WAA releases report on Government and Non-Profits use of Web Analytics

The Web Analytics Association (WAA) in the US has recently released its 2009 survey findings on "Tapping the Potential of Web Analytics for Public Sector and Non-Profit Sites".

The survey asked three questions:

1. How are Web site managers in the public and non-profit sector measuring the performance of their web sites?

2. Can any KPIs used by many non-commerce organizations be used to measure the impact, effectiveness, and contributions of all non-commerce Web sites?

3. Can we develop a series of benchmarks for the key dimensions of visitor online interaction with the Web sites in the public and non-profit sectors?

124 respondents completed the survey – 83% of those came from the United States,.

Some of the findings include:

• 60% only dedicate a few hours a week to web analytics – only 12.5% of respondents described themselves as web analysts and nearly 70% of organisations don’t have a dedicated web analyst;
• monthly reporting is the norm;
• traffic reporting is used by 82% of organizations;
• only 10% link web analytics to return on investment;
• US government sites track file downloads more often than others surveyed; and
• Segmentation is not widely used.

The report provides some thought provoking key takeaways for government web analysts:

1. Conduct high-value, deeper analyses

2. Focus your analytics evangelizing on people in your organization who stand to benefit from Web analytics and have shown an interest in using analytics.

3. Use voice of customer, usability testing, and focus groups in tandem with Web analytics

4. Build official and unofficial alliances

5. Give more thought to how people want to consume Web analytics data.

It is interesting to compare these findings with the results from the 2008 Australian Web Analytics Survey conducted by Hurol Inan of Bienalto. Of the 208 respondents for the Australian survey, 20% were from government. When analysing the government respondents, the survey found that 60% of government organizations looked at web analytics as not important or less important as other web functions. Most government analysis consisted of reporting traffic – no one reported using advanced analysis.

Hurol’s analysis concluded that "Government remains significantly challenged in terms of identifying the objectives
and KPIs of web analytics, and also lacks the key support of management."

There are many similarities between the US and the Australian studies. It seems government still has some way to go when it comes to really analyzing their data and applying their findings to optimising their websites.

If you want to read more about these surveys, the Web Analytics Association has made their report available from their web site for a small charge. A presentation of the report’s findings is also available for free!

The 2008 Australian Web Analytics Survey is also available from Bienalto.

If you want more information about how to develop KPIs for your website, the eGovernment Resource Centre has a collection of links you might find useful as well as a section on Return on Investment.

Twitter spam tips and bible

Two new articles I found today about Twitter – worth a read

“Twitter Tips: Three Ways To Deal With Twitter Spam -
You can take proactive steps to prevent Twitter spam such as unwanted direct messages promoting products and services. Here are three quick tips for keeping Twitter relevant and keeping spammers and mass-followers out.” By C.G. Lynch

and

“Twitter Bible: Everything You Need To Know About Twitter -
Our Twitter guide delivers expert advice on how to get started, practice good etiquette, network and job hunt, search smart and stay organized with the social networking service. You’ll also find analysis on how to better engage your followers, use Twitter to reach customers, and go mobile with Twitter.” By C.G. Lynch

Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/CherylHardy

My Highlights from SMX Sydney April 2009

I was lucky enough to attend the SMX Sydney conference at the start of April. Even though I think I was the only government employee working in the web space attending amongst all the business types the content was very relevant and learning’s equally applied to government and business web sites alike.

Some of my key takeaways are:

Google

• changes its algorithm about 450 times a year = once every 13 hours
• put a tilde (~) in front of a word in Google search to get synonyms
• now modifying search results based on previous search behaviour
  • everybody’s search results are different – so that two people doing the same search
    from two different locations – get two different result sets with even without signing into their iGoogle accounts.
  • Ranking is no longer a measure of success
• looking at the intent of the search at the same time as looking at the IP address from where the search came from
• an aged domain will always rank higher than a new domain
• According to Hitwise, Google has 90% of the search market in Australia and 92% in New Zealand, but only 73% of the market in the US.
• Lots of brand name searches in Australia., eg., Facebook, eBay, YouTube, MySpace, BOM, Hotmail, etc
• Search term length is decreasing in Australia and search term success is increasing from March 2007 – March 2009 – but in the us the reverse is true where search success is declining.

Google Webmaster Tools

• use Google Webmaster Tools
• Will give you: top search queries, crawl errors, external links, internal links, what Googlebot sees, and more…

Yahoo!

• According to Hitwise, Yahoo! only has 4% of market share of search in Australia, but 16% in the US.
• Still gives approximately 10% weight to the meta keywords tag.

