The Audacity of Growth

If there’s one thing Barack Obama taught us about the power of digital by the manner of his election, it’s that email still counts (and, for that matter, still works when you’re in government). For a while, I’ve been determined to focus more on how we use email as a corporate communication channel, particularly in the context of needing to justify why establishing new websites often isn’t a good idea.

We launched a project at work today that’s hopefully a step in the right direction: a kind of souped-up landing page for our new strategy for supporting economic growth, Going for Growth.

We’re probably not alone in having a few big policy themes which embrace a multitude of announcements, speeches and initiatives. The challenge for digital communications – well, for all communications, I suppose – is bringing these big themes out in ways our audiences can understand, and not losing the wood for the trees. Even on our own small interim site, thematic information is scattered across press releases, speeches and policy pages, making it hard to explain the drivers of policy, the history or the direction it’s going in.

This time, the initial request was for a new ‘portal’ but it quickly became clear that an aggregator would be a better fit for the content, audience and the commissioning team, who would be moving on to other things after delivery. So the page we built is designed to:

1. Collate the content about support for economic growth on our site in a single place, making it more easily accessible to media and stakeholders
2. Curate relevant content from other parts of government, demonstrating the cross-government nature of the policy, and hopefully engaging other government departments with communicating it in partnership with us (more later on that)
3. Explain the vision and origins of a somewhat abstract strategic policy, as well as the progress to date and the future direction in an accessible way
4. Engage audiences using channels which enable us to build up a community around this content

Our corporate site is WordPress-based (for now) but the page template itself is really little more than a shell. What’s interesting is what WordPress makes possible through its flexible RSS-with-everything approach and knock-yourself-out unrestricted approach to templating. But the interesting stuff happens elsewhere.

• The document itself is hosted on Scribd and embedded on a page, offering a pleasant browsing experience without the hassle of building a full HTML version. The PDF is of course downloadable too, for committed readers. There’s a video on YouTube (two in fact), press releases on NDS and the archive film of the livestreamed launch via Number 10′s provider. (And a bit of live tweeting around the launch itself, if you count that).
• We’re making liberal use of Feed2JS to help render an RSS feed as a list, comprising items across our site tagged in WordPress with ‘growth’.
• More interestingly perhaps, we’re using the social bookmarking service Delicious (as pioneered by Puffbox for the Governance of Britain site) to collect relevant announcements elsewhere in government via our corporate Delicious account, again tagged with ‘growth’. The RSS feed of these bookmarks then powers a little list on the page, enabling us to keep this content fresh easily, without needing to manually edit the page each time – it’s just a bookmarking job.
• In order to make better use of GovDelivery, a service we used previously just for powering email alerts to changed pages, we asked the team to set up one of their widgets – copying an idea done elegantly by the Highways Agency. These widgets offer a handy, embeddable version of items from an RSS feed (in our case, Piped-together) of Growth news from BIS and elsewhere, with built-in email subscription to topics from across our site. In principle then, these widgets offer a window into what Government is doing to support growth beyond a single Department and in a format which any Department or stakeholder could pick up and use for minimal effort. For instance, Number 10 kindly picked it up as part of their coverage of the launch:

The site was still put together, in-house (kudos for this project to Jenny, Michael, David and Rhys), fairly rapidly to meet a moving target, and there’s still plenty of work for us to do. The list of email subscriptions offered to you via the widget still needs tidying up; we still haven’t quite provided the killer resource for media that I’d hoped to I think; and though it’s less of a nightmare than an independent microsite to manage, it’s still likely to be headache to migrate across to a new CMS.

But we’ll keep tweaking, and with this low-cost patchwork of tools, hopefully we’ll nudge closer over time towards the goal of a truly engaging, useful and workable channel for policy news.

Minding the shop

In my line of work, keeping track of the threads is half the battle. At work, we have (for now) three corporate sites, a sandbox, a development environment, and more. We have social media channels – some corporately-managed, many managed by external agencies in support of our campaigns – and an active stakeholder and media community who like to talk to us and about us, along with ten busy ministers.

We’re also expected to respond quickly to news stories which break in the media on the issues we cover, as well as be responsive to our colleagues in the Press Office, including helping them to monitor and evaluate the reach of their material online.

