Last Monday I promised that this week I’d give an overview of the performance of the RBDRodeo blog, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do now.

This blog launched on June 6th of 2007, so it’s been live for close to 7 months now. In that time, between all of us here we’ve managed to put out 126 posts (this is no. 127), which comes out to just under one for every business day since the site’s been live (work does sometimes get in the way). Those 126 posts have received a total of 130 comments. Not bad, but we’d always love to hear more about what people think about our posts / suggestions for topics that you’d like to see covered. Oh, and our comment spam software blocked 1,257 spam comments, which just goes to show that you must have spam protection set up on your blog.

What were the most visited posts for the year?

1. Google Grants Enforces Spending Cap 11.4% of all blog traffic
2. SES Chicago – Dealing with Difficult Clients 5.17%
3. SMX London – Cutting Edge Linking Tactics 4.98%
4. Google Grants Application Process for NonProfits 4.87

So that shows that people like it when we write about Google Grants, and when we do conference session recaps. Hmm, maybe Nan should give a presentation on Google Grants at SES New York and I’ll write it up…

What did we write about? Well, analyzing the categories that we’ve assigned posts to, we can see that this blog primarily talks about:

1. Non-Profits – 38 posts
2. Social Marketing – 37 posts
3. Education and Training – 34 posts
4. SEO – 31 posts
5. Reputation Management – 26 posts

Which are the topics that I would expect to see showing as those that we focus on. For 2008 I would expect to see Analytics make a big push into the top 5 as our newest team member Joy Brazelle writes more about her tips and insights for Analytics
Where did our traffic come from?

1. StumbleUpon 38.21% of all traffic to the blog
2. Google (organic) 19.61%
3. Direct 14.42%
4. SearchEngineLand 2.46%
5. Sphinn 2.38%

All in all there were 233 different sources of traffic that we logged, with Yahoo not showing up until 9th, which actually placed it below the green social network Hugg.com.

What about the keyword that people used to find us?

1. rbdrodeo
2. rbd
3. paypal nonprofit
4. youtube berlin
5. political emails

What about some of the lower traffic but more interesting terms that people used to find us?

• Causes of Shame
• butter knife
• chunnel
• chicago sports pro bono
• escape route through Berlin Wall

Thankfully the Berlin Wall has been torn down, so we don’t have to feel bad about someone attempting to get from the FDR to the West via this blog.

Speaking of Germany, where did our visitors come from? Well we had visitors to the site from 112 countries; the no.1 country for visits is rather obvious, and as you’ll see the top 4 are all native English speaking countries, with Ireland showing up in 11th behind 6 non-native speaking countries.

1. USA
2. UK
3. Canada
4. Australia
5. India
6. Germany
7. Italy
8. Holland (Netherlands)
9. France
10. Romania

So that’s the old, what about the new? Well, I’m sure you’ve noticed that the name of the blog has changed, it’s no longer RBDRodeo, it’s now EndlessPlain.com. Why have we done this? Well, it’s all to do with the rebranding that Nan announced a few weeks ago. As of Jan 1st 2008 the RBDRodeo team will work for Serengeti Communications. As you can imagine, Serengeti and Rodeo’s don’t fit well thematically, but the concept of the Endless Plain works well with the new name. We’re going to keep talking on this blog about issues that we think are interesting for our audience, and that will help you navigate the endless plain of your digital marketing strategy. Why is it endless? Your marketing effort doesn’t have a final destination, but it does need to have direction, and we aim to guide you in the right direction towards higher ROIs and better and bigger things for your company / nonprofit.

So thanks for reading this blog in 2007, and we’ll look for you in 2008.

Maybe this year you decided that you wouldn’t bother with personal resolutions that you have no chance of keeping; no resolving to get to the gym more or eat only healthy food. Maybe this year, instead, you decided to go with a New Year’s Resolution for your career. If you are a marketer, here is just one simple resolution to help you become more successful.

Measure More.

What should you measure?

PPC or anywhere that you are spending money online
Brand Awarenewss
Engagement & Usability
Conversions & what leads to a conversion

Measuring PPC or any online advertising

The first step to measuring your PPC or online marketing is critical. You must make the ad ‘trackable.’ This can be done one of two ways. You can either send traffic to a unique landing page for each ad or your can use unique parameters for tracking. If you are using parameters, you will want the URL to be unique for the level of detail that you want to analyze.

Some examples are:
source=engine
campaign=campaignname
ag=adroup
creative=versionofcreative

So a destination URL for a Google PPC ad would look like:
www.website.com/page.html?source=google&campaign=holiday& ag=holidaysale&creative=1

That would give you all of the information to analyze your ad down to the different versions of each creative.

