Before moving full time into web analytics I had been in charge of running the PPC campaigns for our clients.  In many cases the PPC campaigns would drive well over 25% of the entire sites traffic.  During that time I had also been in charge of tracking the success of several banner ad campaigns.  Working in these other areas previously has allowed me to now better understand the effect that various marketing campaigns can have on the sites overall performance metrics.

Below are three potential campaigns that could affect your overall site metrics.

• A PPC campaign which had been driving ample of traffic to the site but wasn’t resulting in many conversions gets turned off.  As a result the overall traffic drops by 10%.
• Your company launches a new social media campaign that really takes off virally.  As a result you suddenly see a huge spike in referrals from sites that you’d never seen traffic from before.  You also see a significant increase in organic traffic on your brand terms.
• A banner ad campaign is run announcing a new product release.  You notice a 5% increase in visits, but also a 15% spike in the overall bounce rate.

While these generally wouldn’t be run as stand alone campaigns, they do illustrate what can happen to your overall site metrics when various marketing initiatives are undertaken.  That’s why it’s very important as an individual responsible for your sites analytics to also be up to speed on all the marketing initiatives that are taking place.  Not only do you need to be kept abreast of what is currently being run, but those responsible for the campaigns should be working in conjunction with you before the campaigns are even launched.  That way you’ll have been able to setup your analytics to segment out the campaign traffic and allow those individuals that are responsible for the campaigns to see exactly how they perform.  You’ll also be able to quickly explain abnormalities within the overall site stats as a result of these campaigns without having to spend an inordinate amount of time digging through the data looking for the culprit.

Congratulations to our friend and client, Cherie Gruenfeld, who won her age group (again!) at the Hawaii Ironman World Championships last Saturday.  Cherie completed the 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike and marathon run in 13 hours, 11 minutes and 19 seconds.  It was her 7th age group win and her 17th finish in Kona.  Watch her cross that amazing Ironman finish line here (click on the “watch me finish” button). 

Cherie is a heroine on and off the Ironman race course.  Her nonprofit organization, Exceeding Expectations, uses the sport of triathlon to encourage at risk kids to move their lives in a positive direction. RedBoots is honored to be working with Exceeding Expectations to develop a new Web site and online fundraising program. 

Among the many notable finishers at this year’s Hawaii Ironman was Kirsten Kincaid.  Kirsten raised $1.8 million dollars in honor of a little boy named Matt who died earlier this year.  I first learned about Kirsten and her quest on YouTube.  Be sure to watch the Ironmatt video (and be prepared to shed a tear or two).  You can learn more about Matt and the foundation that bears his name here. 

Many organizations send email appeals. JUST one email in the appeal cycle. Rarely is any thought given to follow up communications, or completing the appeal communication cycle. This blog entry will lay the foundation for thinking through a complete appeal email cycle.

First Email Send

This email will create the need that the organization has, or the supports a campaign that is taking place offline. Generally the ask is pretty straightforward and the subject lines have been tested to get the most of the open rate. The email should be segmented by donor group or interest area, but many organizations still neglect to do this simple step (many times, the email system has limitations and segmentation is difficult – or legacy data won’t allow it.)

The goals are very straightforward – communicate the need, and raise dollars or actions.

The Second Email Send

The second email send consists of multiple components. A follow-up email to those recipients that opened and did not respond, or the recipients that did not open. This is technically TWO emails.

The goals for the email to the recipients that opened and did not respond should be to clarify the statement of need from the first email, providing a little more information. Perhaps the recipient did not donate or take action because the goals were not clear enough, or there wasn’t enough supporting information required to convert.

The goals for the recipients that did not open should be a little different, and at this point the subject lines should be tested again or the copy in the initial paragraph or in the preview pane of the email reader should be re-worked to generate an open or a response.

