Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites increased the number of visitors that they sent to 10 UK charity web sites by 33% in the past 12 months. Compared to the previous 12 months the proportion of visitors coming to the sites from social media sources increased from 2.06% from 2.72%. The quality of the [...]

Real time data is now available in most Google Analytics accounts. The new feature shows the number of active visitors on the site, where they are coming from ( Locations ), Traffic Sources, including the keywords they are using and what Content they are viewing. Plus the most popular pages in the last 30 mins. [...]

Google`s latest update may bring a drop in the traffic that they send to UK charity sites. Google regularly updates the factors that decide what pages to show for a search query.  The latest version of the algorithm called `farmer` or `panda` will soon be in use here in the UK and is designed to [...]

NHS Choices recently published their 2010 annual report which includes summary data on their web site performance and quantifies benefits that resulted. ( £44M saved in visits to GP`s they claim ) The report covers three areas: Web Site Data, Market Share data and an off line user survey. An example of  the Web Site [...]

Twitter and Facebook have almost doubled the amount of traffic they sent to 6 UK charity web sites over the last 6 months. Visits identified as coming from all social media sources, have grown faster than the overall growth in web site visits while Facebook and Twitter are sending a greater share of the overall [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]