Happy Friday! What’s everyone doing for the Super Bowl? Will you be watching the commercials, the game or both – or neither? I’m excited for a football-themed road race Sunday morning, brunch with friends and then cheering on my team in the game that night! Even if you’re not a football enthusiast, I hope your weekend will be spent happily, with friends and family.

Before you start loading up on queso and buffalo chicken dip this weekend (or is that just me?), don’t miss five of our fave association blog posts from this week. Share your own favorites in the comments!

1. Aaron Wolowiec writes about a topic near and dear to my heart: millennials. The oldest baby boomers turn 65 this year, and  Aaron asks if millennials are willing to step up and lead associations. Yes, this younger (and large!) generation wants to make a difference in the world, but Aaron asks if they are interested in the “generalist lifestyle,” or if they want to become experts in one particular field instead.

2. Is your association’s member recruitment strategy effective? Erik D. Schonher shares a great list of how you can structure a well-designed membership recruitment strategy. Our favorite? Keep in mind that an initial investment today, even if it incurs a loss in present day dollars, if done correctly can acquire essential knowledge to refine future acquisitions and set the stage for long-term organizational growth.

3. Google’s attempt at a Facebook and/or Twitter replacement can no longer be ignored by association professionals – no matter how small your association. Deirdre Reid provides info on Google’s new algorithm and how not being on Google+ can negatively affect where you appear in search results. Is your small staff on Google+?

4. If you’re into technology for associations and not reading Wes Trochlil’s blog, you should absolutely add it to your reading list. His post this week on parallel processing included great, practical info. Wes says he always advises his clients to not engage in parallel processing, and explains why here.

5. David M. Patt advises association professionals that, while social media isn’t a silver bullet, it’s still a great tool. Social media adds to the marketing mix, it doesn’t replace everything in it, David writes. Wise words to remember when so many sources are proclaiming that social media is the be-all, end-all of marketing.

In honor of ASAE’s Technology Conference, we wanted to re-post an old Splash post for our newer readers.

Technology can be intimidating. We understand that here at MemberClicks. And the less people you have on staff to manage your data, the more intimidating it can be.

But before you even start looking at vendors and developers, there’s one big question: custom solutions or software-as-a-service (SaaS).

Custom solutions involve hiring a developer (or team of developers) to put together a program or database to keep track of your information. Software-as-a-Service involves vendors or providers licensing a piece of software to your organization and often they house your data on their own servers. Many are contract-based or monthly-based.

For the sake of comparison, I’ve compiled a list of things small-staff associations should keep in mind regarding each option.

Updates

• Many SaaS vendors include updates free of charge or for a small fee. The upgrades are released to all customers, and don’t require a custom job for your organization.
• A custom software solution usually doesn’t include upgrades — and they have to be created from scratch. Getting a custom solution upgraded often entails more time and money than your organization may be willing to spend.

Compatibility

• SaaS functions “in the cloud” — that is, your organization’s data is based in the Web. If you upgrade your Windows or Mac software, you won’t have to upgrade your data management solution along with it.
• Custom solutions are often tailored for just one (or a few) versions of Windows or Macintosh. Every program has a life cycle, and when your Windows or Mac software expires, your custom program probably won’t be far behind.

Support

• Your SaaS vendor will probably be around for quite a long time — and often, support is included or very affordable.
• Who’s to say your custom developer will always be around? Technology changes, so make sure your developer is ready to keep up with your needs.

Cost

• Research, development, design — all are included with a SaaS vendor because they serve so many different organizations. The vendor will be able to give you the lowest possible quote thanks to economies of scale.
• Your organization will probably have to pay for the entire project from start to finish, including development and programming costs.

It should go without saying, but every organization’s needs are different. Having a custom solution developed for your organization may be the right option, but there are already so many SaaS vendors out there. Chances are, one of them will be the right fit for your organization.

By Adam Kearney, MemberClicks Creative Director

Even with a website that is optimized for search engines, attracting the traffic you want can be a difficult task. Perhaps the keywords that people would use to find your site are too general or there are too many other sites that use similar keywords, thus preventing you from reaching the first page of search results. Or maybe you don’t want to rely on the ever-changing nature of internet search algorithms to be your only source of traffic.

Whatever your reason is for using it, paid search advertising provides a reliable avenue for increasing traffic to your website. In this document, we’ll discuss the most common form of paid search advertising – PPC, or pay-per-click advertising.

PPC Advertising
Pay-per-click advertising is a form of advertising where advertisers only pay when someone clicks on their ad. This is in contrast to more traditional advertising models where an advertiser would pay simply to have an ad displayed. Sites that display PPC ads – generally search engines and their affiliates – will display an ad associated with a specific keyword or group of keywords. PPC advertising works much like search engine optimization in that the advertiser needs to know what keywords people will use to search for them. If a user enters the keyword or words associated with an ad, that ad will be returned with their search results.

