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.

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

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

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

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

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

Mobile Outreach Strategies: Online and Off

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mobile Targetted Search Ads

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

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

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

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

Tracking How Your Website Performs for Mobile Users

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

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

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

Determining ROI for Mobile Users

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

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

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

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

1) We set up the client account on Jira so that the client user only see their projects – that makes their experience more streamlined. We have created a Jira client training doc which we send along with the introduction to Jira email.  Beaconfire sets up a default dashboard for each client, so they don’t need to learn the process of how to set up dashboards. Some clients, though, get very comfortable with setting up dashboards and have access to all the tools to add new gadgets, etc.

2) We currently are not using Jira during the Discovery/Design phase, though we may eventually. The tool really best is used during the Development/QA phases.   We are starting to use Jira for Ongoing projects and are refining the best approach on how to differentiate between tickets in requirements/estimates stage and those which are approved for work.

3) Ideally all enhancements, bugs and task requests are entered in Jira instead of sent via email.  If an email does come in with a new request, the Beaconfire PM still enters  it in Jira and then sends back an email with the reference URL.  That way we don’t lose track of any of the requests.

4) Sometimes, if a question goes back and forth on Jira, it makes sense to just get on a call to discuss. A quick conversation can add a lot more clarity sometimes – just make sure to update the Jira ticket with comments and decisions.

5) If  the change/bug was issued by the client, once Beaconfire’s QA is complete, the ticket should be assigned back to the client for review. The status in our process for that is called “Pending Approval”. Once the client has reviewed, if they approve the change, they should assign the ticket to the PM with “Completed” status. If there are additional changes, they should assign back to the PM with “Rejected” or “In Process” status.  Once the change has been deployed, the ticket will be closed out.

6) We have also had the experience of co-management of tickets – either between Beaconfire and the client or amongst multiple client stakeholders. In that scenario, we have set up special dashboards to allow for a view of all tickets assigned to the other managers and then, separately, a list of tickets assigned to you.  The watcher function can also help to keep appraised of ticket status.

As we are refining this process, we may have some additional helpful hints that come up. Also, if you have used Jira, or other similar bug tracking tools, for client access, we’d love to hear what’s worked for you!

The day was marked with a lack of flowers, breakfast in bed or greeting card. Let it be know however, this != lack of appreciation! Perhaps the PMs will fare better on their holiday by assigning everyone a task to observe it ;).

Here are some other topics of interest on the Beaconfire back channel this week:

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If you are familiar with Tom’s Hardware, you know that they take their testing/benchmarking very seriously. Interested in how the current batch of browsers stack up against each other?
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/web-browser-performance-standard-html5,3013.html

This is the table of results if you want to jump right to the nitty-gritty:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/web-browser-performance-standard-html5,3013-16.html

And the Winner(s):
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/web-browser-performance-standard-html5,3013-17.html

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It seems as though Flash has be un-invited from yet another party. In the article “Microsoft jettisons Flash with ‘plug-in free’ Windows 8 Metro IE10“, Josh Ong talks about how IE10 will be a “plug-in free experience”. Some thoughts from the BF team:

Miro:
Great. Now all we’ll have left will be javascript. Building a decent app with jscript is like building an Eiffel tower out of toothpicks.

MS, Apple (now the twin evil empires), so you got rid of Flash. What have you done to extend javascript standards so we don’t have to load up libraries to perform simple operations like read and write cookies? Have decent inheritance? Interfaces? Socket ops? You know, things other true OO languages have had for some 20 odd years?

I’m just waiting for a decent new OO language, fully interpreted by the browser. Let’s ditch js.

Tim:
I pretty much agree with you about Javascript, but are you actually saying that Flash is better for web apps simply because ActionScript is OO? You’re mad. Mad I tell you. Mad!

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There are quite a few geeky parents here at Beaconfire. As such, a couple good kids book suggestions popped up recently:

• The children’s books that Stephen Hawkings wrote with his Daughter Lucy: http://www.amazon.com/Georges-Secret-Universe-Stephen-Hawking/dp/1416954627
  & http://www.amazon.com/Georges-Cosmic-Treasure-Hunt-Hawking/dp/1442421754/ref=pd_sim_b_1
• My Little Geek: http://www.mylittlegeek.com/

Tell us about any other geeky kids books you know of!

3 Column View

2 Column View

1 Column View

This marks the first major, high-traffic, content-heavy website to adopt a responsive design. The lead consultant behind the project is none other than Ethan Marcotte, the designer who wrote the book on responsive design. Much as ESPN changed the way we worked by being one of the first to launch a fully CSS driven site a decade ago, the Boston Globe’s redesign has the potential to completely alter the way we approach web design.

Marcotte explains why the shift to Responsive Design is so signficant:

The landscape is shifting, perhaps more quickly than we might like. Mobile browsing is expected to outpace desktop-based access within three to five years. Two of the three dominant video game consoles have web browsers (and one of them is quite excellent). We’re designing for mice and keyboards, for T9 keypads, for handheld game controllers, for touch interfaces. In short, we’re faced with a greater number of devices, input modes, and browsers than ever before.

…

We can quarantine the mobile experience on separate subdomains, spaces distinct and separate from “the non-iPhone website.” But what’s next? An iPad website? An N90 website? Can we really continue to commit to supporting each new user agent with its own bespoke experience? At some point, this starts to feel like a zero sum game. But how can we—and our designs—adapt?

One exciting solution: Responsive Design. Kudos  to Marcotte and his team for their innovative work helping the web to evolve towards a better, more unified experience across devices and browsers.