Keyword Research

• is vital!
• Drives your website information architecture
• Identify what keywords people are putting into search engines
  • avoid jargon
  • avoid general words
• Try to more your website words to what the market is searching for
• Long tail is very important
• The top 100 terms only drive 5.7% of traffic
• Check out your competition or like sites
• Use variations in spelling, misspelling, word stemming, hyphenated words, synonyms
• Add descriptive words to your keywords eg., faster internet, slow internet
• Use action words in your html page tiles, eg., buy, find, etc.
• Use keyword research before you write that press release

Writing for the Web

• Solve problems for people
• Important stuff at the top of the page, fluff at the bottom
• 1-2 key phrases per page – no more than three
• People scan and jump from page to page – they are time poor
• Cut the waffle
• Forget the "welcome to my website" introduction – no one cares!
• Title tag is most important – stick your brand name at the end – it is more important to get found first
• Turn features into benefits
• Unique and fresh content
• Be conversational
• Link to related content within your site – look at the success of Wikipedia
• Use headings – but use them correctly

SEO – Measuring Success

• Not rankings any more
• Its all about analytics
• Funnel conversion rates
• Segment your data – eg., new versus returning visitors
• Bounce rate is next to useless if you look at it as a whole
• Context is important
• Need to find out what your visitors want and why they are leaving your website

Duplicate Content

• There URL’s are all different
  • xyz.com.au/
  • xyz.com.au/index.html
  • xyz.com.au/home.aspx
  • www.xyz.com.au/
  • www.xyz.com.au/index.html
  • www.xyz.com.au/home.aspx
• But they point to the same page.
• Pick one "canonical" url for each page and ensure you link consistently within your site
• Make all non-canonical url’s do a permanent (301) HTTP redirect to the canonical/preferred URL
• Google’s Webmaster Tools: specify www vers. non-www
• Break ties in Google by submitting your preferred url in a sitemaps file.
• Set preferred domain on your sever to www or non – www
  • implement a 301 redirect from one version to the other
  • eg., http://egov.vic.gov.au permanently redirects to http://www.egov.vic.gov.au

Search Engine Spam

• Spam is anything that violates Google’s quality guidelines
  • White Hat: SEO within Google’s quality guidelines
  • Black Hat: SEO outside Google’s quality guidelines
• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines
• Ask yourself – Does this help my users? Would I dod this if search engines did not exist?
• Report spam to Google – http://www.google.com.au/contact/spamreport.html

Website Design

• Nobody likes ugly pages, but will people find your pretty ones?
  • specify SEO requirements before design plans, eg.,
    • Unique page titles/ URL’s
    • Nested heading tags
    • Reasonable amount of body copy
    • Spiderable links
• Treat Flash like images – or create a HTML only version*
• Use image alt attributes and keywords in file paths*
• Apply ‘CSS image replacement’ to replicate text embedded in an image*
• Use CSS layers to position text
• Ask yourself – Would you drive a car built purely for aesthetics?

* No cloaking or hidden text!

Linking

• Links = Votes
• The more votes your site gets the more important the site is seen by search engines
• Relevance = Content
• Importance – Links
• Quality links
• Relevant links
• Be seen as an authority in your topic – provide quality content and be a resource – for a government website this should be really easy!

On the whole it was a great conference – the 2 days went in a flash – will try to go again next year.

Create Google Custom Search for your government website

If you follow Google’s step by step custom search engine wizard you can have a search engine setup for free in a matter of minutes.

Your search engine can

• Index one web site, multiple web sites, or specific web pages from within a site
• Host the search box and results on your own web site; and
• Customize the colors and branding to match your existing web pages

Being a government agency you can opt to not have Google ads on the search results pages.

The Google Custom Search API Developer’s Guide documentation on Getting Started walks you through the creation of your first custom search engine.

The Western Australian government’s portal is using Google Custom Search

Screen shot showing the Western Australian Government's use of Google Custom Search

Experiment with Google Custom Search and see what you can do with it – you need a Google username and password to use it – if you don’t have one just set up a Gmail account and you are half way there.

What do you put in a web design brief for a government web site?

Where do you start when you are asked to write a design brief for a government website? The usual place – Google! I hunted around for examples and decided this was how I was going to structure mine.

About the site – what is your site about – how and why did it come into being. Why is it here? Does it support a government policy, or is it a corporate site for a government department?

Provide some background about your site. Things you might consider including:

• Competitor sites – who are they – provide links
• Current marketing activities – do you provide any newsletters, news feeds, what are the services the site offers?
• Current features offered on the existing site- such as subscription to newsletters, membership facilities, email a friend etc
• Current traffic levels – eg., visitors, visits, page views, bounce rate, search engine referrals, average time on site,
• Technology used – what is your existing CMS, hosting platform etc – if that is relevant.
• Target audience – including any real demographic data you have collected along the way

Current issues with the site design – what is wrong that you know needs fixing, changing, sprucing up, etc.

New Design

• Goals – what do you want to achieve? Do you want more subscribers to your newsletter, more members? Do you want to make the site functional and easy to use? Do you want to keep your existing visitors returning?
• The Web site Design – what standards should it comply with? Should it comply with the W3C web accessibility guidelines – do want to follow WCAG 1.0 or WCAG 2.0? Should the site look like it belongs to a family of sites? Do you want to specify a CMS or do you want the designer to do that? Do you have specific graphics or photos that must be used? Do you want to use a 3 column or 2 column layout or aren’t you too fussed about that? Do you want to use flash or not? Must not compromise the search engine optimization of the existing site!
• The Newsletter Design – do you want to design a newsletter layout which compliments your new web site design? It would probably make sense to do them both at the same time, so that when you launch with your new design, the newsletter will match the site.

