Wrap-Up from September’s Google Analytics CCC Meetup

Google Analytics and Website Best Practices

• Use Google Analytics to link the activities of your communications team to the overall benchmarking of the organization.
• Add a question at the end of your webpage that gives people an action. Then you can use the related searches module in Drupal as well.
• Change the homepage – did you see this on the New York Times? It can also be used as an anecdotal way to tell where people are coming from.
• In Google Analytics, remove the IP addresses of the people in your office – add just your network IP; remove people’s most used IP addresses (communications director’s home IP, for example).
• Track your PDF downloads through the events section of Google Analytics: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/eventTrackerGuide. Another suggestionswas to create a URL tracker for the PDF?
• Tag your urls to track where the clicks are coming from: http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1033867

Free Website Analytics Resources

All these sites have some free part of their freemium model that offers good insights for nonprofit marketers.

• Use Compete.com to look at peer organizations. Their free account lets you see data on over 1 million websites, discover related competitors and get monthly emails on your competitors.
• Use Quantcast.com to find out the demographics of who is searching your website for free. From their site: “Get easy-to-read reports that show your audience reach and composition by domain, custom grouping, or cross-network, close the gap between internal logs and public ratings from external parties and attract higher ad rates and increase ad-based revenue.”
• Use Alexa.com to track your website over time to see the overall ranking, or its popularity overall. One suggestion was to track it every Monday, for example, and see if you rank is going up overall.
• SEOmoz.org has a domain authority that gives results like the old Google Page Rank. It is “SEOmoz’s best prediction about how a website will perform in search engine rankings”.