So ever since some nice chaps from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office blew me away with an internal dashboard they had developed for this purpose, I’ve been keen to set up something similar. Something which I can have open all day and which lets me see quickly if our sites are up, what’s hot on them right now, who’s sending us traffic, and what we’re putting out there in terms of news releases, tweets and multimedia.

I’ve stolen their idea pretty much wholesale, tweaked it slightly towards social media, and come up with this (click to open a larger version):

1. Site availability: we have Pingdom monitoring set up watching our various domains to measure their uptime, and this box uses its API to tell us what’s up and what’s down. Green is good.

2. Popular content: Google Analytics has a little-known API and the excellent GAPI PHP library to help you access it. In more or less real time, this box lists the top 30 pages on the site today. There’s a lot more to the API, which I might write about another time.

3. Top referers: if there’s a spike in traffic, chances are somebody important has linked to us – this shows a list of the top 20 referers today, again powered by Google Analytics.

4. Search engine keywords: More Google Analytics goodness, this shows the top 20 keywords people entered into Google recently which sent them to our site.

5. Custom Site Search keywords: Slightly squiffy this, as the Great Google haven’t quite sorted out their own technology, but in principle this shows the popular search terms people have used within our own site search (which is powered by a Google Custom Search, covering all our key domains).

6. News Releases we’ve issued: using the RSS feed of our news releases which we retrieve via COI’s News Distribution Service, this lets me keep track of what press releases have gone out recently, to help cross check against popular pages on the site and to help us know when to press the button on digital activity in support of them.

7. Social media output: powered by the RSS feed of our FriendFeed account plus some PHP jiggery-pokery, this is maybe the box I find most useful. At a glance I can see new YouTube videos we’ve posted (in red), Flickr sets (navy), and corporate tweets (gold). The aqua boxes show me what agencies are putting out there as part of our marketing campaigns.

8. Replies and mentions: it’s useful to see what people find re-tweetable and how they respond to tweets from @bisgovuk – this box runs off the RSS feed from a Twitter search.

9. News coverage: Not enough for full social media monitoring of course, but for those reports which do mention the Department by name, this RSS feed from Google News Search provides a helpful list, right next to the news releases which they often refer to.

10. Blog coverage: Often a surprisingly different focus from the mainstream media mentions, this box runs off an RSS feed of Google Blog Search results.

11. Our issues in the news: Believe it or not there’s a world beyond our doors, and this aggregated feed (a bundle of RSS feeds from sections of BBC News online relevant to our policy areas, gathered together and shared out again via Google Reader) helps me keep track of the big stories.

So there you are. I’ve been refining and tweaking it while I road test it over the last few weeks. It’s surprisingly simple (around 500 lines of PHP all told) but helps me get on with more interesting things while keeping half an eye on the shop I’m supposed to be minding. And there’s a hint of geek cool in there too. Whatever gets you through the day, eh?

n.b. This code was developed in my own time, using my own resources and information, and is not Crown Copyright. I’m happy to offer anyone who wants one (including my employer) a royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to use it, bearing in mind it’s early code and I can’t provide much in the way of support – for now, just leave a comment or drop me a line if you’d like a copy.

A Load of Cobblers: my tumblog on the favourite tools I use

Just a quick one to flag for readers who get my stuff by RSS that I’ve got a parallel tumblog alongside this main blog, which I use to post up quick reviews of tools that I like for web work. I’ve called it A Load Of Cobblers, to celebrate the spirit and practice of cobbled-together webbery, made from many individual pieces.

I’ve just posted a few new bits and pieces on there:

• Feed2JS: a simple Javascript-based way to show an RSS feed on a site
• Page Saver: a Firefox plugin to take a screenshot of the whole page, not just the visible portion
• 7 favourite digital engagement tools: from my presentation at ConnectedGeneration back in September

There’s also stuff about the email newsletter software Campaign Monitor, Flash video players and how to get a feed of comments on your Flickr photos.

Coming up in the near future are likely to be snippets on Google Analytics’ API and the GAPI PHP library, the uptime service Pingdom, and Flickr open-source-licensed search tool, Compfight.

Why do people want microsites?

Photo credit: ilse

Last week, Stephen Hale wrote a great piece on how to say no to new websites in the nicest possible way. I quite agree with him, and his analysis that most of the time, people say ‘I want a new website’ when they really mean that they want their issue or campaign to be communicated effectively online.