The Third Email Send

This email is crucial in continuing the relationship building with donors or supporters. The full list should be emailed (probably about one month after the initial send) This email DOES NOT include any hard ask. Instead, this email reiterates the goals of the campaign, and reports on any monies raised or actions taken. The main goal of this email is to let constituents know that they are appreciated and that you are communicating on their efforts and results. This email may close with the introduction of the next campaign (for the following month) – by including a P.S. or other news about upcoming campaigns, the later responses will be greater because the member/donor will associate actions taken with a report on the results, and the seed will be planted for the next appeal.

The Thank You.

Many organizations forget to thank their donors on a regular basis. Many believe that the auto-generated thank you email is sufficient in acknowledging a gift. Most – if not all – email systems do not report on the actions or open rates of autoresponder emails, so it is almost impossible to know if a donor even opens this ‘thank you’. I consider these receipts. Hardly ever do I scrutinize a receipt from a store.

The last email should be sent to those that have donated or taken action as a result of an email appeal or ask. It’s a simple email. Thank You for your gift, here’s how it helped, here’s how we used it, it wouldn’t be possible without you. You will be surprised to find that if you segment donors (much like in offline techniques) you will see increased responses to future email efforts. You will also see a second gift at the time of the thank you email.

It’s very important to follow just some of the basic advice given in this blog entry – don’t just stop after you send the first email. THINK of all the follow up communications and opportunities to cultivate your list.

So you’ve selected your blog platform, identified your voice, and created a blogging schedule. Now what do you do? Sit back and wait for the traffic to roll in? Obviously not.

Whatever the goals of your blog – thought leadership, branding, reputation management, or even ‘me too’, you still have to work to get people to find your blog, and to find out whether what you’re doing is working or not.

So how do people find your blog? Well the easy answer is that you have to market it. You can do this through ‘traditional’ linking campaigns (directories, identifying and contacting sites that link to your competitors, identifying and contacting other niche sites that look like they would be a relevant fit with your audience / message, etc) or through social marketing campaigns (Digg, MySpace, Twitter, Newsvine, Sphinn, etc).

You can’t just put content out and hope it goes viral, as that can’t possibly happen until people see it to know how great your content is. So it is up to you to get the word out. The challenge is going to be to identify what will work with your audience and what won’t. Also don’t assume that your expected audience will be your actual audience, they may not be, so you should work to engage with your audience to determine how best to get your message across to them.

Once you have people visiting your site, you want to make sure that they come back again and again, the best way to do this is to make sure that you have an RSS feed set up for your blog. Anyone who wants to can then subscribe to your feed, and whenever you push out a new post, they are informed. Make sure that you make it easy for anyone to subscribe to your RSS feed. Place a button high up on your blog, and maybe even have some standard text that displays after every post that has a link to subscribe to your RSS feed.

Comments are a vital piece of a blog, without them you don’t really have a blog, you just have a web page that frequently updates. You should have a published comment policy that states that you’ll remove offensive and profane posts, but you shouldn’t just remove any negative comments, or comments that don’t agree with whatever position you’re taking in your blog. Instead you should use comments to engage your readers, and find out where they’re coming from. Be responsive, dialog with them in the comments, or even off the blog by emailing them. By engaging you’re truly taking advantage of the benefits of a blog.

After all that, your main blogging responsibility is simple, all you have to do is to keep pushing out the same quality content, on a regular schedule, keeping your subscribers happy, pulling in more and more new subscribers as you go, and watch your blog grow.

Marketing in the social media arena can result in massive numbers of new links to your site, thousands of new targeted visitors, and even create a dialogue with your constituents.

While sometimes things happen overnight, preparing your content for success in social media is definitely the recommended route. In my post on 5 easy social media wins, #4 was to submit to social news sites. This post delves deeper into submitting content to social sites, and should help you get more mileage out of your submitted content.

An account on a social bookmarking site, social news site, or social networking site will be a lonely profile, likely only to get a fraction of attention for very worthy content than a well connected profile and account. Absent the connections, one has to get pretty lucky for proper exposure of their content.

A new submission to a social news site often goes into a queue or long list of other submitted content on its own page, not directly to the homepage. If content is submitted at an inopportune moment, it may disappear in a matter of minutes without ever making even the slightest impression.