Or you may want to track the ads down to a keyword level which would look like:
www.website.com/page.html?source=google&campaign=holiday& ag=holidaysale&kw=[holidaysale]

A destination URL for a banner ad running in the Entertainment section of cnn.com would look like:
www.website.com/page.html?source=cnn&section=entertainment

Once you have the destination URLs in place and the ads go live, you then can measure the campaign traffic as a unique segment. You can see which of your keywords and ads are working, which need to be tweaked and which just are not worth their CPC.

You’ll want to take a two-part approach to analyzing campaigns. You will want to use your analytics to track the behavior of the PPC traffic once visitors get to your site, but you also want to use the information that the search engines provide to track your CPC and your quality score. This is important since now both Google & Yahoo factor your quality score and your CTR history into what you must pay for the click. Improving your click-thru rate and quality score will lower your CPC.

As far as tracking your campaigns using analytics, there are several metrics that you should pay attention to. Comparing the number of clicks from the search engines to the number reported in your analytics package can be a bit confusing since the numbers will never match exactly. It is likely that the number reported in the analytics package will be lower than what the search engines report. That is because there is a subset of the traffic who just never make it to your site. They click, but then hit the back button or just close the browser before the page loads.

Looking at the number of visitors is good but paying attention to the quality of the traffic is even better. One good rule of thumb if you want your ads to be profitable, is to never pay more for a click than the average revenue per visitor. If your campaigns are not to drive ecommerce but to build brand awareness set a minimum average time on site as the key metric for that campaign and use that to judge success of keywords and ads.

By using your analytics teamed with the information that the search engines provide you will be able to tune up your campaigns, pay less for the clicks and improve the quality of the traffic. 2008 may not hold any fitness goals for you, but you certainly can get your online advertising in shape.

Next week, we’ll tackle measuring your brand awareness.

Yes, the holiday season is drawing to a close, as is the federal tax year.  You now have 6 days left to donate to a worthy cause and get the benefit of it for your 2007 taxes.  Who should you give your money to?  Well, that’s a personal decision; you’ll want to donate to charities that support causes that you believe in, and which you believe are doing a great service.  Of course if you’d like some suggestions, then I’m only too happy to list several for you here.  Disclaimers: several of the charities listed below are clients, but not all.  Secondly, these are my personal picks, which may or may not reflect charities and causes that others at RBDRodeo support.  So now that’s out of the way, here are some deserving charities that you may consider supporting, in no particular order:

• SOS Children’s Villages – Providing food, shelter, education and a village family for orphans and abandoned children around the world.
• HOKAFI – Helen O. Krause Animal Foundation Inc.  A no-kill animal shelter in Dillsburg, PA.
• Kids Wish Network – Fulfilling the wishes of sick and dying children around the US.
• HSUS – The Humane Society of the US is the biggest voice in the fight to stop the annual seal cub hunt in Canada.
• RSPCA – The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is currently leading the fight to stop a UK government plan to have massive cull of badgers, which a government study has claimed to be necessary to limit outbreaks of bovine TB.

Anyone whose job it is to make sense of your analytics data and present it to the stakeholders in a way that is easy to understand knows that it can be a big challenge. Everyone wants data, but unless they understand what they are looking at they will not take the data you give them and use it to help the business make more money. Sure you can create a dashboard in your analytics tool for each stakeholder that shows the relevant data for them, but these usually fall short. The dashboards often give you basic charts, but they do not give a good visual representation of the data over time. Looking at the trends for each metric that is important to your business is vital and having the ability to compare metrics in a chart is where you really can begin to gain some great insight.

Take your top landing pages as an example. It’s easy to look at your top 25 landing pages during a month and each of their respective bounce rates as the raw data is usually only a couple clicks away. That will give you some great insight into what your true “homepages” are and if they are “sticky” pages that keep visitors on your site. But just looking at a report that lists those numbers is not enough; you really need to be looking at those same pages over time. By doing so it will allow you to see how pages trend over time as well as how the changes you make to certain pages affect their bounce rates and hopefully improve the “stickiness” of the page. That can be tricky to report on since your top landing pages are going to be changing from month to month, and so copying and pasting the monthly or weekly reports together does not work. Luckily Excel has pivot tables and dynamic charts.

These are two excellent methods to present your data in a manner that is easy to look at and understand while not requiring much time to produce. After the initial setup, all the work that is required is simply dumping the raw data into an Excel worksheet and updating the pivot tables that are contained in a separate worksheet or separate workbook. The screen shot below shows what the end result would look like with the pivot table and the dynamic chart.

