Bee Measure

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My Favorite Advice & Data Viz of the Month

My Favorite Advice

How to track your SEO work with Google Analytics.

Yoast is a fantastic resource for tips on improving your site’s SEO. This article is especially juicy because it explains, in detail, how to find the data that will help you track whether your efforts to optimize your site are actually working. And you can use your free Google Analytics account to do this — no need to pay for a fancy SEO service. I like this article because it starts with the easy (looking at total search traffic to your site and whether it’s increasing) and progresses to the more complex (analyzing whether your mobile experience impacts your search engine ranking). It explains this all through detailed, accessible videos that play without sound so you can watch at your desk.

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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.

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Google’s Data Studio Updates, Location Ranking & Tinder for Clothes

Google’s Data Studio Just Got a Bit Better

Google’s Data Studio is a pretty sharp (and free) way to create dashboards and visualizations from your Google Analytics data and other data sets. But it’s always been limited in what it can do. However, the program has received some fun product updates in the past few months. My favorite new features are custom data range comparisons and the Tableau-esque ability to drill down in charts. So far, I’ve used this new feature to create more useful maps. Now, dashboard viewers can drill into details about which states and cities their users are located.

Ads, They Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves

There is a growing interest in the idea of personalization and privacy in the online age. This caught the eye of the New York Times, who decided to conduct its own digital advertising experiment to show how far advertisers go to collect and use our information. My main takeaway is that we have a choice to make: either we all agree to be targeted by hyper-personalized ads that are more relevant to us or we need to create and pass more stringent data privacy laws.

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Stop Siloing Digital, Brewing The Nation’s Best IPA & A Much-Needed Perspective Change

Maximizing Your Resources

Strategy and marketing consultant Anne Boyle has a strong opinion about nonprofits that claim they “can’t afford” to create a marketing strategy. The idea is simple: organizations should be putting strategy and planning first in order to maximize their resources. One of her tips that’s actually really helpful, in my opinion, is to not try to be perfect but to just get it done.

Ditch The Digital Department

This article really threw me for a loop. “Digital” has been a buzzword for a while now, but do organizations even need someone solely dedicated to it? The short answer is no. The long answer is still no, but with more nuance. Basically, it’s advised that your organization “hire digitally skilled staff to populate every department” rather than invest in a digital department.

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Google’s Big Birthday News, Picking Your A/B Tests & Painting Data

Happy Birthday, Google! (And What That Means to You)
Most media celebrated Google’s 20th birthday with retrospectives of Google Doodles. More interesting to me, however, is the future. The tech giant shared how it expects to change search in the coming years. I had two big takeaways: an increased emphasis on making images (and video) really work on search and new features to keep users on its platform (reducing the need for them to click off to websites). Stay turned! I’m sure this newsletter will cover more about what’s next for Google.

Maybe You Don’t Need to Test…. Everything
For most nonprofits, just finishing a website redesign is a huge achievement. (I’ve been there. Extra bonus points if it’s on time and in budget.) The idea of A/B testing everything before launch is so daunting. Here’s one consultant’s take on what to test and what to push out and refine later.

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