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).

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.

User Agent Switching: Some browsers, such as Safari (on the PC), allow you to switch user agents to an iPhone or iPad. This tells the website that you’re browsing from that device, and it sends you the version of the website that it would normally send to that device. This is an imperfect emulation, however, since the dimensions of your computer monitor probably differ somewhat from  an iPhone. (If not, it’s probably time to switch to a new monitor).

Emulator Software: We often use BrowserCam, which will allow you to do a screenshot of many mobile browsers. The software isn’t perfect, however. It doesn’t allow you to use authentication for example, and other inconsistencies from the mobile version may appear from time to time. It is, however, one of the best options available right now.

Specific device testing: There’s a good iPhone tester available, as well as Blackberry emulators to mimic individual phones. Be aware that the Blackberry emulators are very large downloads.

In the end, you really do need to test on mobile itself. Testing in an emulator means you’re using a keyboard and a mouse. So you may know what things look like, but you won’t know what will happen if you tap versus mouse-click, swipe, or whether or not your text is too small for medium sized fingers.

The map is not the territory

To really test, you need the devices themselves to see how they are going to respond.  Emulators are great for layout and design testing, but not great for testing how devices will respond to device detection (server side), media queries (client side), and of course any interaction with the hardware (besides gesturing and typing, think click to call or click to email functionality for now on mobile web sites – though the list will grow as new approaches are established for leveraging mobile hardware from websites).

Determine which browsers to focus on

As with any kind of testing, you should come up with a target browser/device list based on your site analytics. Most mobile sites will focused more on Safari/iOS and Android phones, as that is the devices used for browsing on most US based sites. You shouldn’t lose sight of Blackberry and Windows mobile, however, and perhaps even Nokia if you have a more international reach.

You might say I might sound like a used car salesperson (and maybe I do), but it’s true. The feature is site search tracking, and it’s the easiest, most powerful feature in Google Analytics that you’re probably not using. That’s because it’s buried in the settings, but once you know it’s there, it’s incredibly easy to activate. It’s like a well-kept secret, but really, it shouldn’t be, because it’s so useful.

(I’m talking mostly about Google Analytics today. But if you use a different web analytics package, it probably includes a similar, equally valuable feature, and it’s worth looking into how to activate it.)

One of the most common questions I hear about analytics is “what do my visitors want?”  This is a tricky question to answer – we can make educated guesses based on the pages they visit, or perhaps the keywords that they arrive from on search engines.  But just because they view a page doesn’t mean it contained the information they needed, and most of your search visitors are probably coming from branded terms. We can’t know for sure what visitors want, unless they tell us.

Happily, some of your visitors are telling you exactly what they want – when they type it into the search box on your site. (To be clear, I mean your site’s internal search – not the keyword someone searches on Google that brings you to your site.) It’s also easy to capture this information in your analytics tool, for almost any site search tool that you’re using.

First, we assume that your site has a site search, and that it’s configured well. If not, Marissa has some good tips for how to find a site search tool that works for you.

In Google Analytics, just go into your profile settings, and edit them.  There’s an option for site search: to turn it on, turn it off, and configure it.

Configuring site search tracking is as easy as doing a search on your site – it doesn’t matter what you search for – and looking at the name of the search parameter in the resulting URL.  For example, if the URL of the page after you search is http://www.beaconfire.com/blog/?s=analytics, then your search parameter is s.  If your URL is http://www.beaconfire.com/content/search?SearchText=kittens, then your search parameter is SearchText.  Just drop that search parameter into your Google Analytics settings, and you’re done.

It’s really that easy.  In fact, if you’re a Google Analytics administrator, you should go do it now. Go ahead. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

Ok, so what do you get from doing this?  Different analytics tools will give you different data, but all will give you a wealth of information that you didn’t have before.  In Google Analytics, you can now answer questions like:

• What are visitors searching for on my site?
• How many of my visitors are searching? (Some people will search no matter how good your IA is – but if too many people are searching, it could mean they’re having trouble navigating your site.)
• What pages are visitors most likely to search from? (Lots of people will search from the homepage – but if they are searching in great numbers from another page, that’s a clue that they’re looking for something on that page, and not finding it.)
• What pages are visitors most likely to visit after searching? (Ask yourself: do these pages match up with the search terms they used?)
• After visitors search, how likely are they to leave the site? How many more pages are they likely to visit? (Are they especially likely to leave after certain types of searches?)
• For what search terms is the visitor likely to immediately refine their search? How many times do they refine it?