Since there is competition over most keywords, advertisers will bid against one another for better placement. While Google or Bing might display as many as ten ads on a page of search results, studies have shown that the first three ads on a page produce disproportionately greater results than lower-placing ads, so having good placement for a particular keyword is an important factor in a successful ad campaign.

An important concept in PPC advertising is the CPC, or cost per click. This is the actual amount paid for each click for a given ad / keyword combination. In a bid-based model, the search engine will compare an advertiser’s maximum bid against the other bids for a given keyword. If the maximum bid is greater than all other bids, then the advertiser will pay slightly more (usually 1 cent) than the next highest bid and usually (but not always) receive top placement. If an advertiser’s maximum bid is less than other bids, they will pay their maximum bid and (usually) receive a subsequently lower placement.

While generally, the ad with the highest bid will be displayed first, this is not always the case. Another factor that determines ad placement is known as the quality score. The bid amount is multiplied by the quality score and this number is used to determine ad placement, with the highest scoring ad receiving first place. A number of factors go into determining the quality score including the relevance of the ad to the page that it links to and the text of the ad itself. Thus, the quality score helps advertising networks weed out malicious or untruthful advertisements.

Most advertising platforms will have an advertiser set both a maximum bid for their keywords and an overall budget, usually daily. So if an advertiser bids on a keyword that is searched for frequently, they could potentially run through their budget for the day before that time is up. If that happens, their ad will not be displayed until the next day, no matter how many times someone searches for that keyword.

Other Terminology
There are a few other terms that you should be familiar with that are commonly used in PPC advertising. An impression occurs whenever an ad is displayed. Since an advertiser only pays when someone clicks on an ad, they could have hundreds or thousands of impressions for each click. Advertisers do not pay for impressions – they only pay when someone actually clicks on the ad.

The CTR, or click-thru rate, is determined by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions. An ad that is displayed 100 times and receives 1 click would have a CTR or .01 or 1 percent. The CTR is an effective indication of the quality of the ad. A high CTR indicates that people searching for a keyword find that advertisement compelling enough to click on it. The landing page is the web page that the user visits after clicking on an ad. Having a landing page that is relevant to both the ad that was displayed and the keyword that was searched for is an important factor that goes into determining an ad’s quality score, and thus affects its placement. But more than that, the landing page is the advertiser’s primary chance to capture the visitor’s attention and lead them to a goal.

A goal for a landing page is the reason why you are advertising in the first place. If you are selling a product, then a goal would be a sale. If you are trying to attract new members, a goal would be having the visitor fill out an application form. Whatever your goal is, it will usually involve the visitor filling out a form on your website.

Once a visitor has successfully completed a goal, they are counted as a conversion. The conversion rate for an ad is the number of clicks divided by the number of conversions. This number tells you how many people who actually clicked on your ad and visited your landing page went on to complete your goal. The conversion rate is your ultimate indicator for the success of an ad campaign. You can have a high-ranking, effective ad that attracts visitors to your site, but if they do not complete your goal, they have not fulfilled your reason for running the ad in the first place.

Click fraud is a crime that occurs when someone clicks on an ad for the purpose of generating a charge to the advertiser without any intention of converting. Google and Microsoft have both implemented a number of measures to detect and prevent click fraud.

Getting Started With PPC Advertising
Traditionally, there have been three major players in the PPC advertising space – Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. While Google has long been the dominant force in the market, Yahoo and Microsoft also attract a significant number of searchers. Recently, Yahoo and Microsoft have merged their advertising platforms so that they are both using Microsoft’s AdCenter. By using that network along with Google AdWords, your advertisements will reach nearly all internet searchers.

While there are other forms of paid advertising available for websites, PPC is by far the dominant avenue. Banner ads were once more prevalent, but these days few people click on them. When Google introduced plain text ads next to their search results, they changed the entire online advertising world. You may still run into banner or Flash ads on websites, but they are generally very expensive and offer a poor ROI for all but the largest advertising budgets.

Another avenue open to you may be paid directories. Once, Yahoo was the king of directories, but their influence has dwindled over the years as more people have chosen to search for sites of interest rather than browse through a general directory. Today, there are more specialized directory sites that offer paid listings. These can be very effective at generating leads, so be sure to look around and see if there’s one that matches your field of interest.

We hope this guide helps you on your way to building a world-class website for your organization. If you’re interested in some of the services described within or you have questions about any part of this document, feel free to email us at webmaster@memberclicks.com and we’ll be happy to help out, whether you need advice on how to get started or just have questions about what to do next.

By Adam Kearney, MemberClicks Creative Director

Goals – What Are They?

Put simply, a goal is an action a user can take on your website that leads to a positive result for your organization. This could be a sale of a product, a registration for an event, or a new signup for a membership. Or it could be something much more intangible, such as filling out a survey or answering a poll question. Maybe you have written an article that you want your membership to read – in that case, the goal is as simple as getting them to the page. You will likely have several goals on your website, and they may change over time.