So with this bleak view of social media marketing also comes the planning of a social media marketing campaign and preparing your content in the process.

1. Research Vertical Social Media Outlets.
Green news is popular right now, and has the potential to do well in a slew of places. But posting to Digg, like everyone else, may be less successful than a well-executed blog outreach to sites in the green “vertical” like treehugger.com and inhabitat.com, and better yet, their smaller cousins. Also, smaller social sites do exist, and success can be found in treehugger’s digg-like site, hugg.com. Many verticals have social news and networking sites that can be identified during this stage. Relying on Digg and Reddit as the “only” social sites worth the effort is a mistake.

2. Research Headlines and Bylines.
With outlets identified for your content, you will want to see what makes some content rise to the top over others. Examine the top content versus the ignored content on the sites a minimum of one mid-week afternoon (EST) for U.S.-based sites, and preferably over a few days to a week (or longer!), and then at different times of the day. Trends may be difficult to see, but look for descriptive adjectives in addition to questions, humor and/or sarcasm, and general tone.

3. Research Content.
On a schedule as above, examine the actual content. What makes top content more interesting, engaging, and newsworthy than ignored content? Look for editorials versus photos versus interactive tools. If all of the top content is of a certain form, you will be better prepared for how to package your content for each social site. Do not have a cookie-cutter approach when submitting to multiple sites.

4. Research Top or Active Users.
You’re looking for frequent contributers as well as new users. Buddying up with a frequent contributer who adds content all of the time may allow that person to submit your content with greater success than submitting it yourself. However, by the time you’ve developed that relationship, you’re probably already pretty popular yourself. New users may love a personal message that you thought they’d like the content you’re submitting, so you want to have a mix of friends ready to promote you.

5. Take the Social Media Plunge!
If you haven’t already had to sign in and create full, descriptive profiles, now is the time to start. Vote frequently and seek out tons of friends! Spend some time outside of the social site exploring the vertical. When you come across content that might do well, submit it! Discover and push other people’s content so that they will in turn do the same for you.

And have fun!

The organizers of the Nurses Hardship Fund in the UK came up with a great idea to raise funds. They encouraged all of the soccer players in the English Premier division to donate a single days wages to their cause. If all the players agreed, they would raise £1.5 million. They ended up having 255 players that signed up to support the cause, pledging a total of £750,000. Still not a bad total, although to date they’ve only collected around £200,000 of the total pledged.

Today, the manager of Middlesbrough F.C. pulled his support from the cause stating that he felt that the charity was effectively blackmailing players into signing up to donate by naming those players that had donated, effectively shaming those that hadn’t by omission (note in the image below I think they may want to change the bit that says that the Middlesbrough manager is on board).

Currently a search on Google for “Nurses Hardship Fund” shows decent results about the charity, but a news search has the Middlesbrough story currently coming in in first place. If Universal search was active for that term, you can bet that story would be in the top 10 for that term, as it stands should that story get some traction behind it (links), it could move up there anyway and become a reputation management issue for the Nurses. After all, how many charities want to see search results with the words “name and shame” and “blackmail” coming up for their name?

The first time we take a woodwork class in school, after the safety instructions, we’re taught the cardinal rule:

“Measure Twice, Cut Once”

Which is, of course, much more preferable to:

“Measure Once, Cut Twice”

or the even worse:

“Measure Once, Cut Once, Discard, Cut a New Piece”

With your website, analytics allows you to continually measure the performance of your site, and allows you to adjust in areas that you wouldn’t even realize you were deficient in, in order to maximize your ROI. Without an analytics solution you may know how much traffic you have coming into the site, but:

• Do you know what your visitors do once they get there?
• Do you know where they found your site?
• What keyword made them click on your search listing?
• Was it organic or paid?
• How many pages did they view?
• How long did they stay on the site?
• What page was the last they visited?
• What’s the abandonment rate of your shopping cart?
• Is there a particular page that gets more visitors than others and why?
• Which keywords convert?
• Which landing pages convert?
• etc, etc.

