Archive for June, 2011

By now you have started to build out some keyword campaigns within you Google Grant and hopefully are getting a new stream of visitors to your page. Great job! 

Now what? Start converting this new traffic into donation, email signups, activist, purchasers, or whatever is the relevant conversion for your organization. You probably have more conversions on your site than you realize. Do you have PDFs that are downloadable? Are there signup forms? Is there a donation button? These are all measurable conversions.

There is some more work that goes into setting up measurement of different conversion goals, but the first step is to do a conversion audit of your site. Ideally, you only want to send traffic from your Google Grant to pages where conversions are possible. This is how you get the biggest return on the time investment you are putting into building keyword campaigns and devising new ad copy. Just sending traffic to your site is the start, but it should not be the ultimate goal of having a Google Grant.

Go through your site map and look at every page. You should still have this handy from when we needed it back at the Grant Architecture phase. Now with the site map go through and find those conversions.

What if I don’t have any conversions? Then it is time to start thinking about a few. As a non-profit having a donation mechanism is great way to get a conversion loaded on to your website. As a Google Grantee you have access to free donation processing through Google Checkout until the end of 2011.

To learn more about how to convert your Google Grant traffic get in touch with us. Look forward to next week as we start to work on tracking this traffic through Google Analytics.

The rumors are abuzz that any moment now the deal will be announced that News Corporation will sell MySpace which they purchased for $580 million in 2005. If you look back, you’ll see that News Corporation hoped that MySpace would soon be a billion dollar property.

They are about 90% off as analysts estimate they will let go of MySpace for under $100 million and write off close to $500,000,000 in losses on the deal. Many people will write about what went wrong, all the mistakes made but I have a simpler theory. Because online properties are virtual places, and because with the drop in technology costs, it is so easy to create new platforms and places, they actually have a shelf life one that is far more real than we would see in bricks and mortar world.

One day, Facebook and FourSquare will too be passe and their valuation will be far less than it is now. Murdoch may be many things but he is not an idiot. He bought a very valuable property in 2005, he just didn’t realize that time wasn’t on his side.

So it’s been a busy long week in the world of Social and New Media. And the last piece of news shall be first.

Facebook announced a new advertising format, one that was crowd-sourced. We chipped in some ideas but didn’t win but ironically the most traditional advertising agency in the country, Leo Burnett, came up with the winning concept, “comment ads” and they will have exclusive use of the platform for two months. Bastards.

Google is facing the anti-trust music like Microsoft did way back when, a fact noted with some glee by Seattle newspapers. What we noted was that according to ComScore Google is the first site to have a billion unique visitors in a month. That is a lot of people.

Which also kind of proved the point of this post from earlier this week, is 10 million users what it used to be? Maybe not the writer thinks as FourSquare hit that number.

And this caught our eye. FromGoodForGood using the new LaunchRocket platform to tease their new site.

Hats off to Fourquare, passing 10 million users and also creating the coolest graphic of the day.

The global graphic caused us a bit of a pause because while 10 million people is a lot of people, when you stretch it out not even globally but just in relative terms to the United States population of over 330 million, it’s a small percentage.

As broadband penetration has grown, and as access to sites such as Foursquare have increased, we wonder if we are creating a max-connected minority of tech users. All Foursquare users would make up less than 3% of Americans, if they were all Americans. Yes that would be a smart, connected and savvy 3% but still, pretty small relative to the country.

It’s also a reasonable hypothesis to think that those 3% are also on Facebook, Twitter, maybe a site like Quora and so forth, so the question remains, are we creating a small minority of the over-connected or are tools like Foursquare truly spreading, as their graph suggests?

First of all, we’d like to congratulate our partner Live Free Or Die Alliance, a non-partisan political alliance out of New Hampshire whose goal it is to bring both citizenship and courtesy back to the political process. This morning, they hit 5,000 fans on Facebook. So clearly their positive message is getting through in the Granite State.

