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.)

1. Stop people leaving the site within 10 seconds of arriving. My tests show that it is more likely that someone who has arrived on your site using your Brand or category terms will donate. ie they entered your brand name or the name of  the condition that you deal with eg cancer, heart disease, etc in a search engine. Examine the pages that searchers arrive on and find those with a high bounce rate. Now the hard part. Why are they leaving so quickly (bouncing) ?  In my experience there is often too much information on a page. As you will know users scan rather than read a page at least initially. The page may contain great info but many visitors will scan to see if it interesting before deciding to stay longer. So they may be put off by seeing long sections of text or detailed explanations on the landing page.

2.  If you have `Donate Now` links on any pages of your site check which are the most popular pages with links. On these popular pages see if you can spot any good practice that can be used elsewhere.  Check using the Event Tracking section of Google Analytics ( Content > Event Tracking ). You should also check which keywords bring visitors to the most popular `Donate Now`pages.

Finally some of the most generous charity donors are from the US. Most UK charities get 10% or more of their traffic from the USA. If you do, does it make sense to provide some specific landing pages that they can really relate to plus of course a `Donate Now` button ?

To see how it may affect UK charities I compared the search results for the current Google and `caffeine` using the nifty comparison tool put together by sembience ( nice example of link bait !). For four different sites that attract between 50k and 250k visits per month I looked at their top 10 keywords. From them I excluded the `brand` terms eg organisation name and terms clearly not related to the organisations mission – leaving about 5/6 keywords per organisation. For one organisation `caffeine` put all 5 terms lower than current search results. Two organisations had a majority of terms producing lower results and one had no net loss or gain.

Before it becomes Google`s new search engine no doubt `caffeine` will have a lot of modifications but it is well worth checking your top terms now and seeing if you are on track to lose or gain visitors when it happens.

Impression Share Report

The Impression Share Report can be created in the AdWords Report centre. The report shows the Impression Share(IS) for the Campaign and the percentage lost due to either the budget being too low, Lost IS (Budget) or lost due to poor ranking, Lost IS (Rank). For most Campaigns the largest loss has to do with Rank.  As Rank is CPC X Quality Score the most cost effective way to improve is to improve Quality Score.

Given that not all of the keywords in the Campaign will have a great Quality Score and your Maxm CPC will not always be high enough it is very unlikely that you will get 100% Impression Share (IS).  One reason for low IS could be that the keywords are not showing up on broad match. The Exact match (IS) figures helps here as they show how the Campaign would perform IF all keywords were Exact Match. Increasing your bid will also improve your Ranking too. However in chasing greater Impression Share remember that 30% or 40% Impression Share of a large `market` is better than a 100% IS of a small market. So do not be afraid to keep less than optimal keywords in the Campaign.

One drawback of this report is that it is only available at the Account and Campaign level where there is often too much data to make sense of it all. If this report was available at the ad group level I think it would be more widely used.

New Search Query Tool in AdWords

The new AdWords interface allows you to very easily access this information, by AdGroup or individual keyword, via the Search Query Performance Report.  Say you had an AdGroup relating to working part time and you had  included the keyphrase `part time`. After running the Campaign for 7/10 days you check the Search Query Report and see that for the keyphrase `part time` 25 clicks were registered. Of this 25 the report shows that 5 were as a result of Exact Match,  10 via Phrase Match and 10 via Broad Match. Review the keywords marked as Phrase or Broad Match and see if any of the search terms that triggered the ad were used 2 or more times. If so add these terms into the AdGroup as Broad Match. Doing this regularly will exand your keyword list with more high performing keywords. Note that if any of the Phrase or Broad match terms are not related to your ad eg `electrical timer`, `kitchen timer`you should put `electrical` and `kitchen` as negative keywords to prevent your ad from showing for these unrelated terms. Keywords that regularly achieve less than a 1% CTR should be looked at very closely with a view to either deleting them or moving them to a more appropriate AdGroup or Campaign.