So when yesterday, Social Media Today directed us to Build Channel, or why Microsites are a Bad Idea, I started wondering: what makes people ask for microsites in the first place?

There are a bunch of reasons, good and bad:

• Identity: people want their thing to have its own name online, with a nice URL to use in marketing, and its own distinctive look and feel – which may or may not be justified
• Measurability: they want to be able to tell how well their site works and get regular, good stats on traffic, referrers and search keywords for their project specifically
• Flexibility: they want more latitude than the normal corporate site allows, maybe using more space for video or displaying an RSS feed – and the corporate templates or CMS can’t handle it
• Distance: their thing is a partnership or an independent organisation and they want to show it’s at arms length from the mother ship
• Timing: it’s a short-term or urgent project, so it’s more cost-effective to set it up separately and take it down again afterwards than to make changes to the functionality and templates of a big platform
• SEO: (a rare one) people believe that a separate microsite will rank higher in search engines for the desired keywords or brand name
• Ego: (a rather more common one): people want to say ‘that’s mine’ and enter it for awards
• Hassle: getting it onto a corporate site can involve headaches, bureaucracy and compromise in many organisations; it’s easier to go it alone and build from scratch direct with an agency

I’ll put my hand up to setting up microsites for these reasons and others – and yet I also agree with the ‘build channel, not microsites’ logic. It’s self-evident that a big channel can send more traffic, be more cost-effective, and be a better long-term bet in terms of SEO and brand, if it’s an effective one.

So what makes an effective channel, and by implication, what does it need to offer to head off the calls for microsites?

• It’s not about strong corporate branding: or at least, it’s not about a rigid corporate visual identity across the site. Cbeebies, BBC Weather and BBC News manage to have some pretty radically different templates, but work within the umbrella channel brand. A good channel has a common purpose and personality, where the organisation’s style and proposition shows through the design and language of its various sites.

• It’s not about a monster CMS: I just don’t think a single CMS can ever quite stretch to cover all the needs a big organisation has – no, not even WordPress. So it’s better to choose the right tool for each job, using small (interoperable) parts, loosely joined with embedded code, APIs, RSS feeds or whatever it takes to link your content pages to your blogs, your email newsletter to your video hosting provider. More generally, a strong channel is integrated: with other corporate channels, with social media channels, with related and interesting content, and with other sources of evaluation. Flexible but specialised tools, well-integrated with each other is crucial to demonstrating why a new microsite is a second-best option: if you find yourself saying ‘it’s not possible to do that on our CMS’, then you’re fighting a battle you will (and probably deserve to) lose.
• It’s about stickiness: microsites build an audience from scratch, and generally try and keep them engaged for the length of the marketing campaign. That’s an expensive and inefficient way to do it. A good channel has segmented email lists and alerts, RSS feeds, good use of Twitter, good SEO, and strong partnerships within and beyond the organisation. It helps promote the new launch initially, and builds awareness and engagement with the organisation’s customers in related areas, and can sustain it for months or years, not just a few weeks.
• It’s about ownership: it’s human nature to want some control over the shop window, and to feel frustrated when your special project is forced into a standard template or told it can’t have the kind of functionality you see on blogs all over the web because the corporate site can’t do it. A strong channel gives internal clients a sense that they own their piece of the channel, and that within some sensible boundaries, it’s theirs to take in whatever direction they like.
• It’s about the package: it’s not enough to say ‘You have to’. There are good reasons why – with the limitations of big CMSes and the needs of individual projects – people want special functionality, custom templates or personalised analytics. The challenge for people like me then is to put together such a helpful, flexible, compelling package of design, functionality, promotion, integration and analytics that nobody in their right mind would want to go it alone and build a microsite. Because why would they?

What machines think people do: a basic primer on web analytics

In a previous life, I once wrote:

Fundamentally, evaluation should be about measuring performance objectively in order to make improvements:

• measuring: involves a process for collecting, recording and sharing data, perhaps from a number of sources, or of different types
• performance: how successful the activity has been, which means how well it met its objectives, budget and timeframe – including unintended outcomes or side-effects
• objectively: trying to overcome natural personal and psychological inclinations to look on the bright side, remember ‘peaks’ or anecdotes,and try to consider every aspect of the activity fairly and in proportion
• in order to make improvements: not just evaluating for its own sake, but with the aim of making it better in future, through refining techniques or developing individuals

Source: Connecting with Communities: a good practice guide to outreach, CLG (2006)

I still think there’s something in that definition, and it came to mind when someone challenged me to write an intro to web analytics – a field awash with data and trends where it’s more important than anywhere to ask yourself: why?

