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You are here: Home / newsletter / Decrying Fluffy Metrics, How to Elevate Your Engagement Rates & SEO Changes

September 13, 2019 By Erin Cafferty

Decrying Fluffy Metrics, How to Elevate Your Engagement Rates & SEO Changes

I adopted an, um, energetic dog early this summer. The seemingly endless walks around my neighborhood with her have given me a lot of podcast-listening time. I’ve found a few new favorites.

If you are familiar with this newsletter, I obviously like my tech news with a good dose of skepticism. Loving Recode’s Pivot for a mix of tech, politics and business updates… and some major sarcasm. It has me LOLing about IPOs and income inequality ⁠— something I didn’t think was possible.

How Are Other Orgs Doing? Here’s The Answer

It’s my favorite yearly opportunity to snoop on other nonprofits! The 2019 M+R Benchmarks Study includes data from 135 nonprofits across a variety of sizes and sectors. This report has so many good takeaways, it’s hard to choose what to call out here. An interesting fundraising stat was that the revenue from one-time gifts decreased by 2% in 2018, while monthly giving revenue increased by 17%. Focusing heavily on recurring donors could be a winning strategy moving forward.

Feeling Techy? Here’s a Dose of Google Analytics and SEO Changes

A couple changes this month to the more technical side of SEO and analytics. Apple released its Intelligent Tracking Prevention back in 2017, which was supposed to stop third parties from collecting data on Safari browsing habits. Now, Apple’s latest effort ITP 2.2 is expected to be released mid-September. Many are worried it will lead to larger data losses in Google Analytics, but the impact is still a mystery. Check out this analysis for more details. Also this month, Google introduced two new link attributes. If your organization’s site has sponsored content and ads, look into these new options.

Please Stop the Phony PR Metrics

Loved this interview with public relations pro Adam Ritchie. He believes there’s an ethical problem surrounding reporting fake PR metrics, and I totally agree. Ritchie recalls a client who didn’t understand why his (accurate) metrics were so much lower than previously reported. He found himself explaining the difference between “automatically generated garbage partner content and real articles.” It’s attractive to think that your efforts led to an unbelievable amount of impressions. But the point of evaluating and reporting on our work is supposed to be to improve ⁠— not share fluff with the higher-ups.

Baby Animals = Better Engagement?

Great analytics related to audience engagement rates on Facebook here. Turns out, viral publishers like UNILAD, LADbible and The Dodo have insane engagement. So, what’s their secret? Baby. Animals. That, and delivering consistent content that their audience expects. If you’re a nonprofit, think about why your audience follows you and cater your content to them. Rather than copying what tactics worked for others, find the nuggets of wisdom in their strategy and implement it in your own unique way.

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Filed Under: newsletter Tagged With: data analytics, engagement rates, evaluating and reporting data, fake PR metrics, fundraising, google analytics, link attributes, newsletter, nonprofit, SEO

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