June 2007 NEWSLETTER: 5 Minutes to Improve ...
"5 Minutes to Improve ..."
This newsletter is a free service to the North American not-for-profit community from William Harper Associates. Its focus is on helping organizations that do good, do better ... by identifying practical ways that small- to mid-sized organizations can improve their operations, one small step at a time, in just a few minutes.
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June 2007: 5 Minutes to Improve ... your Website
This month's '5 Minutes to Improve ...' ideas are to understand your Website traffic, and add a search function to your Website. And, the tools to implement both of these are free!
Understand your Website Traffic
Who visits your Website? Where are they from? How long do they stay? and, What do they do while they are there?
Interesting questions, but you think, "there's no way of knowing this information, or, if there is, it must cost a fortune to implement". Right? Wrong!
The first myth about Web traffic is that it is anonymous - in reality, it is not even close! A great deal of information about visitors to your Website is captured on your Web server. And, while most of it is technical information, it can still reveal a great deal about your visitors.
The second myth is that information of this nature is only available to huge enterprise-type Website owners, at a huge cost. In fact, there are free analytical tools that can give you a great many insights into your Web traffic.
We'll focus today on one such service: Google Analytics.
Google? Yes, the company that wants to organize the world's information wants to help you! For free! Now, if this sounds a bit like, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you", don't run and hide. At least, not quite yet.
Is there a catch? Well, the catch, if you consider it to be one, is that in return for telling you all about your Web traffic, you also tell Google all about your Web traffic. Now, Google does no evil (and that's true, because I read it on the Internet - on Google's site!). Google says they only want to understand Web traffic better, and they won't use any personally identifying information.
So, is Google to be trusted? In our opinion, the answer is yes and no. For most information, it's probably fine to accept this trade-off. For some very confidential information, you might not want to. The trick, therefore, is to be a bit selective about what Web pages you serve up to Google. For example, you don't want, perhaps, to open up online donation or other financial activity to the analytics engine. But, on the other hand, you really don't have to, because you've got detailed information on this activity from the transactions themselves.
On balance, then, we think that Google analytics offers a truly valuable service at a generally acceptable cost. The key is simply to understand what parts of your Website shouldn't be opened up to Google analytics, and what parts don't need to be opened up to understand what is going on.
What does Google analytics tell you? More than you could ever want to know, really. If you integrate the analytics thoroughly into your site, you can set specific site objectives (for example, get people to sign up for our newsletter, or get people to donate on-line). Then, you can track how successful you are, not only in actual sign-ups or donations, but in how many people start down the path to doing so, how long they spend doing so, and where they fall off the path if they don't meet your goal. Very powerful stuff for analyzing the effectiveness of your site, and working to improve it.
Analytics also tells you much, much more. Like number of visitors, number of pages visited per visitor, where they came from (both geographically, right down to the city and the ISP they use, and also what site they were referred from or what search terms found you). It can tell you about the computer hardware and software they used, such as what browser, screen resolution and colour settings they have (very useful in terms of making sure you site works well for your audience). It can even tell you the popularity of each page on your site, how long visitors stayed on each page, and from what page they left to go elsewhere!
Want to check it out? Just go to www.google.com/analytics. But remember … they'll know you visited! (As the Google Analytics page ominously announces, after all, "You're not alone.")
Add Search to your Website
And, no newsletter mentioning Google would be complete without talking about search.
You want your visitors to find what they are looking for on your site, right? That's why you've carefully designed the site navigation, design and layout, added a site map, and so on. But, if all that doesn't meet the needs and expectations of every single visitor, what next? Well, Google would suggest that your visitors be able to search!
Now, Google isn't the only search engine in town. It's not even the only search engine that you can add to your site for free. But, it is the search engine that everyone knows, and it is hard to go wrong adding Google search to your site.
Google site search will also let your visitors search the entire Web from your site without leaving. And, it's all about keeping traffic on your site!
Whoever set up your Website should have no problem figuring out the instructions to add Google search to your site as well. And, there is no cost for adding this feature. That sounds like a winner to us!
So, consider adding search to your site - visit www.google.com/coop/cse.