So why analyse?

Before you analyse, ask yourself two questions: What is my site for? and What do I want to achieve by analysing? The answer to the first question will help you work out what kind of measures are worth paying attention to; the latter will help you be clear on what the numbers really mean for you. It’s important, because analytics can help you do all kinds of things:

To track progress towards a goal. Web analytics can help you benchmark and track trends over time to see how your site is performing: if the purpose of your website is to sell things, how well are you doing that? If it’s to build a community, are people coming back? If it’s to build an easy-to-use web app, do people get beyond the front page? It’s an obvious point, but not all goals are the same, so Good for one site is Bad for another.

To compare approaches.Web analytics are all about comparisons. Analytics can help you see if site A or site B send you more traffic; whether a particular piece of link text works better or worse than the one you tried last month, and whether people are more interested in your blog posts on Kerry Katona or Kefalonia.

To assess the value of what you’re doing. Return on investment is a dirty phrase, but the bottom line is that analytics can give you some of the raw materials for a story about what you achieve for the effort and money you invest in your site. But it’s the story and the insight into why people visit and what they do when whey come that’s really interesting.

To kill failure. Some sites or sections or campaigns flop for one reason or another. Analytics can tell you which ones they are, so you can try something else instead.

What do analytics look like?

Broadly-defined, I’d say there are four main kinds of analytics:

1. Server side: these are based on the big log files stored by the server your website is hosted on, which adds a line each time a web browser requests something from it. It stores information about the machine address, the page or image requested, and what the requesting machine’s operating system and web browser is, all in a line something like:
   123.123.123.123 - - [26/Apr/2000:00:23:48 -0400] "GET /pics/wpaper.gif HTTP/1.0" 200 6248 "http://www.jafsoft.com/asctortf/" "Mozilla/4.05 (Macintosh; I; PPC)"
2. Client-side: these are stats collected using a service like Google Analytics or SpeedTrap, which uses a bit of javascript code in each page of a website to detect information about the page itself and the visitor’s machine. The tools are often able to provide quite a bit of detail – even sometimes providing ‘heat maps’ showing which parts of the page are most clicked on – but don’t record anything if the machine visiting the site has javascript turned off (and a few percent still do).
3. Trackers & counters: particularly on the social web, you’ll find lots of services which track how many times something has been played, favourited, commented on or clicked through to. From comments on YouTube videos, views of a Flickr photo to clicks on a shortened bit.ly link from Twitter, all of these provide help to answer the ‘how many?’ question
4. Panels & data-crunchers: some services can tell you how popular your site is without even asking you. Well, they claim to. Tools like Alexa track the websites visited by people who install a certain toolbar, or are paid to be members of a certain panel, while services like Hitwise use data from internet service providers to track which websites are visited by their customers – and fascinatingly, what the demographic and consumer profile is of those people. Whether these numbers mean anything depends a lot on the profile of their sample, and whether they reflect visitors to your site – if you’re a big consumer site, there’s a chance they will. At the very least, they’ll give you some comparisons in terms of rank order and traffic volumes for some of those kinds of sites.

What to look for

Trends: the absolute number of visitors or pages is usually less interesting than the trend over time. Are more people coming than last month? Are weekends always low, or is it something we did? Trends help you establish whether a change or campaign consistently has a positive or negative effect.

Journeys: when people come to your site, they move about. It’s a common fallacy to assume people visit the homepage, click on an item from the main menu, then an item from that page, then the next page, and then view your detailed page. But analytics often show the reality of people who land from a search engine deep within your site, unaware of your homepage. The journey tools within Google Analytics can help you spot where people give up and go elsewhere, so you can take action to make the journey smoother and keep the traffic (if that’s what your site’s about).

High & low stories: the high and low points can tell you some interesting stories in themselves – what made a particular blog post twice as popular as the norm? And was it bad timing or bad content maybe that made that other post sink like a stone?

Surprises: analytics are full of surprises, like the geographic origin of visitors (plenty of UK consumers read US sites, and vice versa), or the screen resolutions on which people are reading your site. Have a large cohort of iPhone readers browsing your site on a 320×480 screen? Consider tweaking your stylesheet.