A few months ago we began using JIRA for tracking bugs and tasks, and while it’s still an evolving process, here’s a quick glimpse into how we’re taking advantage of JIRA’s flexibility to keep projects running under budget and deadline.

Deadlines and Priority

There are always more tasks than time available in a week. One of our core commitments at Beaconfire is ensuring a healthy work/life balance, so we strive to ensure that no one has much more than 40 hours of billable work each week. We reserve developer and designer time (up to 40 or so hours/week), often months in advance, and whenever possible try not to use more of anyone’s time than we’d reserved.

Instead of focusing on prioritizing tickets, a somewhat squishy metric, I’ll set deadlines for tickets based on the amount of time I’d reserved for that developer for that week, based off of those tickets hourly estimates. For more massive website builds, prioritized tickets can also be an effective approach.

Workflow

Tickets can have several different states, as you can see.  In addition to these states, we also use several other workflow options. Using these options allows for more granular views of the ticket status.

Optional Workflow Steps

• Place on Hold
• Clarify with Beaconfire (internal discussions needed)
• Clarify with Client (decision from client is needed)

Dashboards

One of JIRA’s greatest strengths is the ability to build customized dashboards. I keep two types of dashboards, one for a general look at tickets across projects, and also project specific dashboards. Here’s a few of the reports (or gadgets, as JIRA calls them) that I use on my dashboards, along with which kinds of tickets are tracked within each gadget. (The way you limit tickets within a gadget is known as a filter in JIRA-speak)

A few of the reports (or gadgets, as JIRA calls them) that I’ve found most useful for tracking tickets across projects:

Listing of who is working on each open ticket I've created, along with the status of each

This lists the tickets I have open, broken down by projects and priority

Word cloud of ticket topics

I also have gadgets that list all tickets

• assigned to me with pending deadlines
• assigned to me and open
• assigned to me and pending client action
• assigned to me and on hold (a more long term status)

On each project-specific dashboard I use the following gadgets:

Listing of who is working on each ticket, along with priorities for each

Graph of how quickly tickets are being resolved, compared to how quickly new tickets are being opened

Heat Map for Open Issues for that Project

An activities listing gives a quick overview of everything that's been happening recently with the project.

I also keep lists for the tickets for that projects which are:

• assigned to me
• open (w/ pending deadlines)
• waiting on client action
• recently updated

What’s your approach?

Everyone has their own style of managing tasks and tracking tickets. Hopefully these approaches gave you inspiration into what could work best for you. Feel free to share in the comments how you manage group tasks.

Why bother? Nonprofit budgets have always been tight, and they’re getting even tighter.  How helpful would it be to have a framework that would help you prioritize your online projects (particularly those that are not revenue generating) and define what “success” means?   A framework that is not subjective and arbitrary, but thoughtful, practical, and designed to facilitate your (or others) decision-making.  Easy, peasy, right?

Marissa and I participated recently in an informal meeting with staffers from CARE, UNICEF, MercyCorps, as well as some of our colleagues in on the consulting side (Donor Digital, M&R) to try and untangle the complex topic of Web ROI.  The group succeeded in defining some common approaches to measuring ROI related to online fundraising. However, the non-monetary returns proved more complex and we simply ran out of time.  Yet, there was a lot of interest in continuing with the challenge.

So Marissa and I are pushing for workshops at both SxSw and NTC to continue the dialog on Web ROI. We will not be teaching you how to leverage a framework that exists.  Nooo… These will be working sessions, with you the audience,  to continue making progress on a potential framework.  Assuming, that is, that we are actually selected by the conference organizers…

So run, do not walk, to the nearest SxSw panel picker at:  http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/9694  and put in a plug for our session.  The NTC voting opens in early September, so stay tuned for another plea for votes.

Developer Trubnikov: Russia classifies beer as alcoholic.

Co-Founder Herron: The Russian beer that I had was almost always higher than 10% alcohol by volume… it almost isn’t beer. Only in Russia would anything less than 10% be called food. :)

Project Manager Dimock: To be fair, ethanol is metabolized and is actually more calorically dense than carbohydrates and proteins. 1 gram of carbohydrate yields 4 kcal (known in laymen’s terms simply, and inaccurately, as a calorie) as does 1 gram of protein. 1 gram of ethanol metabolizes to 8 kcal. Fat, for reference, yields 9 kcal per gram.

Jeopardy Champion Goldsmith: Ah, what I wouldn’t do for a Baltika #9 right now.

After that, conversation disintegrated into where one could go to find various Baltikas.  It seems the Beaconfire outpost in Brooklyn might be our best bet.  Imagine that!

Have a good weekend & stay cool.

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We’re a bunch of geeks. With a well-documented love of infographics. So what could be better than a diagram of geek culture? Because nothing says Beaconfire better than an infographic that brings together XKCD, zombies, RennFest and cute kitties. (And, while we’re on the topic of infographics, Amy shared this gem with us: The Business Impact of Social Media.)

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As mobile and tablet design is becoming increasingly important to clients, the concept of responsive web design is becoming more important to developers and content producers alike. Scott brought the Media Queries gallery to our attention so that we can peruse examples of how different websites display across mediums.

Welcome to the world (and Beaconfire), little one!

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And last, but most certainly not least, Beaconfire’s family has grown again. Our own Neal and his wife Clara welcomed their second little boy into this world on Thursday. Can we get an “awwwwww”? Congratulations, Neal and Clara!