Adding negative Keywords can really help your performance in AdWords. Doing a search for `university places` on google.co.uk as expected throws up some ads for Uni places. However my eye was caught by the one advertiser, Google, who is promoting a different kind of `places` in this case an ad for Google Local Listing. Clearly [...]

Recently the UK government announced that over 1000 government web sites have been closed and another 615 are scheduled to close. A lot of these sites had a close relationship with the charity sector and no doubt had backlinks to various charity sector sites. It is unlikely that any of the closed sites sites have [...]

Charities and nfp`s looking for benchmark data on their web site performance will find the the recently released report on 46 government sites useful. The data is for 2009/10 and covers 46 sites with total monthly visits of 32 Million and a total cost of £127M. For each site there is a breakdown of Cost [...]

Google Insights for Search is useful for identifying new search trends and potential keywords for charity adwords or seo.  It is particularly useful in finding new or rising search trends. AnnMarie Hill of the Google Grants Team has recently written about it. A couple of examples show how it can be used. First, for the [...]

Whether you have a Grant or regular AdWords account Google has provided a clear way to improve the results you get from your AdWords spend. Quality Score (QS) has been specifically designed by Google to encourage ads more relevant to the searcher and potentially cheaper for the advertiser. Improve your QS and get more clicks [...]

Google have again updated the search query data that they are providing in Webmaster Tools. The data can be found in WMT under the tab `Your Site on the Web`> `Top Search Queries`. ( The posting below titled `Webmaster Tools data for Marketing` gives more info on WMT layout) . This update shows many more [...]

Less than .5% of web site traffic was driven by social networking sites based on analysis of 6 UK charity web sites for the period 1st Oct 2009 to 28th Feb 2010. The sites examined had monthly Visits between 20k and 800k. Social Sites such as Facebook and Twitter are now major sources of traffic [...]

Back in November Google introduced Ad Sitelinks which allows you to put 4 additional links to your site into your adwords ad. Ad  Sitelinks give you more screen real estate in a prime location and early indications are that it results in more clicks. However to take advantage of it you need to have a [...]

Two keys metrics in Google Analytics that are very widely used, particularly by occasional users, are Traffic Sources and Bounce Rate. Both are useful for example when applied to individual pages but they need to be used with an understanding of their limitations. Direct Traffic is defined as ” people who clicked a bookmark to [...]

The latest Google Analytics update has one new feature that is extremely useful for information sites – Engagement Goals. For charity and nfp sites I have found that the traditional url based goals do not give a clear feedback if users find the site useful. The new goals, which are very easy to implement, are [...]