Anand Pallegar and Amanda Eyer fro atLarge, Inc. review free tools to improve your on-line marketing initiatives.
Metrics/Analytics- studying the behavior of website visitors.
Don't guess about your marketing; know what causes a reaction. Was it a TV ad, print ad or social media outlet that drove someone to your website. Reviewing this will help you plan your operations better so that you're not spinning your wheels doing something that isn't effective.
The Tool: Google Analytics (GA) It's not about hits anymore. A hit occurs every time you load something on a page (five photos, plus one page = 6 hits). This is a misleading statistic and you should move away from it.
Pageviews is a much better metric, as is Sessions and Unique Visitors.
How to Plan for Analysis:
- Confirm Busines Goals (i.e. raise funds)
- Indentify and Align Site Goals to Business Goals (i.e. online donations)
- Establish accurate, key site metrics
- Identify Key Site Behaviors (i.e. filling out an information form or signing up for a meeting or subscribing to a newsletter)
- Assigns Values to Key Site Behaviors Broadcasting (i.e. $10 for an info form; $25 for newsletter subscriber) - GA will track this for you
Using the Right Words
Conversion - figuring out what actions you want people to take on your site and seeing that happen.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - getting more people to come to your website.
The Tool: Google AdWords is a free tool to measure what words to use in your copy for on-line advertising. You can search what words your competition is using in their on-line ads.
The Tool: Google Trends let's you look at how people are searching for key phrases on the web. You can sort by certain parts of the globe and by year. This also shows top web pages associated with the search terms or key phrases.
The Tool: Google Grants gives in-kind advertising to non-profits who advertise.
Attracting Attention
The most effective social media tool you can use is on-line video. The reason is simple: "We like moving pictures."
The Tool:On-line Video (YouTube)
So, to grab views, follow these rules:
- Brand your channel with your logo, design, elements and messaging.
- Use relevant and enticing video titles, tags and descriptions.
- Engage often through new video posts, send friend requests on YouTube, "like" their channels and "favorite" their videos.
Examples of effective YouTube Channels are Women for Women and Invisible People.
YouTube has a nonprofit programthat that offers free advertising, banners and on-line donation tools.
Additional Tools: Google for Non-Profits
Anand and Amanda were great. This workshop helped me not only to better understand Google Analytics but also gave me some great actionable tools that I immediately took back to the office to put into practice.
My website needs some work but I feel like I am headed down the right path to make it a useful tool in promoting my organization.
Amanda shared some really good examples of sites and methods that work. I appreciate all that atLarge gave me to think about and I look forward to promoting my organization with all the new "toys."
Posted by: Lindsay Letts | September 27, 2010 at 07:13 PM