Put this together, and you’ve got a wealth of information about the usability of your site, and about your users’ interests. Here are just a few examples (based on real things I’ve seen) of what you might learn:

• Hundreds of people are searching for topic X, which is buried far down in your site. You had no idea so many people were interested in it, so you make it more prominent.
• It’s June, and you’re already seeing searches for your conference that happens in October – and they’re finding information from last year’s conference. Time to update your content…
• Every month, your number one site search term is “search”… which happens to be the default text in your search box.  Your users are confused about how to use the site search. (You would be surprised how often this is true.)
• People are looking for one of your programs, but using a phrase that you never use and didn’t expect them to use. They’re not finding it, and leaving the site instead. There’s a good insight for your site search and your SEO…

Have I convinced you that site search analytics is magic? If you’ve just turned it on, or if you’ve had it for a while but haven’t paid attention to it, you may find that it’s your new best friend.

AP Style Guide Drops the Hyphen from Email

Finally! It is perfect timing too because Beaconfire has just switched over to using the AP Style Guide with the launch of our refreshed logo and website. Before this announcement, there was an internal staff debate whether we could all handle the shift to using “e-mail”. Now we don’t have to decide.

Oxford English Dictionary Features OMG and LOL

Just announced this month, the Oxford English Dictionary Online has decided to include noteworthy initialisms OMG and LOL. Already on the list are IMHO (‘in my humble opinion’), TMI (‘too much information’), and BFF (‘best friends forever’).

Web and Mobile Marketing

Key Tips for Mobile Web Design Strategy
Mobile websites are becoming more common as businesses and organizations realize that a growing number of people access the internet over their smartphone. Microsoft Tag predicts that mobile usage will overtake desktop usage by 2014.

With that in mind, perhaps you’re an organization who already has a website, but wants to engage more users through mobile, or you’re creating a totally new website and starting fresh. In that case, you need to consider implications for a mobile website from the start. Check out Mashable’s 10 Key Considerations for Your Mobile Web Design Strategy.

Google Analytics Rolls Out New Dashboard

Google will be launching a new Analytics in the near future, and to get things started they’ve begun rolling out the newly designed dashboard to select users. The new dashboard will be customizable with user-selected widgets and give you the ability to have more than one dashboard in order to track multiple initiatives.

Color Mobile Photo App Takes Social Interaction to a New Level

New App Alert – Color, made by Color Labs, allows you take pictures and then share them with people within 100 feet of you. Keep in mind that the sharing of these new photos takes place with anyone in that 100 foot radius who is also using Color. For example, we tested in our office today and saw some shots of another business’ team meeting, including white board notations. Just keep in mind that if you’re going to use Color, you may want to be selective about the photos you take. The app is available for iPhone and Android.

Here are some questions to keep in mind when evaluating tools:

• Who is my target audience and where do they hang out online? Some tools are better at helping you manage multiple accounts (e.g. your organization’s CEO and a subject matter expert both have Twitter profiles) and connect with various platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, WordPress, Ning, etc.), while others are better at analyzing data.
• Why do I want to use a tool to manage my social media outreach? Perhaps you need a way to start scheduling posts or you want to know exactly what your outreach efforts mean for your organization.
• What specific information do I want to learn about my constituents? You may want to track conversation or article topic trends, or determine the social network that a majority of your constituents use and advertise on that website. Think about the answers you want to learn and make sure that you’re choosing a tool that can help you reach those goals.

As reported in a recent article on eMarketer, InformationWeekAnalytics released a survey showing that most companies are relying on relatively low-tech solutions to monitor social media.

But, the game is changing and marketers need to change with it.

eMarketer also reported that while site traffic was the top metric for social marketing success in 2010, the number two spot will shift from just tallying fans, followers and positive buzz to tracking conversions.

As technology improves and professionals recognize the need to track their social media outreach to a bottom line, these monitoring and analysis tools will be in high demand.

Ask yourself, what does your organization need? Most tools on the market have a set of common features: they allow users to register profiles across multiple platforms (i.e. Facebook and Twitter), provide a way to help with planning and scheduling posts, report analytics and offer ways to shorten URLs to maximize trackability.

In addition, each product may have its own set of special features or a unique focus. For example, products like Small Act and Spredfast offer personalized setup service and ongoing support with a live person versus an online help desk. Explore other cool features like social profiling from Small Act to help you identify how many of your current constituents are already using social media and where they spend their time. Or connect with Spredfast to acquire sentiment analytics to easily measure overall online brand awareness and activity.

