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.

1.`Nobody likes my pages`- bounce rate: this is the % of site visitors who entered and left the same page without going anywhere else. For the biggest impact go to GA> Content > Top Landing Pages and over on the right you will see the Bounce Rate. Below 30% is excellent, 30- 50% is not bad. Anything above 80%  is a bit embarrassing for the person or group who created the page. However do check the `Time on Page`as some pages such as Sign-Up, Register can legitimately have high Bounce Rates.

2. `People do not like our stuff`- engagement: most nfp sites are designed to provide information. What should be happening is more visits consuming more info ie staying longer. Look in Visitors > Visitor Loyalty at both Length of Visit and Depth of Visit.  Over 70% of people looking at just one page and staying less than 10 secs is not a good sign. To isolate this data for a group of pages or a section of the site either create a specific Profile or use Advanced Segments.

3. `Yeah, but our visit number are growing` – share of search: the number of visits is rising and everyone is happy but what if someone else in your market is gaining visitors 3/4/5  times faster than you ? You have a problem and you do not even know about it !  Compete will give you info on how you are doing relative to your competitors. Google Trends will show you what people are looking for. Google Trends for Websites gives you data on your competitors. Finally look at the Keyword Tool and see how many searches per month there are for your main keywords in Exact Match. You should be getting between 20% and 50% of that traffic if you are in top spot and if you are not in top spot for your top brand or cause related terms then your audience is going somewhere else.

ah. But what about the stuff that everyone is talking about eg Conversion Rate,  Donations / Sales per visit, etc?  For most of us the first tasks are to show that GA data is relevant and individuals can influence it directly. Once you have won those battles *then* you can start to build KPIs that matter to people and that they will pay attention to.

First User Engagement. Google Analytics provides on the Dashboard two useful indicators ie Pages per Visit and Avg. Time on Site. Next, in the Visitors section > Visitor Loyalty there are two further indicators of how engaged visitors are with the site – Length of Visit and Depth of Visit. Taken together these 4 give a clear measure of how `engaged` users are with the site.

To measure the overall User Loyalty we can consider 3 figures. First, from the Dashboard we can deduce the percentage of returning visitors from the % New Visits figure. Second, we can determine how many visitors make more than 3, 4, 5 (whatever number we choose) visits per month from: Visitors > Visitor Loyalty > Loyalty. Finally the number of Visits divided by the number of Unique Visitors will give the average number of visits per visitor.

While average figures can be useful they rarely provide the all important `actionable insight` that we really need. To make the User Loyalty and User Engagement metrics as defined above really useful we can do two things. First we group pages or sections of interest together so that the people who author material can see clearly how the audience is responding . Secondly, segment by Traffic Sources ie direct, referring site, PPC, etc so we can see what the `best`traffic is coming from. In this way we get real insight into how each part of the site is performing.
Fortunately Google have now provided a really easy way to do all this selection of pages and sources in Google Analytics – The Advanced Segments feature. This feature allows non programmers to easily segment any group of pages and see all historical data for them. Something that until now was not possible in GA. Well worth checking out.

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This is a presentation that I gave at Breast Cancer Care in London on 24th June 2008. Thanks to the 40+ attendees who came along.
Seamus