So without an analytics solution all you can do is:

“Cut, Wait, Maybe Cut Again”

A good analytics tool implemented on your site can give you the answers to these questions and more. This gives you the ability to:

“Measure Multiple Times, Adjust Multiple Times”

There is never any shortage of news — if not useful, then at least fun and interesting — from the world of social media and user generated content. Three of my favorites this week:

• Facebook is apparently developing a new feature that will allow users to separate work friends from social friends, a move that could mean competition for LinkedIn. Personally, I prefer Facebook to LinkedIn for professional associations. LinkedIn amounts to little more than a list of contacts, whereas Facebook encourages me to actively keep up with my colleagues’ activities and discuss important industry issues (primarily through Groups). The one issue I have with Facebook is that I don’t exactly want my personal life to be profiled alongside my professional one. For example, several of my daughter’s friends (IRL) have “friended” me on Facebook. Have you seen the average profile of a teen girl on Facebook? Right. Nuff said. No word on when the new feature is scheduled for launch.

• Seems like everyone is getting the memo about incorporating user generated content into their online offering. MSNBC.com just announced its purchase of Newsvine, a social news site that allows users to write articles, comment on other articles, post links, etc. Even US News and World Report, a conventional print publication, is taking a page out of the UCG book – well, sort of. US News is launching a new online rankings/ratings service for luxury goods to compete with Consumer Reports. Rankings are based on a scoring system compiled from “dozens of automotive reviewers at newspapers and magazines” which are then assigned a numerical value and aggregated into final scores based on a complicated, “top secret” algorithm. Hmmm. Why automotive reviewers at conventional newspapers and magazines? Why not real people who post their opinions and experiences every day on sites like Epinions (which, after all, beats Consumer Reports in terms of traffic). The older demographic targeted by luxury goods items are heavy users of such sites and tend to trust peers most when it comes to product reviews. Come to think of it, maybe this would be a nice side business for Nielsen Buzz Metrics.

• Digg and Reddit crashed the server of a Blogger who posted the now infamous CraigsList exchange that went viral recently. The initial post on Criagslist.com was from a woman seeking advice on finding a rich husband in New York City. The post received a scathing response that read, in part “In economic terms, you are a depreciating asset and I am an earning asset…Your looks will fade and my money will likely continue into perpetuity.” Blogger Howard Lindzon (who writes about financial trends) posted the full exchange on his Blog and jokingly responded to a commenter that he had written the scathing response. Thinking that Lindzon wrote the response, Digg and Reddit users pushed Lindzon’s blog post to the top of the heap, sending more than 100,000 visitors to a blog that normally gets only about 3000 visits per day. While the Web is still abuzz with musings about who the real author is, Lindzon noted that what he had learned from the incident was that “Digg and Reddit leave a firestorm coming through your Blog.”

You’ve been called into a meeting and told that it’s been decided that you’re going to be in charge of writing a company blog to enable your company to:

1. engage your customers / potential customers
2. be positioned as a thought leader in your space
3. get your branding / product message out there
4. keep pace with your competition

So what are the first steps? Well, obviously, you need a blog to write on. There are several platforms out there that you can use, but the big ones are Blogger, Typepad and WordPress. I’ve used all 3, and currently go with WordPress on all new projects, as it’s just so much more flexible, as the others are updated that may change. Therefore the advice below is directed at WordPress users, although you can adapt most of it to the other platforms.

You’ll then need to select a good name for the blog and set up hosting, unless you’re going to run it off an existing site, in which case you’ll just want to skip to getting the blogging software installed. You do have the option to set your blog up directly on the blogging platform servers, so instead of GreenWidgetsblog.com you’d have GreenWidgetsBlog.Blogspot.com. This is something that you want to avoid. By putting your blog on their servers you’re giving up a degree of control, and should you one day decide to migrate to another platform it’s going to be a big headache.