Speaking of politics, here’s an interesting post about using the data collected through Google Paid Search and seeing how is garnering the most interest in the 2012 GOP Presidential Race. Hint: it’s a former Governor from Alaska.

Here in our office we listen to Pandora on our iPad. We have watched their stock IPO with interest. While we disagree with some of the commentary, we do think that this time around there is a far smarter balance of optimism and cynicism as regards the pricing of the stock.

New Hampshire is once again taking its place as one of the two bell weathers of politics as the 2012 Presidential Race starts to heat up; especially on the GOP side. Like Iowa, the residents of the Granite State take their role as vanguards of the process quite seriously and in turn, the Republican Candidates are heading north, and lining up to shake hands across the state.

One of our clients here at Common Sense NMS is the Live Free Or Die Alliance, a non-partisan group dedicated to improving the civility of the political discourse in New Hampshire and also bringing the concept of active citizen participation back into politics. LFDA launched three years ago and is starting to gain considerable traction on issues important to local residents but now, of course, as the country’s attention turns to their state, they are increasingly become a solid resource for on the ground New Hampshire political news.

In working on their efforts in the Granite State as the process has picked up, it’s been fascinating to see the relative strength of the GOP candidates as reflected in the Google search trends of the core candidates. From this unique perspective, we can gain some insight into who has appeal at this early stage, or at the very least, who people are finding interesting enough to go onto Google and type in their name. This is important to LFDA as we helped LFDA receive a Google Grant a year or so ago, and the ability to capture and translate the political trends in search helps them grow their group. Contact us to learn how a $120,000 a year Google Grant can help your C3. For example, if more people are searching for Mitt Romney and what he is doing in New Hampshire, we can then focus the Grant efforts on words relating to Romney and introduce people to LFDA via the Grant and their interest in Romney’s Campaign.

As you can see, over the past 30 days, no candidate comes remotely close to having the interest that Sarah Palin does, in terms of search globally. She clearly is far and above the other candidates, in fact, she is more interesting to those online on Google than all the other candidates combined. Of course, this doesn’t mean true political support, but it does mean interest, and interest seems to be a precursor to support.

Thanks to the power of Google, we don’t have to look just globally. We can look at Search Traffic in the United States and you can even dial down and look at just New Hampshire which we decided to do. Before we pulled this chart, we thought that perhaps within the Granite State, the serious but relatively unknown candidates like Jon Huntsman might pull a little better but just the opposite is true. Within the borders of NH, Palin is even more dominant than she is globally.

But before any Palin fans start planning their trip to Washington for the Inauguration, let’s look at what people are searching for in terms of their favorite candidate, and the answer is our post title. So the interest in Sarah Palin is being driven most recently by her gaffe in Boston, not by pure interest in her campaign. We’ll keep tracking the trends in New Hampshire but remember, Google Insights is free and available to all. When you are looking at your organization or your company and want to learn more about what people want, what they are looking for or even where they are searching from, Google can give you a lot of valuable information instantly.

Last week we talked about the foundation of a successful Google Grant – scalable architecture. Now that you have a firm foundation you can start building out your Grant to get the most traffic possible to your site to convert into supporters and donors. Adding keywords is the way you begin to get more and more relevant traffic to your site.

As we learned last week, you want to build your grant out around themes that already exist on your website. Therefore, you should have campaigns that reflect the layout of your site.

Example

Our national environmental non-profit is back as an example. Say we have a campaign for Animal Protection. On our site we have a page devoted to the polar bear with a strong call to action to Save The Polar Bears. Within our grant, in the campaign for Animal Protection, we can build out a Adgroup for keywords relating to polar bears. I like to use the naming convention (kw: polar bears) to make sure I remember which keyword clusters are in each adgroup.

There are two really easy ways to find good keywords: (1) Check the Google Analyics report for that page on your site. Which organic searches are driving people to that page already, (2) Use Google Instant search. Google Instant was rolled out last fall and essentially changed the amount of words available to marketers using Google Adwords. To get a keyword list on Google Instant type out “polar bear”. You will automatically get the top 5 or so results on what users are looking for in real-time. The trick, and this is time consuming, but is to type “polar bear a”, “polar bear b”. “polar bear c”, etc., until you have a robust list of keywords related to users searching polar bears. Not all of these words will be relevant so make sure to screen them before you add them into your Adgroup.

