What to do ?  Go to your Webmaster Tools account and look in Your site on the web > Links to your site. Download these links to Excel and find the ones with .gov extensions. Then very politely contact the organisation and ask them to put a 301 redirect on the pages that you appeared on. Then find the new government site ( or indeed any government site) that deals with your charity or condition and ask them for a backlink to you site.

UK Government COI report

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 and Usage. Across the 46 sites the overall cost per visit is £ 0.22 with a Bounce Rate of 37.5%. The Average Time on Site is around 4/6 minutes (although this excludes all Bounce visits) and average monthly Unique visits per site of 690k each month. As with all data real care needs to be taken in any comparison. To get a more accurate picture I picked 10 sites where the costs are detailed and the sites have a mid range value of monthly visitors. For these 10 sites the average cost per visit was £0.07 over a total of 52M annual visits. This data is particularly useful as it is from government web sites. These more closely resemble the function and purpose of charity sites rather than commercial sites where most data comes from.

Picking one or two sites from the list that have Costs or Visits similar to yours and comparing their data to your site could be useful. For the most accurate comparison charity sites should I reckon omit data relating directly to Fundraising traffic as this differs greatly from cause related traffic and is not comparable to the data from these government sites.

The methodology used to gather the data is clearly laid out and could be a useful basis for doing an evaluation of your site. In addition there is a lot of good advice in the COI site section Measuring Web Site Quality. The section Delivering Web site objectives is useful in pointing the way towards more detailed measurable achievements giving examples such as 1. Reduced calls due to better site info 2. registrations for events and services 3.  measurable user participation, etc. Mind you the COI site itself could do with seo friendly urls. Better advice about getting your web site seen by search engines would be useful too.

Demonstrating that a web site is worth the investment is not easy but hard data is the best way to do it. Showing that your site compares well using this data and that it compares well to its peers using the info provided by Google in GA will help. Proving that you can reach more people AND lower costs elsewhere are pretty powerful arguments as budgets come under scrutiny.

Comparing two search terms. CLICK FOR LARGER IMAGE

First, for the United Kingdom only we can compare how frequently in Web Search the terms ` volunteer` and `volunteering` were used over the Last 12 months. We can quickly see that the search term `volunteer` is almost twice as popular as `volunteering` and that January is the most popular time for searches. More data about the nature of these searches can be got by examining the searches in each Category ( shown in the red box). Note that data from the filter `All sub-regions` for the UK has very questionable accuracy and should not be used without data from other sources.

We can now look in more detail and see what the Top Searches associated with `volunteer` were.

Google Insight rising searches CLICK FOR LARGER IMAGE

Rising Searches (shown on the right of the image above)  is particularly interesting as it shows that searches for `vodafone volunteer` is classed as Breakout which means that searches have risen by more than 5000% ! `festival volunteer ` and ` volunteer week` have also been increasing in popularity over the last 90 days.

Exploring All Categories can be useful. For charities and nfp`s in particular the Categories: Lifestyles, Society and Health give interesting insight into what searchers are looking for.

possible Quality Scores ?

The cost per click (cpc) that the advertiser pays for a keyword is directly related to its QS. Craig Danuloff has crunched a lot of numbers to show the effect of QS on the cpc. Briefly, a QS of 7 means that you are paying the standard price for each click. For a QS below 7 you are penalised eg a QS of 4 means you will be charged a 75% Premium. However a Quality Score of 1.0 means that you get a discount of 30%. So what are the factors that Google takes into account when calculating the Quality Score for each Keyword/Ad combination. For the Search Network Google lists 8 factors. However the most significant is the Click Through Rate or CTR – specifically the CTR for the Exact Match version of the keyword.  Siddharth Shah has crunched some different numbers and his show the correlation between CTR and Quality Score. The higher the CTR the higher the QS. So, a keyword CTR in the range of 2 or 3% will get you a QS of 7 but you will need a *much* higher CTR to get the magic of QS 8, 9 or 10 discounts. Looking at my own keywords with a QS of 10 ( not as many as I would like sadly )  all of them have an Exact Match CTR of over 30%. So no surprise, Google does not easily give away AdWords discounts. Typically you will only get that kind of CTR on very specialise keywords or Brand Terms.