Tools like HootSuite allow you to track the online activities of your influential social media constituents, and Radian6 offers sophisticated analysis of how people are talking about a topic (i.e. tag clouds of related words). Plus, the selection of tools is growing, offering a variety of options to fit every budget.

Both HootSuite and Small Act offer free versions to start, allowing users the option to upgrade ($149-$1,500 a month, depending on the tool) to receive extended customer support, additional data storage and more. Furthermore, packages for high-end products like Spredfast and Radian6 may start at a few hundred dollars a month, but offer features like in-depth training for your staff, dedicated account managers and the ability to monitor and analyze unlimited social media accounts.

Remember, when you’re selecting a tool for your organization, think about future growth and what other opportunities you may want to pursue. Even if you’re just starting to use social media, you should consider selecting a tool that will help you expand your marketing efforts. Don’t be afraid to try tools, request demos and talk to other tool users to see what will best fit your organization’s needs.

For additional information about other social media monitoring and analysis tools, check out this article “5 Superior Social Media Management Tools” from Mashable.

But, you could get even better data about donations.

There’s a serious limitation that comes with Google Analytics goals: they track key actions, but no related information. You can know that someone made a donation, but not how much, or even what form they donated to.  With many actions (for example, email signup), that’s just fine. But for donations, wouldn’t it be nice to know if your high-converting segments are donating $5, or $500?

Of course, there is a “value” setting that you can set for each goal.  The downside is, it’s purely symbolic.

You choose the value of each goal, and it’s the same every time the goal is completed.  This is a great way to account for the potential value of non-donation actions – for example, if you feel that a new email address is worth about $5, but your average donation is $60, you can compare the value of content that drives email acquisition, versus content that drives donations. But you won’t see the differences in actual donation amounts.

There’s a better way to track donations: instead of goals, use eCommerce tracking.

eCommerce is built into Google Analytics, but it requires some technical know-how to set up – as a result, it’s less used than goals. But it captures a wealth of information about transactions, including transaction amount, that gives you a richer view of your donation data.

Not only do you get better data on your transactions, but it opens up access to a world of useful reports: most valuable traffic sources, most popular products, even the number of visits made before a user donates. You can view eCommerce data as a separate tab in most reports, and measure the value of landing pages that contribute most towards conversion.

“Wait a minute,” you might say. “We don’t have eCommerce on our site. We just take donations.” No big deal. A transaction is a transaction.  Where a robust eCommerce tool might send back data about a cart full of multiple products, your tracking treats the donation as basically an eCommerce transaction with a single item.

To set up eCommerce tracking, you follow these steps:

1. Enable eCommerce in the settings on each profile where you want to use it.  (That’s easy.)
2. Write some code. This where the technical know-how comes in – you’ll need to edit javascript to do this.  Google has good documentation and examples that you can build on.  In your code, you’ll create a transaction (defined by a transaction ID), and add a single “item” (your donation). Then, you’ll submit the transaction to Google Analytics.
3. Add the code to the thank you page of your donation form, and add whatever hooks you need to plug in the appropriate information about the transaction.

Depending on your donation management tool, it may be easy to pull out transaction details, or very, very difficult. We’ve had fun doing this recently with Convio, which has a handy shorthand for displaying transaction information. If your system has something similar, just drop that shorthand into your eCommerce code, and you’re all set. (If it doesn’t, you may need to do some more serious coding, either to pull data from an API, or in the worst case, scrape it off the confirmation page.)

What data do you pass to Google Analytics?  The details of a donation aren’t a perfect fit for the parameters in the eCommerce tracking. This means you need to be a little creative about mapping your fields – but it also gives you an opportunity to pull in data you might not otherwise.

For example, the Item details allow for a product code, product name, and a “category or variation”.  Your “product” is just a donation, but you can use these fields in whatever way best meets your needs. If you run many different campaigns, you might use the campaign name as the product name. If you’re testing ask strings, maybe the donation level name is the product name.  The category field is open-ended and could capture any other aspect of the donation. Are you interested in honor gifts? Monthly gifts? You can catch that information in the category.

Once you’ve set up eCommerce tracking, you’ll be able to assign a real dollar value to almost every interaction, segment, and source in your analytics setup. If you’re an analytics geek like me, be prepared to have lots of fun digging into a whole new dataset.