It is currently showing the previous three months worth of data in the pivot table, but visually it’s often better to just show the most recent month and then show the rest of the data in the chart. This makes the data much more visually appealing which is extremely important since many of your companies stakeholders are likely to get glassy eyed if you give them a spreadsheet full of numbers.

Below the pivot table is the dynamic chart that shows the trend for both the number of entrances and the bounce rate for the currently selected entry page. The example only shows three months worth of data, but as the dataset grows trends will begin to appear. This makes it very easy to look at a chart and quickly see how your top entry pages are performing. You may be wondering how this chart is going to really help since it’s only showing one of the top landing pages. Well that is what makes a dynamic chart really cool. Instead of showing all your top entry pages and their bounce rates in a jumbled mess on one chart the dynamic chart allows you to show one at a time. Next to the chart is a scroll bar that allows you to cycle through each of your top entry pages and see a visual trend for each one. The chart below shows the trend for the top entry page.

If you look at the scroll bar in the next chart you can see that it’s now scrolled through about half of the top landing pages. Each time you click the down arrow it will populate the chart with the corresponding entry pages historical trend.

Pivot tables and dynamic charts can be used in the same way to present your other key metrics in a manner that is easy to look at and understand for your stakeholders. You can create a whole report that takes very little time yet provides a powerful visual representation of the data that’s important to each stakeholder. Now your stakeholders may actually embrace the data since they no longer have to stare at endless amounts of numbers and try to make sense of what they mean. No more logins to dashboards that never get used or Excel spreadsheets that just sit on their desk or in their email because they do not understand the data. You can now give them a report that is visually appealing and easy to understand.

The next step is to get them from understanding the data to taking action based on what the data is telling them in order to make positive changes that will increase the bottom line for your company. That will take time and training. However, if making changes based on the data and not on impulse can be ingrained in each stakeholder it will be amazing to see the increase in performance that your company will realize from your site.

My first blog, hello!   Being the new guy around here my December has been pretty hectic with work leaving pretty much no time for gift shopping.   So I decided 2007 would be the year I would do all my shopping online. Or at least try.

Borrowing some advice from Seth Godin circa 2002 (The Big Red Fez), which is still just as true and important as it was back then, if you have a website where you hope that visitors do something; sign up for a newsletter, buy something, request pricing, whatever it is, do yourself a favor and pretend that you are a new visitor to your site and try it for yourself. You may be surprised.

It is December 19th, 6 days before Christmas, and I have no shopping done. And it is really not my fault. Okay, it is my fault for leaving all the shopping until December, but last weekend I really did try. I spent hours online only to be met with strange error messages, lengthy registration requirements and the worst, sites crashing when I tried to enter my billing info or my credit card security code.

So why do I bring this all up on my first blog posting? What does this have to do with website analytics? A lot. First, you need to find a way to track the progression through a ‘conversion’ process on your site.

But even before that you need to figure out what you consider a conversion. Sure, if you’re an ecommerce site a sale seems like the logical conversion. But there should not just be one conversion. Don’t burn bridges. If something happens to your cart, or if me or other visitors just can’t figure it out, don’t prevent us from buying. Send us a follow-up email with other ways to purchase. Who knows, I may call you and buy.

Once you have a few conversions in mind figure out how to track them in your web reporting and then pay attention. What you should see is that once someone is engaged in the process the percent who proceed should increase, not decrease. For example, if you are an ecommerce site you may have a conversion funnel similar to this:10 – 20% of all visitors – See product detail and/or add to cart 20 +% – Start checkout process 70% – Step 2 of checkout

Since next Monday, like most, we’ll be on vacation, I thought I’d open the random thoughts box, which holds a variety of topics in and around the work that we do, and that you do.

Firstly, Nancy Schwartz of Getting Attention, has decided that she’s going to make 2008 the year of the nonprofit tagline. To that end she’s running a quick survey on taglines that she’d like all nonprofits to complete. As a thank you for completing the survey, she’ll give you a copy of the final report for free, so if you’re a nonprofit, head over there, but come back for the rest of this post.

Now it’s time for a minor technical rant that’s off topic for this blog… Why, oh why can’t IE and Mozilla based browsers load and parse XML using the same common functions?

Don’t forget to protect your data, and that of your customers / donors / members. The UK Revenue and Customs sent 2 CDs with the personal details of every family in the UK with a child under 16 to the National Audit Office. The CDs didn’t arrive. The personal records of 25 million people in the UK, including bank details, were lost. In the era of identity theft and fraud, this is a catastrophic failure. Make sure that your data is protected, and don’t send it all on CDs in the mail.

