UK charity social media sources

increase the overall number of visitors from social media sources to closer to 3%.

In Sept of 2010 I did another analysis of the impact of social media on charity web site visits. This latest analysis uses a slightly wider group of social media sources and charities comparing the period 1st September 2009 to 31st August 2010 with the period 1st September 2010 to 31st August 2011. The data is a simple average across 10 different UK charity sites varying from 10k to 250k visits per month. The data was collected from Google Analytics using an Advanced Segment as described in the previous post. For all the charities the Top 5 social media sources comprised around 80% of all the sources in the Advanced Segment. So the 80/20 rule applies and there is no long tail of social media referrals.

The Social Media Advanced Segment that I used covers many kinds of sources but three distinct groups can be identified. The first might be considered true social media. Here the big two, Facebook and Twitter, are becoming more dominant but for some charities Linkedin brought many visitors. The second group is social bookmarking sites where the two that did well were Stumbleupon and Netvibes. If you are not using them currently they are worth investigating as they have been very successful for one or two charities and as this report shows for national newspapers such as The Guardian and the Daily Mail. The third broad group is Communities and Forums. Examples are in-house Forums plus places such as moneysavingexpert and sector specific forums. As the sites I reviewed used different referral methods the numbers coming from in-house communities and forums may be undercounted. Finally, Google+ sends very few visits directly to the sites that I reviewed and to my surprise YouTube did not feature in any Top 5 list of referring social media sites in the last 2 years.

Google Analytics real time Overview Screen (Click for larger image)

1. Improve response to EMails and Tweets. Testing variations in EMails is a great way to increase response rates. If you do a test to say 5% of your list and watch the results you can immediately see what sections, layouts and links get the best ( and worst) response. If you are keen you can continue to test for optimum results. Similarly you can test Tweet variations containing embedded links.

2. Take advantage of hot news events: If an article is getting a lot of visits say as a result of a news report on a crisis then creating a link on the home page immediately will enable the content to be found easily by more people. You can even benefit if a celeb is in the news and they are an ambassador for your charity.

3. Convince content creators: I think that this may be a big side benefit. One of the biggest hurdles at many charities is convincing those who can create great content that doing so is a worthwhile and effective use of their time. While they know that people read web posts seeing it in real time is quite powerful. Perhaps the same as telling a donor that you will do good things with their money and showing an effect in real time – they believe you but seeing makes it more real. I think this R-T feature has the potential to engage and convince contributors. Particularly if you Tweet or Email about their content and they watch how people responded to their efforts. (More details on GA R-T from Jason.)

Google update effect on UK charity sites

You can read more about the possible impact and how to identify the most affected pages and even keywords by Patrick Altoft. Aaron Wall, who is well worth reading if you want an informed critical view of the search business, reckons that UK sites will be affected. My checks on around 10 decent sized UK charity sites suggest that very few will be affected but better to be safe than sorry….

The report covers three areas: Web Site Data, Market Share data and an off line user survey. An example of  the Web Site Data for September is shown ( these stats are published monthly) . The site, which uses tracking from Webtrends rather than Google Analytics, is grouped into two main areas Service Usage and Engagement With The Site. The first covers standard stuff such as Visits, Visitors, Average Time on Site and Pages Visited. More interestingly there is data on the top search terms and referring sites plus market share data. The Market Share data comes from an independent source – Hitwise. They make a good attempt to quantify Engagement, a key metric for information sites such as this. The engagement metrics they choose are New User Accounts and the number of Comments posted. All in all it looks like a decent effort to report on the effect of the site. Some information on costs would be nice.
As they are spending public money it is right that they publish data such as this. Should all charities who are receiving the public`s money publish similar data ?  Summary Press release here and the full report here

Facebook and Twitter are most popular with UK charity visitors.

The share of traffic from social media sources varies among the surveyed sites from a (very) high 6% to less than .5%. Twitter and Facebook are the largest contributors to social media visits and are the fastest growing of the social media sources. Comparing the last 6 months with the previous 6 months Facebook sent 65% more Visitors while Twitter sent 80%. If you are comparing the absolute number of visits remember that Twitter is reckoned to be under counted in Google Analytics by a factor of 4 or 5.

This analysis is similar to the social media analysis I did back in March 2010. This time I included Visits from over 34 social social media sources and ensured that the analysis was comparable across all 6 sites for both periods. Three of the sites had visitors in the 10/20k per month range with three more having over 100k visits per month.

The data comes from Google Analytics using the Advanced Segments capability. You can do this test on your own web site by using Google Analytics Advanced Segments. You can easily create you own version of the Advanced Segment or drop me a line and I will send you the one I used with its specified social media sites. Once you receive it simply log into your GA account and paste the url into your browser. Voila !  you can check how your site compares to the ones I did.

Click for Larger Image

You can track how many visitors a page on your site receives as  a result of your Tweets by Tagging any Links that you put into your Tweets. Bit.ly, currently the most popular URL shortner, can be used with Google link tagging. Simply add tagging parameters such as Source and Medium to the end of the url, shorten in Bit.ly and post to your Tweet. Now when you look in Google Analytics > Traffic Sources you will see a separate Medium ` Twitter` and provided you have tagged your links they will appear listed for each Tweet you have sent out. Now you know how many visits your links have brought to your site.

Incidentally if your site uses the AddtoAny bookmarking service ( as this site does) then you can see full details of what pages have been bookmarked by looking in GA >Content > Event Tracking.

Combining the use of Advanced Segments, Link Tagging and Event Tracking will give you a good idea of how your Facebook and Twitter activity are affecting your site.

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.

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.

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.