Blog

Today on intent.com, James is featured writing about some of the experiences he has had at Common Sense and wondering if the ‘unconscious consumer’ is the key to helping non-profits succeed.

Google Earth Outreach

Reach more donors

Google Analytics  - Understand how people find and interact with information on your website.

Blogger  - Publish instantly and keep your supporters informed and engaged.

Trends  - Learn where your donors are searching.

Gadgets  - Drive traffic to your website and interact with your supporters.

Alerts  - Get email updates if your organization or cause is in the news.

News  - React and respond to news coverage of your cause directly on the Google News site.

 

Improve operations

Forms  - Collect information and easily create web-based surveys.

Custom search  - Create a customized search experience for your community.

Groups  - Communicate easily to staff or volunteers and encourage discussions among supporters.

Moderator  - Let your supporters decide which questions, suggestions or ideas interest them most.

Translate  - View web pages in other languages.

Open Data Kit  - Collect, aggregate and visualize your data.

 

Raise awareness

Fusion Tables  - Show your impact or add a custom map to your website.

Picasa  - Find, edit and share your photos of your work.

Google Places  - Help people find you on the map.

Subscribed links  - Create custom search results that users can add to their Google search pages.

 

Tools for your webmaster

Code  - Find developer tools, APIs and resources.

Website Optimizer  - Figure out the best landing pages to turn site visitors into donors.

Webmaster tools  - See how Google sees your site, troubleshoot errors, and increase traffic to your site.

Public Data Explorer  - Make large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate.

The news today that Newt Gingrich spent $800,000 on his campaign website brings back to mind the best advice I ever heard given on building a web site.

Talk to a lot of people and find someone you trust to help you build your site. From where I stand, given as the article linked above also points out, the fact that there are so many core basic tools and platforms available to anyone building a campaign site, I can’t possibly imagine how you could spend over $100,000 on a new site. $200,000 tops.

However, one of the challenges I have found here at Common Sense NMS is repairing the damage caused by gross over-billing by other groups and agencies; sheer greed or partial incompetence. But when you had to try and help a non-profit, for example, that was billed $1,500 for having Google Analytics hooked up to their site – a free tool that takes about 2 minutes to set up – it’s hard to build any sort of level of trust up.

Speaking of Google Analytics, there is a good example of where to spend money and where not to. In our experience collectively here, there simply is no better tool for measuring website traffic than Google Analtyics. It’s powered, maintained and supported by Google. And trust us, you will have to be a very big, very powerful group before the analytics offered by Google no longer suit your needs. However, time and time again, we see clients, even smaller non-profits spend precious money on site-tracking services, many of whom just don’t work. (One client we had saw their traffic drop 75% when Google Analytics was hooked up.)

But whether you’re building a major Presidential site or just trying to find out how many visitors you have, make sure you find an online partner that has your best interests at heart. Otherwise it can be a costly mistake, just ask Newt.

We get a lot of free stuff from our time in the Twitterverse. Be it gift cards, tickets, or products, there are always brands looking to extend their reach by offering a giveaway. Last week though the model got flipped on its head a little bit. I retweeted a post by the Boston Public Library about the latest and greatest thing to hit The Hub – food trucks. It was an image of a “Food Truck Only” parking spot. A few moments later @PretzelCrisps hit me up asking me if I wanted a snack. Umm… yea! I am a chronic muncher.

The next day Lisa Parady, the Field Marketing Rep, stopped by my office with enough treats for everyone. Actually, it was like 10 bags of Pretzel Crisps. We talked for a bit and Lisa spends her day using search.twitter.com locating conversations where people are talking about food or snacks or just about anywhere she can promote her brand. She then drops of her gift bag of goodies (as well as her energy) to the office quicker than you can retweet your excitement.

My big takeaway is that anything worth doing is worth doing right. Brands often try to dip their toes in social media marketing – looking to find evangelist that will spread their message. Lisa and Pretzel Crisps are creating brand evangelist. There probably aren’t a lot of people out their talking about Pretzel Crisps before this campaign, but you better believe there are a bunch of folks in Boston who are talking now. Great job!

How is everyone doing? I hope our two weeks on vacation were fruitful for your Grant campaigns and you are seeing an influx of new visitors. The next question is, “how do I measure how effective this traffic is on my site?”

