So, you have a website. It looks good, works well, and is kept updated — great! But what else should you be doing on a regular basis to ensure its success?

Google Webmaster Tools is a free service provided by Google that will help you to see the “big picture” of how your site exists on the web and how you can improve both its presence and performance. To get started, log in with any Google Account. You’ll need to add your site and complete a brief verification process. Then you’re ready to go.

Here are a few things you can accomplish through Webmaster Tools:

Learn about Incoming Traffic

Understanding the intentions of incoming visitors will help you to make sure they have a positive experience on your site.

• View Top Search Queries shows when and how your web site is appearing in Google search results. Which keywords display your site the most? Which result in click-throughs? Learning the answers to these questions (and identifying the differences between them) will help you to ensure that your site’s content meets the needs of incoming traffic. If certain keywords are missing from the list or ranked lower than you would expect, you may need to add more content to your site related to that keyword and ensure that others are linking to it.

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Beaconfire VP Michael Cervino gives his five New Year’s resolutions for non-profits. This is the first in a new series of video blog posts (vlogs!) we will be bringing you.

Next month hear CEO Lynn Labeineic talk about her biggest failures as a consultant. You do not want to miss that one!

Google has been slowly rolling out new features in Google Analytics over the past couple weeks – some more visible than others, but all of them pretty powerful.  If you haven’t seen them appear yet, you likely will soon.  I’ll let Google give you the full tour, but these are the highlights:

• Intelligence - this is the biggest, shiniest of all the new features.  We all know there’s a lot of useful, actionable information buried in our Analytics reports, but often don’t have the time to sift through and find them.  The Intelligence reports look through your data for significant trends and deviations from those trends, and tell you what they find, saving you some of the time of hunting for these insights yourself.  It won’t give you all the details, but it will tell you if you get a large spike in search traffic, or if your bounce rate peaks.  You can even set alerts for yourself, so that when you get, for example, a big spike in referring traffic, Analytics will send you an email and let you know you might have some important incoming links.  Don’t pack your bags for vacation yet – you’ll still have to review your data regularly, and analyze it yourself – but this tool will make it a lot easier to keep on top of trends.
• Pivot Tables – If you’re a data geek like me, and you love pivot tables in Excel, you’ll also love them in Google Analytics.  You can find them at the top of most reports with data tables, next to the other views.  This is great for doing a quick slice-and-dice of your data without downloading it for deeper analysis.  (This one has been around a little longer than some of the others, but hasn’t received a lot of attention – I think it’s great.)
• Advanced Filtering – Until now, filtering data in a report was mostly just useful for looking at a particular folder, or file extension, or page title (or else, you had to know a lot about scary-looking regular expressions).  Now, instead of filtering only on the primary dimension of the report, you can filter on any dimension or metric that’s visible.  Want to look at pages that got 100-200 visits, with an average time on site over 1 minute?  Want to find pages with the highest bounce rate that had more than one visitor?  Advanced filtering will be your friend.
• Goals - Goals have been around for a long time, but until recently, you could only have 4 of them.  Now, you can have up to 20, and Google has added some additional metrics that you can use for goals (like time on site).  Very handy.
• Custom Variables – This feature requires some custom coding, but soon you’ll be able to tag visitors, visits, and pageviews with identifying data.  For example, you could tag your news articles by category, and then see aggregate data about the categories in your reports.  This feature is still on the way, but should have a wide range of uses.

Just a few things that could make your life a little easier.

I love analytics. I love diving into the data, looking at the numbers and finding new and actionable insights. But there is one thing about analytics I don’t love – monthly dashboard reports. You know what I mean – a spreadsheet showing visits, pageviews, new visitors, etc., compared from month to month in nice little columns, filling in a neatly formed Excel graph. While not always actionable, these reports do show big-picture trends, and your bosses and boards love that. In the world of analytics, monthly dashboard reports are a necessary evil.

However, I could never get Google Analytics to give me data in a form that really fit any of my monthly dashboard report needs. I’ve spent hours clicking, copying, pasting, and reformatting in search of the perfect dashboard report.

The tedium may come to an end, thanks to an Excel Plugin called Excellent Analytics. The plugin uses the Google Analytics API to allow you to run customizable Google Analytics reports right in Excel. And after you create a query, a few clicks will update the numbers in next month’s report.

So after you invest some time to set up your first Dashboard report with Excellent Analytics, all you need to do next month is copy and paste a few columns as values, and update your query. I tried it out for the first time this month, and I went from spending almost 4 hours on a dashboard report to 45 minutes.

