter", and set Visits > 5.

.....

The final report is perfect.

You can use it to look at which combinations of landing pages and keywords are working well, compare those to pages that aren't working well, and either re-edit the copy on the landing pages, change the ask on those pages to raise it's yield, or use the techniques that seem to be working on those pages to create new landing page-keyword combinations.

If you're interested in spending more time on increasing your search engine traffic, and you should, since it's often your best performing traffic, I'll be trying out and reviewing a new product in 2010, Enquisite, to optimize organic search on a number of clients. (And yes, the people from Enquisite are giving me free access to their tool to try it out.)