I recently took a look at three of the most popular utilities for social sharing: ShareThis, AddThis, and Gigya. After conducting a review, AddThis came out on top as the best system for most users. Gigya, especially with it’s recent integration with Convio, might be your best bet depending on your needs.

Gigya, in addition to the standard social sharing options, also allows for Single Sign On, allowing users to bypass the standard account creation process. Instead, it allows users to use their Facebook, Twitter and other credentials and also allows for user interactions with the widget (e.g. sharing content) to be recorded in Convio. While it is highly powerful and customizable, be aware that setting up Gigya requires significantly more time and effort than setting up most social sharing widgets (even if you only use their social sharing features).

One concern with Gigya’s service is that sharing content through their widget prompts users to provide access permissions to their profile data on Facebook (see screenshot, right). While this may provide additional audience data, users may be wary of the privacy implications of this somewhat unusual request (for a sharing widget) and therefore it will likely have the effect of reducing clickthrough rates. Gigya also offers a simple sharing plugin which does not send a request for permission.

ShareThis and AddThis have had significant feature differentiation in the past, but as time progressed they have largely mimicked each other’s feature sets. Currently, there are a limited set of functional differences between them, primarily focused on default aesthetics and ease of customization.

• Customization: AddThis is generally preferred by developers due to an API that is easier to use, but the ShareThis API can typically accomplish the same tasks (though potentially at a higher development cost). One of the few differentiators between the two services is in the customization of which buttons are shared. Both services, by default, show sharing icons to each user based on their previous sharing history (across all sites using the platform). If, for example, someone typically shares via MySpace on other sites, the MySpace icon will appear in the sharing box on the very first time that the user visits a site. It’s possible to force a listing of pre-determined icons using AddThis, but that level of customization is unavailable with ShareThis (or it is not documented).
• Privacy Policy: AddThis received negative publicity several years ago for their use of a flash cookie which recorded a user’s browsing preferences across sites, with non-personally identifying demographic and historical visit information later being sold to advertisers. This practice is common among these services (including ShareThis and Gigya), but they received additional criticism due to the fact that the AddThis Flash cookie revived cookies that had been deleted. AddThis no longer engages in this practice.

• Reporting: Both AddThis and ShareThis integrate with Google Analytics to report on sharing, but neither provides the user-level actions that makes Gigya compelling.

• Clickthroughs: While there may be difference in clickthrough rates between these services, no testing has been done. Even so, scattered reports have suggested people find the AddThis hover menu to be easier to use than the ShareThis version.

AddThis widget (on hover)	ShareThis widget (on hover)

Conclusion: Based on most organization’s needs, the easy extensibility of AddThis is probably ideal. If single sign on is desired, or tracking by user (with Convio integration), Gigya’s software may be the best fit.

For more sophisticated sharing (i.e. allowing people’s Facebook posts on a topic to appear directly on your webpage), check out Disqus or Echo.

1. Encourage links from supporters

One of the most important factors for SEO is having incoming links from reputable external web sites. As a non-profit, you have an advantage in this area, because you likely have supporters who are happy to promote your cause with a link. Take advantage of this — if your organization has a blog or makes announcements online, make sure that content is easily shareable. Provide logos, badges, or widgets that your supporters can easily plug into their own web sites.

Beware of linked badges/graphics that don’t give search engines enough information. From NTEN’s Blog:

Badges are an excellent way to get your supporters linking to you, but too many nonprofits make a common mistake: they fail to incorporate text links into their badges. Search engines prefer text links to graphics, as they signal which keywords are related to the linked page. (Remember, search engines can’t read graphics. Yet.) So, ask your supporters for links and be sure to provide them with SEO-friendly badges.

2. Don’t forget about pages hosted elsewhere

If your donation form isn't hosted on your site, it won't appear in your Google Sitelinks.

The pages stored in your content management system may already be search engine optimized — but if some of your most important pages are hosted elsewhere (through your CRM system, for example), they may not be optimized in the same way.

• The externally hosted page may have a different domain name than the rest of your site, which makes it difficult for search engines to associate it with your organization. For example, a donation form hosted on a separate domain cannot be listed as one of your Google Sitelinks. However, if you create a “Donate” page on your own site that directs users to your donation form, that can appear as a Google Sitelink.
• You may not have as much control over the format, URL, title, heading usage, and meta tags for pages hosted elsewhere. Take the time to identify workarounds or dig deeper into the customization options for your highest priority pages.