Now that’s efficiency only an analytics geek could love.

Sometimes a client needs a change.  When you’re talking about websites, that change can be the whole enchilada: a new (or first time!) content management system, a comprehensive content audit with audience matrices and  IA work, a big build with tons of new functionality.  Or it might just be a creative design refresh with some minor tweaks and enhancements,  resulting in the appearance of a major revision at a lower cost and quicker implementation — the website facelift.

A website’s search can be similar.  Many clients we talk to are convinced that their site search doesn’t work and needs to be torn out — and sometimes that’s true.   We can gut the whole works, put in a new Google Mini or MS Search Server, spend hours dividing your site into collections, setting up separate searches based on audiences or site sections, but that’s not always necessary.  As a counterpart to the website facelift, the site search facelift seeks the same result: more for less.  How? By applying lessons from your search metrics, particularly what the top search terms of people seeking information at your site are and then making specific corrections to content.

While a site search facelift has several techniques to improve results, one of the easiest steps you can take to improve search results is to review frequent search terms and provide recommended links through your search engine for those terms.  The term used is dependent on the search engine, but is commonly referred to as “best bets” or “suggested results”.

Perhaps your search engine doesn’t make those frequently searched for terms reports available? Don’t have that data in the first place? Don’t be so sure – if you’re using Google analytics, most of the time that information is available to you irrespective of your search engine technology.

The best thing about this method is that it generally follows the 80/20 rule where 80% of your searches are coming from 20% of the search terms people use.  Start with the terms most frequently searched form and you are automatically handling the search results in the order that will gain the most benefit from clear, recommended content suggestions.  And while there’s a lot more to a full search facelift, this is a quick way to get some significant results.

There’s no doubt that Google is the search engine for most of the Internet.  Over the past few years, the big G has taken almost all of the growth in the search business (90% according to the linked source). And when vendors speak of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), they are recommending practices that are tantamount to Google Engine Optimization.  And why not? Most website administrators looking at their search referrals can plainly see why that’s where to put your effort in.

With the recent agreement between Yahoo and Microsoft making MS Bing the search platform for all of Yahoo’s sites, there’s now a new wrinkle in the SEO game.  Take the two numbers in your referral logs for Bing and Yahoo, combine them together — big enough to matter now? Especially with MS pushing the technology everywhere it can?  Right now you’ll continue to have traffic from both Bing and Yahoo, but moving forward, most sites will only have to optimize for a single additional search engine in the #2 position — Bing.

If you decide Bing is worth watching, try out these tips on optimization.  Remember – SEO is always a bit of black magic rather than hared science, but the rewards can definitely be worth the effort.

Often, the “analytics component” of a Web site redesign consists of sticking some code on a page, configuring a few goals and reports, and afterwards running some reports to show your board just how awesome (hopefully) the new numbers are. You might even run a few reports to show the success of a campaign or two. And then, analytics sinks into just another report you need to put together, dashboard-style, before your annual board meeting.

Why does web analytics sink into statistical oblivion when there is just so much to see and do? Maybe it’s because there’s so much to see and do. Dashboards filled with data show you when numbers go up and when they go down. You see page hits, bounce rates, and goal funnels galore. What does it all mean, and what can I do about it? Analytics is all well and good in the for-profit organizations with departments dedicated to this kind of stuff – but non-profit tech folks are busy people. Who has the time?

One proposed panel at SXSW this year, Data, Data, Everywhere: Drowning in a Sea of Analytics, says you have the time, and you should take it. Just because you don’t run eCommerce doesn’t mean your site doesn’t have goals. You run campaigns, you take donations, you provide member services. And with Web analytics, you can constantly strive to have a better, more engaging Web presence. As you make improvements based on analytics, you may actually save your staff time and your organization, money.

So vote for Data, Data, Everywhere, and we’ll see you in Austin!

Web analytics is usually left to marketers looking to fine-tune shopping carts, hone in on AdWords, track campaigns, and conduct a whole bevy of marketing tasks. Creative-types and IA folks don’t always dive into this kind of data. But when a site is undergoing a creative or architectural facelift, it is the perfect time to dive into analytics and make the right decisions.

Creative Decisions:

Analytics packages can tell you a lot about the technology your audience uses. Some stats worth looking at include:

• Resolution;
• Browser;
• Flash Version;
• Java.

Are 75% of your users at 1024×768? Then maybe it’s time to break out of that limiting 800×600 design. Do 30% of your users still in IE6? Avoid transparent images. 5% of your users don’t have Flash or Java? Make sure you offer alternatives to that nifty Slideshow on the homepage (which you should do anyway, but that is another post for another day).