So now you have a blank blog, what’s next? Well, first you need to get a blog template created and set up. This look and feel may be determined by your corporate style guide, but if not, there are many free templates available on the web that can be found by doing a simple Google search i.e. Free WordPress Themes, these can be modified by anyone with some php and photoshop experience.

The next step is to do some customization of the template that you’re working with, not so much in terms of look and feel, but in terms of functionality.

1. Akismet – This is a no-brainer. This plugin stops the spammers from infiltrating your comments with blatant attempts to push their non-related sites.
2. All in One SEO pack – This plugin allows you to modify the title tags, the descriptions, and the keywords, while also allowing you to set up sections for no-indexing so as to head off the potential issue of duplicate content.
3. FeedBurner FeedSmith – This plugin detects all ways to access your RSS feed, and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed to allow you to track every possible subscriber.
4. Get Recent Comments – This plugin should only be used when your blog is established, and receiving a nice amount of comments and trackbacks. What it does is display the recent comments and trackbacks, which then encourages more people to comment, and shows the blog as being an active one.
5. Simple Tags – This plugin allows you to easily generate Technorati tags within your blog posts. This increases the chance that your blog will be found for a particular search on Technorati. Exactly why that’s important will be discussed in my follow-up post next Monday.
6. Sociable – This plugin allows you to select from a list of social media sites, which will then display at the bottom of each post to allow readers to easily submit / vote on your posts, which can increase the likelihood that they will vote for your post.
7. WordPress Database Backup – This plugin created backups of your WordPress database. Handy to have for if you ever have a catastrophic disaster.
8. Other Plugins – There are over 1,000 plugins in the official WordPress database. Some replicate functionality, others offer specific functionality that you may or may not need.

Next, go open a Google Analytics account and put the code on your blog, this will allow you to see your traffic stats.So now you have a blog, it has the look and feel that you desire, along with the functionality that you believe you’ll need to succeed. Next comes the easiest and the hardest part… the content. When you first set up your blog you should have a good 5-10 posts prepared and ready to go live, you should also have a content plan.

• Who is going to be writing?
• How often are they going to write?
• What are they going to write about?
• How long is an ‘ideal’ post?
• What is the approval process?
• Are there any off-limits topics?

Ideally, you want to have a minimum of 2-3 posts per week, with more being better, as long as the topics are relevant and the posts are worthwhile enough, with fresh ideas / perspectives, and not simply regurgitations of current industry news items or your own marketing collateral. Having a regular posting schedule helps your readers follow your blog. This doesn’t mean that you have to rigidly stick to that schedule, but it does help set expectations. For example, on this blog we have 5 authors, and each has a scheduled day to post, but we can still post on other days, should inspiration so strike.

There is no ‘ideal’ post length, but you do want to make the posts easy to read, by breaking them down into nice chunks, with bullet points sprinkled within. If you have a really long post, think about breaking it down into a series of posts, don’t force people to read an 8,000+ word treatise in one go for each blog post that you put out, while it may work for an author, it’s more likely than not not going to work for a Green Widget manufacturer such as yourself. Speaking of which, I’m going to stop here and continue next week, with a discussion on what you need to do post-launch of your brand new corporate blog.

Following on from the YouTube / Google Checkout nonprofit program announcement the other day, MySpace today announced that they have partnered with PayPal to enable nonprofits and political candidates to fundraise through their civic and political hub – “The Impact Channel”. With MySpace being the current 800lb gorilla in social networks (Facebook is catching up fast, and has already surpassed them in the UK), this offers an opportunity for nonprofits to extend their online fundraising reach even further. Currently the MySpace / PayPal plan is only available to a select group of nonprofits, but they do have details on the application process, which at the moment is to send an email to myspace.

There isn’t a great deal of information up on the site as yet, but it looks as though you can see the supporters and the amounts that they’ve each contributed, as to whether you have any contact information for them, beyond their MySpace name, that’s not said, so it’s possible that you won’t, but at least having that user id allows you to contact your supporters through MySpace.