Whatever the goal is, setting up and monitoring the metrics for a goal in your analytics solution will save you time by providing a quick snapshot of the success or failure of an initiative. Instead of digging down through your analytics reports and manually looking to see how many hits you’ve gotten over time, if you have set up a goal, you can instantly see if it has been successful or not.

The most common way to set up a goal is to have a page act solely as the end point for a goal. That way, whenever that page receives a hit, you know that the goal has been accomplished. Some examples of this sort of goal include:

• A ‘thank you’ page after a user has submitted information through a form. You would use this type of goal to track newsletter signups, email list subscriptions, application forms, contact forms and many other similar forms.
• A purchase confirmation page or receipt page
• An ‘About us’ page
• A particular news article

Once you have decided what you want to measure, you should think about what type of goal will best help you determine success.

Types Of Goals

The most common type of goal is a URL Destination. The examples given above are all URL destinations. These are easy to measure as each hit the destination receives counts as a positive result. In this way, you can establish realistic, tangible metrics for how many hits each goal should be receiving. If you have a membership of 500 individuals, and you want at least half of them to read a particular “members-only” article, in this case, you’d be looking for 250 hits for that article.

One thing to keep in mind about URL Destination goals is that you need to specify the correct page as your goal. You might think that you should target the first page of a form as your goal, but this will only tell you how many people reached the front page. That number will include people who go to the page and leave or who start to fill out the form but quit halfway through. Since you wouldn’t count those as succesful objectives, you want to set the “thank you” or “confirmation” page that appears only after someone has successfully completed the form as your goal. The only people who will get to that page are the ones who have filled out the form successfully.

A second type of goal is Time Spent On Site. Let’s say you have lots of content on your site – news, articles, updates or any kind of content you want your visitors to see – and you want to know how engaged your visitors are with new content versus old content. Time Spent On Site goals will show you how much time visitors spend on specified pages. You can compare these numbers across different types of content to see which sections of your site are most engaging.
While Time Spent On Site goals are useful for comparing large amounts of data to one another or relatively measuring how engaging some types of content are in comparison to others, these types of goals are not good for very precise metrics. The biggest problem with measuring the amount of time a user spends on a particular page is that it may not accurately reflect how much time that user spent actively interacting with a page. After all, with tabbed browsers and computers that can easily perform several actions at once, many users will leave sites up on their screens or on a hidden tab without engaging with the site.
The third type of goal is Pages Per Visit. This measures how many pages each unique visitor navigates to on average when they visit your site. This type of goal is useful if your site contains a great amount of content or you want your visitors to go to many different parts of your site for some reason. A large Pages Per Visit number will tell you that a visitor is very engaged with your site, while a small number will tell you that they aren’t as involved.

What Comes Next?

Once you’ve determined how you want to use goals, setting them up should be an easy process. Google Analytics makes it easy to define goals and then view those goals in customized reports. But whatever analytics solution you’re using, it should provide you
the tools to easily define your goals. And once those goals are defined, you’ll be able to concretely measure how successful your website is in your own terms.

Image source

By Adam Kearney, MemberClicks Creative Director

We recommend using Google Analytics to track your website’s performance. It is freely available, constantly updated and extremely customizable. To get started with it, go here: http://www.google.com/analytics/.

Once your account is all set up, you need to add the tracking code to your site. Google walks you through this process, but if you are using MemberClicks to host your site, the process couldn’t be easier. Just go to Website > Site Settings and enter the code that they give you in the box provided for it at the bottom of the page. MemberClicks will automatically add the code to all of your pages. That’s all you have to do. After that, you’ll be able to pull up analytics information for your site within minutes.

What Comes Next?

Once you have a web analytics solution in place and have a clear idea of how you want your site to perform, you can explore all the opportunities available to you. You can optimize your site to increase the traffic you get from search engines. You can buy pay-per- click advertising to drive traffic to specific pages or to your site in general. You can even sell ad space on your site and earn non-dues revenue by attracting a large base of regular visitors. We’ll explore all these topics in later articles in this series.

For now, you’ve got everything you need to understand about web analytics. You know what it is and how it works and have an idea of what it can do for you. And you know how to get started. So what are you waiting for?

You’ve chosen a web analytics solution, and it’s tracking data about your website. You can learn a few things just by looking at this data, such as what your visitor demographics are like or what pages they are hitting. But how do you measure the success of a website? Is your website successful because you get 500 hits each day? What if you get 5,000? What if you only get 5, but each of those 5 hits makes a donation or joins your organization?

These are the kinds of questions that will help shape your website moving forward as you define and measure goals.

Don’t forget – October is Small Staff Appreciation Month! If you haven’t entered our giveaway yet, what are you waiting for?! You could win an iPad 2!