My great grandparents lived in the market town of Helmsley in North Yorkshire on a small farm. I visited there many times growing up, and loved the old market town feel of the quiet Yorkshire village. It was with interest that I read an article on how a band from Helmsley had become a featured artist on MySpace, garnering over 5 million hits per day on their MySpace page. It just goes to show that you don’t have to be in a big city to make an impact using social media sites, you just have to have a compelling story.

Mashable recently posted list of 20+ Charity and Fundraising Sites, and 30+ US Political sites that are worth looking at.

Finally, remember, if you’re modifying Wikipedia pages, people will look to see who you are, and what your motive is for making those changes. For example; if you work at Guantanamo Bay, and make changes to wiki pages talking about the detainees, Fidel Castro, and the War in Afghanistan, expect to get called out…

Well, that’s emptied the random thoughts box for now. Enjoy your holidays, and look for my next post on December 31st, when I’ll do a recap post on the first 6 months of life for this blog.

Take the title with a grain of salt! Search marketing should never focus entirely on one search engine. Yet, I do have Google on the mind this week.

Keeping up with the ever-changing field of search marketing is not for the faint of heart. Those of us who manage to fit at least some feed reading into our schedules often bookmark news to read and investigate later. The number of sites worth following ebb and flow, at least for me, simply because the number cannot continue to grow and grow. I do not have the time or speed with which to keep up with all of the content produced by the search marketing community while I work for clients during the day and maintain my relationship at home.

But when I feel a trend in the news, there’s been some form of critical mass that causes the news not to fly under the radar. This week, I heard Google chatter.

Google Search tested a new search results format.

Google Analytics released some comparison graph tools.

Google AdWords Editor was updated to Version 5.0.

Google Search changed how it handles subdomains.

Google AdSense tested scrolling AdSense ads.

Google Toolbar was updated to Version 5 for Internet Explorer users.

Are you a non profit that is looking for a cheaper method to process your online credit card donations in the coming year? Well thanks to Google you can use Google Checkout free of charge through at least the end of 2008. That means no processing, setup or gateway fees. In addition to being free for non profits, it’s also convenient for potential donors since they can make a donation with just their Google login.

In addition, by using Google Checkout you will also have the added benefit of having the Google Checkout badge displayed on your AdWords ads. This will allow your ad to stand out from your competition which can be a significant factor in drawing a larger share of searchers to your site.

Google Checkout should then be combined with a Google Grants account to potentially drive a considerable amount of donation revenue without any out of pocket expenses. For help in taking advantage of these programs check out this post on how to apply for a Google Grants account and this one on how best to leverage your Google Grants account.

Since Google is willing to provide this service free of charge there is no excuse to not at least test and see the impact it can have on your non profit organization and see if you can help allow more dollars to go directly to the causes that it supports.

At every search related conference I attend, there’s a general consensus that Reputation Management is a big issue, especially with the loss of privacy as the world becomes more open, and the ‘permanence’ of artifacts (photos, documents, videos) on the web. Then later that night, those same people head out to the nearest bar, and get sloshed. Of course, when people are drunk, they do things that they normally wouldn’t, but those pictures are still being taken and that video is still being shot.

The same is true at your company holiday parties. It’s all well and fine to have fun, but that fun can come back to haunt you should anyone post pictures or video online with either your name or that of your company. Do you really need your customers to see your CEO doing his Elvis impression? Do you want your next employer to search for you and find a shot of you with a lampshade on your head? Most likely not. So what can you do? Can you prevent the pictures from going out? Well, if you can prevent them from being taken, yes. Keep an eye on your situation, don’t allow yourself to be in an compromising situations. Don’t let people take your picture, unless you’re in control of the situation.

What about when it does get online? Firstly, you can ask people to take down any pictures that you feel may portray you, or your company in a bad light. If they won’t, then you need to take control of your search footprint, and make sure that these pictures / videos aren’t so easily found.

I’ll end this warning post with a picture of me, from the last conference in Chicago, doing something that I wouldn’t normally do… here I am playing pool… badly.  Oh wait, that is something that I normally do.

We have several positions open at the moment, so if the idea of joining a group of passionate, slightly geeky, sometimes crazy Web 2.0 evangelists interests you, please get in touch. We have two account/client management positions open and one position for a designer/developer. And we are ALWAYS in the market for top talent, so if none of the published jobs are a fit, get in touch anyway.

Send your resumes to Nan: nan at redboots.com or ndawkins at serengeticom.com