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Recently, there’s been a proliferation of url shortening services, driven largely by Twitter’s 140 character limit and the need to keep links as short as possible to fit in your tweets.  They are run on websites with names like bit.ly and tr.im, as well as the classic tinyurl.com.  As a user of the internet, I have a serious dislike of these cryptic little URLs, and I went searching to find out if they came with other problems I hadn’t thought of, especially problems for SEO.  It turns out that they’re not as bad as I suspected, but they do have some serious downsides (some even say they’re evil).  If you’re trying to make a name for your nonprofit in social media, these are issues you’ll want to watch out for.

Shortening urls provides some important benefits to the person sharing the link, which is why they’ve become so popular.  Aside from taking up less space (thus making them more tweetable), many of the services provide tracking data, giving you details about how your content is being used.  That can be really fun for the casual user, and valuable for organizations.  Some people think they look tidier than long urls.

But there are two (or maybe three) other parties affected by the shortened url, and they aren’t so well served by it. (more…)

I’m very pleased to announce the release of Beaconfire’s new white paper – Is Multivariate Testing Right for You? A Guide for Nonprofits.

We’ve become big fans of multivariate testing (MVT) as a powerful, flexible, and often under-utilized way to optimize websites based on real users’ behavior.  We’ve also seen nonprofits gain insights through MVT that would have otherwise been difficult or impossible to learn.  It’s a great way to learn what drives your visitors to get involved or donate through your website, and can be applied to support almost any of your online goals.

This white paper is a guide to understanding just what MVT is all about, what’s required to take advantage of it, and whether it’s a good fit for your nonprofit.  You’ll also learn how the optimization process works, from planning to analysis, and how to get started with an MVT program that meets your needs.

The paper is available for download now at http://www.beaconfire.com/mvt.

I like diagnosing problems. I love implementing solutions. And as some of my colleagues will tell you, more than anything else, I love to test. But it’s the final step that I loathe: clicking that dreaded “publish” button.

A few weeks back, we discovered a minor issue with the “print this page” functionality of a site. The issue affected only a small universe of browsers. I was able to diagnose the problem and implement a fix. However, that fix was more of a coding change than I had hoped for. I tested each several pages using each template in four browsers times two versions times four operating systems, (which translates to “I tested it a whole heckuva lot”). Everything worked. But when it came time to click that publish button, I hesitated. I was about to change this functionality on no less than 5,000 pages. Could I have possibly anticipated every possible outcome?

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Answer:  Multivariate Testing (or MVT)

So what is it?  According to Wikipedia:

…multivariate testing is a process by which more than one component of a website may be tested in a live environment. It can be thought of in simple terms as numerous split tests or A/B tests performed on one page at the same time. Split tests and A/B tests are usually performed to determine the better of two content variations, multivariate testing can theoretically test the effectiveness of limitless combinations…In a nutshell, multivariate testing can be seen as allowing website visitors to vote with their clicks for which content they prefer and will stand the most chance of them proceeding to a defined goal.

Two Beaconfire staffers, Shiloh and Jo, recently won our Leadership & Innovation Award for their work on MVT, and I had the opportunity to sit down with them and find out more about it.

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Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to attend ForeSee Results‘ Digital Citizen 2008 Summit.  I was only able to attend the first half of the event due to client meetings in the afternoon. One morning session was fairly sales-oriented. One was a fun case study about the National Park Service web site (which I particularly enjoyed because the National Parks Conservation Association is a BF client).

But the best session I was able to attend was Eric Peterson’s opening keynote. Aside from being a really engaging speaker, Peterson is also pretty much a guru in the art and science of web analytics (and do follow the link to his site, because he offers a ton of free resources there).

Peterson opened with the concept that satisfaction is a function of expectations. “Well, duh,” you’re probably thinking, but how many times do we disappoint our constituents not because what we’re offering is bad, but because we led them to expect something different than what they got?

Peterson also immediately disabused us of the notion that occasionally running a report out of Google Analytics is sufficient. While the tools themselves have improved in the past 15 years, he pointed out that the really important, useful advances have been made in taking that data and turning it into knowledge organizations can act on.

Peterson pointed out that organizations all make one of three errors in trying beneficially use information about their web traffic beneficially:

• An investment gap – because even free tools aren’t free.
• A staffing gap – because data without interpretation and application is just a big pile of numbers.
• A process gap – because unless you’re willing to change your business processes based on what you learn, you’ll never see a return on your investment.

