Case Study: A Website for Coastal Maine Getaways

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Case Study: A Website for Coastal Maine Getaways

Coastal Maine Getaways was a great opportunity to start a website from scratch. Lindsey, the owner, had been managing vacation rental properties for some time, but hadn’t yet named her company and had only advertised her listings on VRBO (Vacation Rentals By Owner). It was working fairly well for her, but she wanted more control over her web presence, including the name of the company, SEO (search engine optimization), and the ability to add and highlight more options than VRBO allowed.

Lindsey engaged me to do some market research and to eventually design and populate the site.

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Tracking Campaigns, for Non-Profits and Small Businesses

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Tracking Campaigns, for Non-Profits and Small Businesses

Within Google Analytics, non-profits and small businesses can track where website traffic is coming from in several different ways. For example, you can track referrals or Adwords through the acquisition tab.

But what if you’re running a campaign and you want to track how it’s performing across channels? For example, how do you track a holiday message as it performs on social media versus your e-newsletter versus digital ads?

That’s when you need Google’s URL builder.

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My Dan Pallotta Inspired Halloween Costume: I’m Overhead

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My Dan Pallotta Inspired Halloween Costume: I’m Overhead

I’m personally and professionally fascinated by analytics and the idea of return on investment (ROI). I spend my working days in Google Analytics, Facebook and YouTube Insights, e-newsletter stats and more.

When it comes to my personal giving to non-profits, I’m just as intrigued by numbers.  I tend to “invest” my thoughts, energy, time and finances quite vertically: I drive deeply down into issues and give there, rather than here and there to many causes.

In doing this, I come across terms like effectiveness, efficiency and overhead, which are very often cited by non-profits as reasons to believe an organization is “good.” This is, of course, in addition to (and sometimes an after-thought to!) the actual impact an organization has.

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When Google Analytics Disappears

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When Google Analytics Disappears

Believe it or not, Google isn’t infallible. Neither are humans. I recently lost a significant amount of data in Google Analytics – a real tragedy that had me crying for an entire day and still confounds me. I was adding a new profile onto my account. I revisited it a few days later and the other, main profile was missing.

Apparently, I am not the first person to whom this has happened. The Google Analytics forums are full of people who have lost profiles and years of data. Either an employee deletes it when she quits, out of spite, or one user deletes it from their screen and that deletes the entire profile for all three users. Or, as in my case, and which seems shockingly common, it just disappears.

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Website Analytics 101

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Website Analytics 101

[NOTE: This website analytics post was published in 2010, which was a very, very long time ago in computer years. I’ve left this post live, both for fun and because some of it is still relevant. If you need help with your website or Google Analytics, please feel free to contact me for help or new info.]

Web analytics is becoming a normal and necessary practice, but I think many non-profits and artists are still working with websites that don’t provide them the info they need to grow, flourish, or even function well. So this entry will be an overview of web analytics, as well as a plea to install or become familiar with your website data (instructions on that further below).

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Using Data and Emotions to Build Your Brand

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Using Data and Emotions to Build Your Brand

I’m at the STAMATS SIM Tech Conference in Boston this week. So far, I’m impressed – the information offered is exceptionally dense and clear.

The first workshop I attended was “Building a Brand Strategy When Dollars Are Tight, Audiences Are Distracted, and You’re Not Sure of the Role Digital Media Should Play.” Sound useful? It certainly sounds like every non-profit and college I’ve ever worked with! The gist is that building a brand is about clearly and creatively communicating your brand  everywhere and every way possible. The presenter, Dr. Robert Sevier, gave us these tidbits:

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