There are probably a myriad of other things you could include. Please add your comments on what you would include in a web design brief for a government web site.

How do you calculate the ROI of your government online campaign?

Governments are often notorious for announcing campaigns and publishing press releases without optimizing content on their websites to enable visitors to find information to back up the campaign announcements.

So I was really pleased to read this great article by Augustine Fou at Clickz the other day called "How to use search to calculate the ROI of awareness advertising".

This article hit the nail on the head about what Government should be doing: ie.

• make sure the website or content sections on websites are set up before releasing the press release. A classic Victorian Government example was the announcement of the Bushfire Royal Commission. Everyone wanted to read about the Royal Commission from the official source, yet it took a number of weeks for this to happen. When they did release the Royal Commission website, they appeared not to take out a Google AdWords campaign to support its release. As you can see from this screen shot, the ABC is really well optimised for bushfire royal commission, and the government is not.

• make sure you search engine optimise your website so that the specific information which is announced is easily linked to from the press release, so that the visitor can easily find the supporting information they are seeking – government should be a lot better at doing this than they are in reality (read my earlier article entitled: "How to increase traffic to Government websites with press releases");
• ensure you are using an analytics package, such as Google Analytics (its free and fully integrated with Google AdWords!) to establish how successful or not the announcement, banner ad, search engine marketing and so forth, really is. Putting campaign tracking on your email newsletter links, or on links from press releases or ads you want to track will give you great information to analyse the return on your investment.

Hopefully this will change when one day governments take the web as seriously as they do their television, radio and print campaigns. Until then, how do you work out the return on investment for your government online campaign ……?

How to write Easy English – Workshops from Scope Victoria

Workshops being held May – June 2009

This full day workshop is presented by the Accessible Information Unit, Communication Resource Centre, Scope.

Find out how you could increase the number of people who can access your services and organisation. The presenter will take you through the steps to develop accessible written information. You will start working on a document from your own workplace.

The workshop is suitable for people who write information for their workplace. This includes resources, documents, plans, posters, brochures, fliers and for the web.

Where and when:

Monday 4th May 2009 at Scope, Glenroy

Thursday 25th June 2009 at Holmesglen TAFE, Chadstone

Cost:

$242 (Including GST)

Includes Lunch, coffee/tea and handouts.

For more information:

Phone: 03 9843 2000

Email: crc@scopevic.org.au

Scope has also published: Easy English – Writing Style Guide.

New Accessibility Updates

Back from holidays now and starting to get into work again – very hard. Much rather be horse riding, bike riding and swimming!

I noticed that WebAIM have published some interesting accessibility updates on their site in the last few weeks.

WCAG 2.0 Checklist – easy-to-use, understandable checklist for evaluating or implementing WCAG 2.0.

Color Contrast Checker – lets you select or enter a foreground and background color in RGB hexadecimal format and then select the lighten and darken options to change the colours slightly or change the luminosity.

Screen Reader Survey Results – They received more than 1100 responses with useful information about screen reader user demographics and preferences including that only 36% never or seldom use text-only versions of web pages and 71.5% of screen reader users reported that Flash is very or somewhat difficult.

This is a must read for any web publisher trying to make their site accessible to all.

What happens if you don’t use metadata correctly in your pdf document?

Tripping around Google I found this example of pdf documents indexed by Google belonging to the Victorian parliament website.

They are all have the title: what is the trouble – repeated! Has this happened to you?

Example of Google search results displaying documents with incorrect titles.

Free tools you can use to do Keyword Research – Part 3 – Other tools

This is Part 3 of my series of tools you can use for Keyword Research. In part 1 of this series, I looked at free tools which Google offers. In Part 2, I looked at the tools available as add-ons to the Firefox Web Browser. In Part 3, I have listed a number of tools you can access on the web which are not provided by Google.

17. SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool – This tools uses the Wordtracker keyword suggestion tool. If you sign up for a Wordtracker account they offer many additional keyword research features and tools that are lacking in this keyword tool.

18. WordTracker – offers a free 7 day trial – but you need to sign up first.

19. Lexical FreeNet Connected thesaurus – This program allows you to search for relationships between words, concepts, and people. You can also use this for your SEO keyword research projects.

20. Keyword Discovery (offers a free trial) compiles keyword search statistics from all the major search engines world wide, to create the most powerful Keyword Research tool.

21. What’s the Buzz – a keyword research tool to find out who’s talking about a certain keyword by displaying the Technorati Blog Popularity Chart, the Google Trends chart, blog posts tagged with or containing the keyword, and social bookmarks tagged with the keywords.

23. iWebTool – Keyword Suggestions – This tool will display up to 10 popular keywords matching your initial keyword using Google, Yahoo and MSN

22. KW Map – a keyword map for the whole internet. Below is an example of the keyword phrases you can discover for "Global Warming".