These parallel the three factors that have to be in order so that organizations can effectively make sense of their web traffic: technology, people, and process. And, as you might guess, the last one is the hard one.

Peterson went on to describe an analysis ecosystem, made up of analytics tools, personalization, multivariate testing, and the voice/experience of the customer. Rather than trying to explain the full concept here, I’ll point out that he’s written a white paper that’s available for free download (from ForeSee Results) and that lays out how all these factors interact to provide both quantitative and qualitative data to give organizations a complete picture of how to improve their constituents’ experiences with them.

And finally, if this topic really interests you, be sure to check out the next Web Analytics Wednesday in your area.

Edited Friday, October 10 at 9:48 am to add:  The slides of all the presentations are now available for free download.

Inspired by a post on Occum’s Razor, I recently applied for and received access to Google’s new Ad Planner (it took about a week for my application to be processed, so if you’re intrigued, don’t delay – apply right now. It’s okay – I can wait…). Test driving the tool, I found three things:

1. It’s immensely cool for a marketer, voter targeting guru, or demographics aficionado
2. It’s yet another example of how awesome Google is for giving us tools like this for free
3. It will make some privacy advocates likely go bonkers, as happened with some other Google innovations

Here’s the reader’s digest version: the Ad Planner leverages Google’s gigantic barrel o’ data to help users understand what sites people browse, based on a variety of demographic information and their other online behavior. It then helps you to build a list of sites to run advertising on, and even provides the ability to export your target list in MediaVisor (so that’s where that DoubleClick acquisition went).

The long version, as always, is a lot more complicated – the tool is very powerful, and not just for advertisers. Follow me below the fold to learn more…

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With the advent of Web 2.0, services such as YouTube.com made the idea of video publishing and hosting a commonplace activity for amateurs, hosting its videos for free, and carrying advertisements on its pages.

With the online video frenzy, ad agencies have capitalized on this burgeoning industry of amateur producers, and in a couple of instances, even commissioned to the populace to make Superbowl ads. Now, there are specialized online hosting services in niche markets serving the needs of advertising agencies, businesses, and political campaigns to serve video content.
Now, more than ever, the popularity of an online video can directly translate into money and success, whether it is in the form of ad revenue, donations, or advocacy conversion. This makes the tracking of video statistics more important than ever.

There are several reasons someone could be interested in online video statistics. If you’re a cost-conscious webmaster paying for bandwidth, you will want to track the actual transfer of bytes over the internet, and not necessarily  how many times a video is viewed. In paying for advertising,  it is more important to measure how many unique people watched a video, or how many times these people watched the video all the way through.  TubeMogul is helping organizations answer these and other important questions. TubeMogul’s name has been coming up at Web 2.0 and Social Networking events. While their authority on the topic has yet to be fully proven, their research looks impressive.

In May of 2008, the company published an updated “What Counts as a View?” which “discusses the findings of an experiment to test which actions result in a ’view‘ as measured on 14 online video websites. There are other interesting pieces about how online video views are driving donations to presidential candidates.

Looking through Tubemogul’s research, you can get the notion of how a video’s popularity impacts different social groups and different interested parties, seeking to benefit from the video’s popularity. As a service, TubeMogul provides a broadcast mechanism to push video content from one central location to multiple sites and then aggregate the video views from those different sites into one dashboard which lets users track video statistics from 12 video sites at once (Screen shot). You can get a more descriptive overview of their services at their site.
Also of interest is Compete.com’s blog.  This interesting blog offers the Video Market Share measured in April for the top 20 Video Hosting sites. With GooTube (Google Video/YouTube) at the top with 50% market share and with a steady growth month by month, it seems to be the Tiger Woods of the video world.

Weeks after their recent purchase of Feedburner, Google annouced last week that they were going to make Feedburner’s two paid functions free for all users. Feedburner is already a fantastic free feed optimizer and stats tracker, and opening up their advanced stats tracking and custom branding just makes it better.

What’s more, rumors abound that Feedburner will be integrated into Google Analytics, making your RSS an integrated part of your web stats package. So what are you waiting for? If you’re not using Feedburner yet, go burn your feed now – and if you are, upgrade to Stats PRO and custom brand your feed. And if you aren’t subscribed to the Beaconfire Wire feed – pick it up here as well.

Update: Via Lifehacker, if you’re using Blogger you can integrate Feedburner directly into your account. Here’s how.

Read below the jump for more details on the formerly paid features that were just freed up:

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