One way to improve your CTR for a keyword is to lower the number of Impressions that do not receive a click. Identifying possible Negative keywords that will help you is an ongoing task that pays dividends. One way to find search terms that on Broad Match trigger your ad is to look in the Search Query Report. For some accounts this now shows Impressions that get no Clicks. Another way to is to enter the keyword as a search term and then check the terms shown in Google Suggest. Also some terms shown in Related Searches under More Search tools can give suitable negatives.

Note that Google makes public a linear QS scale of 1 to 10. However it is almost certain than internally they use a log scale such as the one used for Page Rank where one number is vastly greater than the previous one eg 2 is 100 times greater than 1 and so on. This means QS will in reality cover a very wide range. So when you reach the magic 7 keep improving the CTR as it is very likely that Google has a more refined internal scale and even though you cannot get above 7 your ad position and cpc may will continue to improve.

So what to do: 1. Look at the list of Queries and see if there are any that you would like a page on your site to rank higher for.  If you see a suitable Query with a high number of Impressions take a closer look. If your highest ranked page for that term is below Position 1 or 2,  and consequently getting few Clicks, you should look to optimise that page for this Query. To do that look at on-page factors, particularly the Page Title, then look to get back links, ideally from external sites, with the Query as the anchor text.

2.  Check the snippet which appears in the Google SERPS results for the top terms that you want to be found for.  Does the snippet  ( and the Page Title) accurately describe what you are offering and if so does it encourage visitors to your page ?

Most popular Social Sites

Social Sites such as Facebook and Twitter are now major sources of traffic for many web sites and for some web sites rival Google in their ability to drive traffic.

However for these UK charities the social  networking sites are not big drivers of traffic. The analysis showed that Facebook and Twitter accounted for over 95% of visits from the social sites, although Stumbleupon had some success. While the data says that Twitter brought about 33% of the visits that Facebook brought in reality Twitter probably brought more as many believe that Google Analytics undercounts Twitter visits by a factor of 5 or more.
Social Networking sites have an important role to play in reaching specific audiences but for now it is best to tag each tweet and check the stats for the specific landing page to really measure the impact on visits.

Google RNIB AdWords Sitelinks

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 good AdWords Account CTR. My experience is that you need a CTR of around 3% spread across all your ad Campaigns to be offered the Ad Sitelinks option. You can check if you qualify by logging onto your adwords account, go to Campaign > Settings > Networks, device and extensions. Here, if eligible, you can enter a brief description and the associated url for the appropriate pages on your site.

Location of Ad Sitelinks settings in AdWords

Google deals with the question `What ads qualify ? and they specifically say ” Ad Sitelinks are most likely to trigger on unique brand terms”. My experience has been that this is the case on all accounts that I have done this for.

Now on your main brand term you can occupy a large amount of google SERPS screen real estate – your AdSitelinks, regular site links and (in many cases) a site specific Search Box plus Local Listings. Anyone looking for you under your brand term should be able to find you.

Bounce Rate is defined as  ” …the number of visitors who enter the site at a page and leave within the specified timeout period without viewing another page, divided by the total number of visitors who entered the site at that page “. So it does not take into account the number of Page Views by Visitors who did not land on that page. For example a page may have 5 direct visits and 4 leave immediately ie a Bounce Rate of 80%. However that page may also have 200 Page Views from other visitors to the site. The average time on page may be long. That piece of data gives a very different `spin` on  how that page is performing.

Google Analytics Goals layout (click for larger image)

Sadly you can only include Event Tracking in Goals by using the `_track Pageview function`. This is for most users too complicated to implement – you have to involve the web dev or IT guys and we all know how busy those guys are. If you can track events eg downloads, sign-ups, feed subscriptions, phone call requests, etc then you have two great sets of Goals that you can measure progress with. By Source, Keywords, etc you can see first how Engagement is improving and then how visitors are acting on that engagement.

Goals achieved by Traffic Medium (click for larger image)

Remember that Goals are cumulative so that on the extreme right (above) the Goal Conversion Rate is the sum of all Goals achieved. If, as here, you have Goals of 2, 4 and 6 Pages Viewed then a Visitor who Views 6 pages will have achieved 3 Goals.

Implementing the new Goals is really easy and is a great step in understanding user behaviour.