Hopefully, you have a website traffic measurement tool in use. Google offers a free one that is really robust and easy to install called Google Analytics. Set up simply requires the inclusion of a piece of code on all the pages on your website. This is something that can be easily achieved through putting the code in the header, footer, or some other element that is on every page. You can find a full Google Analytics setup tutorial here.

Once you have Google Analytics installed on your website you are going to want to link your Google Grant Adwords account with the Google Analytics account. This is to make sure they are both feeding each other data so we can get the best picture of what is happening with your Grant traffic. A complete guide on how to link this is located here.

Pat yourself on the back you now have some very powerful tools setup to measure the effectiveness of your Google Grant. Keep in mind it take about 24-48 hours if you are just setting these tools up to begin to populate with data. Be patient you are going to have more data than you know what to do with very soon.

So what do you do with all this data? There are different levels of analysis. We are a big fan of @avinash on Twitter. Not only is he entertaining, but he knows this stuff better than anyone on the planet. The video below talks about capturing teenager, adult, and ninja metrics. Since we are just getting start lets just worry about capturing some teenager metrics. We have to train to become ninjas.

Last week we talked about conversions and making a list of what the conversion were on your website. This is where we look to measure those conversions. I am just going to talk about the most simple conversion to measure today. This is a conversion where there is an ask on one page on your site (one specific URL) and there is a thank you page confirming the action on another page (a specific URL for the thank you page).

Within Google Analytics you are going to want to setup goals that track when a user has reached those “thank you” pages. This is the complete tutorial of how to setup goals within Analytics. If you have linked your Google Adwords and Google Analytics account together, then the goals will migrate to your Google Grant Adwords account and you can begin to see the conversions reporting right next to the keywords that brought that user to your site. This is a really great feature because it allows you to only focus on those keywords that are giving you a conversion.

There are a few other metrics you might want to keep track of at this beginning stage: (1) time on site, (2) bounce rate, (3) % new visitors. Google Grant traffic will be reported as Google (CPC) within Google Analytics and these three metrics are always good to look at in comparison with the rest of your traffic. If Grant traffic is spending less time and bouncing more times, then it might be important to look at why? Are the keywords your bidding on relevant? Are the landing pages the best they can be? These metrics are just the start, the all-important question of why is what you always need to solve for.

Next week we are going to take a look at the rest of the tools available to Grantees through the Google for Non-profit program. Stay tuned and make sure you are always setting aside some time to dig into your grant. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions. I always love to hear how folks are doing and the victories they are having with their Google Grant.

We are all used to the concept of a cause products, something that is sold where a percentage of the sale, hopefully a fairly high one, goes to benefit a charity or cause. Here at Common Sense NMS, we’ve been working on Product (RED) since just after its launch, and we’ve watched in admiration as groups like Live Strong and Susan B. Komen have raised millions for their respective causes. We’re also involved in a project exploring the next generation of cause products and what can be done to take it to the next level.

As we live and work in the cause product world, we have spent some time thinking about what the first cause product was, and since the walls of our office are decorated with old War Bond Posters, we realized that the answer might literally be hanging right there.

From a provincial or purely American point of view, World War I was where War Bonds were launched in what we would describe as a cause product – with truly staggering success. Why would we describe them as the first cause products? Well, savings bond were an existing well known product; a special version of saving bonds were created with a specific goal – ie to fund the war, and perhaps most importantly, the product was marketed in a way we would look at now as a cause product campaign.

Much like Product (RED) used celebrities to launch its brand, World War I war bond campaigns were headed up by some of the top celebrities of the day, like Al Jolson and Charlie Chaplin. Famous artists were commissioned to design the posters; some of which still hang on walls like ours. The bonds were renamed “Liberty Bonds” so they were distinct from ordinary savings bonds.

So how did it work? Amazingly well. At a time when the total federal expenditures were approximately one billion dollars annually, the Liberty Bond Campaign raised over $21 billion. (Imagine if today we raised over $20 trillion dollars through a bond campaign.)

Within the efforts from all those decades ago, some lessons still hold true. Celebrities certainly do still work in terms of gathering publicity and attention. Strong branding and strong communications make a lot of difference in your success. And ultimately, people have to desire what you are selling. And back in 1917 and 1918, they most certainly did.

Stay tuned as we work through a new concept that will, we hope, make some pretty good history itself.

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?