3. Evaluate the calls-to-action throughout your site

• Identify the pages on your site that already receive plenty of traffic from search engines, then make sure your most important calls-to-action are featured or at least accessible from those pages.
• Make your calls-to-action SEO friendly by incorporating text links containing strong keywords and using alt tags for banners/images.

4. Manage your online identity

• Which is more recognizable to your target audience: your organization’s full name or its acronym? Or maybe neither — are people most likely to be searching for a well-publicized project or campaign you’ve run recently? Does it depend on the audience? Account for these variations in your SEO strategy.
• Be sure that your website is listed where it should be, both in broad non-profit listings sites (Idealist, Charity Navigator) and in topic or geographically-focused resources.

5. Do your keyword homework

• When branding new campaigns and projects, do keyword research. Does the title of your new campaign align with the terms that your audience is searching for?
• Identify the keywords that are most specific to your cause and be able to differentiate yourself.

Do you have other SEO ideas that non-profits should have on their radar? Post them in the comments.

We use analytics tracking on the homepage slideshows for a number of our clients.  I got curious about the results, one day, while I was helping one client look for the answer to a particular question: why did their new report not get the traffic they were hoping for? They were promoting it on their slideshow, so I started there.  What I saw was so striking (if not necessarily shocking) that I broadened my scope.  I looked at all the slideshows where we had analytics data, and asked: do these things really work?

“Work” is a relative term.  It depends on the goal you’re trying to meet.  With an old-fashioned slideshow, the kind where you show off your 300 best vacation photos to all of your friends, you’d probably call it a success if your audience makes lots of appreciative noises, and a failure if they fall asleep.

We like setting goals, so we have a pretty good sense of the needs that slideshows are meant to fill. Most often, they’re meant to:

• Promote important content and announcements
• “Engage” visitors
• Show off compelling, mission-related visuals
• Establish a personality or aesthetic for the site
• Make it easier to manage what goes on the homepage

The last goal is interesting to me. Slideshows are a very easy way to manage content. Want something on the homepage? Give me a slide, and it’ll be the first thing visitors see on the homepage… until someone else comes along, and puts another slide on top of yours. (We’ve always insisted on a limit on the number of slides – usually 5, occasionally as many as 8 – so eventually each slide will rotate off.)

Slideshows make it easy for web content managers to settle the all-important issue of “I need space on the homepage” without hurt feelings or bad politics. Back in the day, the common solution was to have really long, scrolling homepages. Today, the homepage looks cleaner – the extraneous content is buried in the slideshow or other expanding clickamajigs, and displayed one pretty piece at a time. Certainly, this is easier for the web manager, so this goal is a success.

But what about other goals?

Most of the goals on this list are subjective, and hard to measure quantitatively. But the first two, promotion of content and visitor engagement, are things we can concretely measure with analytics. I figured that, if slideshows were successfully promoting content and drawing users in, you should see lots of people clicking through the slides for more information.

That’s not what I saw.

Granted, this is not a scientific study. For hard proof, I’d love to have some usability testing data to back up the analytics. However, this was data from four dissimilar nonprofits over a period of several months – and the same patterns held for each.

In each case, one slide would get a nontrivial number of clicks. Usually, this was the first slide, and it averaged clicks from about 1% of homepage views. The next slide would get about half as many.  The next slide, half again. Beyond that, the click rate rapidly dwindled towards zero.  I saw this pattern in every case I looked at.

The takeaway: people might notice the first couple slides, but they’re not likely to click, and beyond that, no one is even seeing them.

It’s easy to guess why this would happen. Most visitors spend only a few seconds on the homepage before deciding where to go next (or leaving). If your information architecture is good, they won’t need to wait around and see your slides. I would also guess that some visitors don’t understand that slideshows are clickable, or get frustrated when it changes before they can click – though, again, usability testing could confirm that.

A poorly designed slideshow can exacerbate the problem.  Timing the transitions is tricky – too fast, and the slide will pass before anyone can click. Too slow, and you’ll only ever see one slide.  If you do miss a slide that’s interesting, the controls are often so hidden or unintuitive that it’s hard to get back – you just have to wait for it to come around again… if you don’t lose patience and go somewhere else.

It seems that a homepage slideshow is not the best way to promote critical content. It may help set a tone for your site, and certainly makes it easier to slot content onto the homepage.  But it’s probably not a good way to encourage users to click.

If you’ve got a slideshow on your homepage, is it meeting your goals? There’s one easy way to find out – install some extra analytics tracking on your own slideshow, and see just how it’s doing.