Once you have a good list, you will want to add all three variations of the keyword: broad matches [exact matches] and “phrase matches”. There is a great tool by Matchpeg that will churn out all three variation for you to add into your Grant

Big Takeaway

(1) Build robust keyword lists for each adgroup.

(2) Keep Adgroups segregated by keyword clusters (themes)

(3) Use the free tools available (Google Analytics, Google Instant Search, Matchpeg) to your advantage.

(4) It takes time, but building robust and relevant keyword lists is vital to maximizing the potential of your Google Grant.

If you are a non-profit ready to make the jump into the digital marketing world with a Google Grant, then we are here to help. Contact us to get started immediately.

Every Friday, we like to highlight and share some of the top things we see online, big stories, little insights that might add up to some big progress and often just some fun online things we want to share. So on this sunny summer Friday (in Boston at least) take a moment and let’s look at what the week has had to offer.

First, it’s easy to always include Google in our round-ups because to be honest, they always deserve it. So to start the round-up, hats off to Google who yesterday had one of the great Doodles of all time honoring Les Paul on what what would have been his 96th birthday. Not only was the Doodle a Les Paul Guitar design but you could actually play it AND save the song you created. Some Fridays, we just have to tip our hat. Here’s an article with more on that.

And yes there is a place where all the old Google Doodles go when their time is up. Check them all out here.

GroupOn has been accused of essentially being a ponzi scheme, and this article makes a pretty good case for that line of thinking.

It does feel a little like people are starting to act like it’s 1999 all over again. The valuations for online properties seem to be distinctly out of line with what they are actually worth. And that’s our bottom line on GroupOn (and Pandora too).

Our very own Cody Damon made Tuesday the day to learn more about Google Grants. He launched a series of posts this past week a note about Grant Architecture. If you’re one of the thousands of non-profits who have a Google Grant, you’ll want to follow what Cody shares on Tuesdays.

What did you see this week that’s the top online story? Email us at inquiry@commonsenseboston.com and tell us what you think. Have a good weekend.

We have been working with Bobby Shriver on Product (RED) since it launched and today, Bobby took another one of the causes near and dear to him, the issue of homeless veterans, to the next level, suing the Veterans Administration to force them to use VA land and resources in Los Angeles to provide shelter to homeless veterans.

Here’s a post I put up on Daily Kos about this.

And here is the coverage from today’s New York Times.

Congratulations Bobby. Keep fighting.

Grant architecture? You won’t a need a fancy compass or any measuring tape. What you will need is your site map and some time.

Your site should be laid out in a manner that makes content easily distinguishable. Building out your Google Grant will follow this same premise. Remember you can have 25 active Campaigns in your Google Grant account. Each campaign can have an unlimited amount of Adgroups.

Your campaigns should be topics that are logical for your website and easy for you to be able to find. Remember the Grant is an ongoing and constantly evolving project and you want to think about scale at the beginning.

Example

Let’s say you are an national environmental group. Your website is broken into four sections: (1) Animal Protection, (2) Clean Air Program, (3) Kids Education, (4) Citizen Advocacy. You can create four campaigns that target a national audience. For your animal protection campaign, perhaps you have 10 Adgroups representing each of the animals that you have webpages. Always remember to group your Adgroups by keyword. For example, if the African Elephant is a species that you create an Adgroup for, then make sure you only have keywords and ads that contain “African Elephant”.

Big Takeaway

Keep it simple and keep it logical. Use your own site map as the guide and remember you can always go back and make edits. Your grant should evolve with the content on your site.

Subscribe to our RSS feed to make sure you don’t miss any of our Google Grant Tuesday write-ups. If you need more help right away be sure to reach out to us and we can get you started down the right path of utilizing your $10,000 a month Google Grant in the most effective way possible.