What to look at

Hits v Pages v Visits v Uniques. A hit is request for a single part of a web page, like an image or a stylesheet – so isn’t a great measure, as a page with lots of pictures and associated files can have a lot of hits for very few actual people visiting. Pages is a better measure, more comparable to measures used in traditional media given the correlation with the number of times an advert is displayed, for example. A visit gets closer to the concept of ‘how many real people visited the website’, looking at the number of times someone came along to the site and viewed a set of pages in a single session. Finally, ‘unique visitors’ tries to de-duplicate visits from the same person or machine, to give a cleaner measure of the number of different people who came to the site. I generally find unique visitors the most valuable number, as it gives me a sense of the real human audience for the content.

Time on page. By seeing how long it takes, on average, for someone to move from page to page within your site, analytics work out the average time spent on each page and on the site as a whole per visit. It’s an interesting measure which can give you an indication of whether you content is properly being properly read or just skimmed. If your aim is engagement and your time-on-page is just a few seconds on average, there may be a problem – a longer time-on-page is generally thought better for most sites.

Bounces. A special case for visits are so called ‘bounces’ where a visitor visits only a single page on your site. Perhaps they come to the home page, realise you’re not for them, and click back to the Google search results. Or perhaps they land on the in-depth article they were looking for, and need to look no further. A lower bounce rate is generally thought better.

Conversions. Some of the more complex functionality in Google Analytics lets you define goals and ‘funnels’ to analyse how people move through your site towards a defined sales objective – maybe downloading a document, completing a multi-page form or clicking the ‘buy’ button.  Non-transactional government sites often don’t look as hard at this measure, but that’s not to say they shouldn’t. A lot of websites are created simply to look good or get lots of readers, but establishing some more stretching objectives like getting visitors to sign up to a newsletter, subscribe to an RSS feed or complete a form to join a ‘supporters’ scheme is more likely to show the value of the web longer-term in mobilising support and engagement from otherwise passing trade.

Referrers. Blimey, where did all those people come from? Referrer information tells you which site the visitor was on when they clicked on a link to your site. Looking at the list of sites which refer traffic to you can often open your eyes to unexpected organisations or individuals who found your content interesting and chose to link to you. ‘Direct entry’ generally means someone typed your URL in themselves or, in these days of desktop Twitter clients like TweetDeck, that they came to your site from a source outside of their main web browser. Many referrals are likely to come from search results pages which, in these days of Google dominance, are most useful in that they give you…

Keywords that people typed into the search engine in order to find the link to your site. These give you a sense of the popularity of different phrases used to describe your content, as well as some of the most amusing and surprising insights into your analytics – at time of writing this site, for example, is on the first page of results in Google for the phrase ‘sell stuff‘.

Browser stats. In making design choices about your site, browser stats can tell you what proportion of visitors used outdated browsers (such as Internet Explorer 6) and therefore do or don’t need catering for, as well as the screen resolutions they have, which can inform what kind of layout you go for – often very useful when combatting the oft-quoted stipulation that government sites need to work for the sizable minority of visitors on 800×600 browsers. They’re a minority, but they’re not as sizable as the folks browsing your postage stamp pages at 1600×1200.

Social stats

Social media tools and platforms introduce a new dynamic. On the whole, you don’t get the richness of traditional web analytics (though some platforms such as Ning let you plug in Google Analytics code if you pay a bit extra). But on the flip side, your analytics are much more public, which introduces its own interesting dynamics of ‘popular content’ and feeds the ego.

• Views of videos, pictures or presentations are probably the most straightforward, along with click throughs of link services like bit.ly (tip: take any bit.ly link e.g. http://bit.ly/3zfftT and add /info/ in the middle to see the public stats on that link – e.g. http://bit.ly/info/3zfftT). [UPDATE: And as Robin says in the comments below, it's worth mentioning the stats built into Feedburner, which lets you track the otherwise untrackable activities of people who come to your content via your RSS feed and never actually visit the site itself]
• Comments are the next notch up, showing who has engaged with the content to the extent of responding to it, e.g. @replying to a Tweet
• Shares in the form of bookmarks on services like Delicious, Digg or StumbleUpon or re-tweets on Twitter indicate people who liked or felt inspired to spread your content to their own networks or save it for later. Ditto for starring/favouriting items.
• Embeds and responses in the form of inbound links to your site (which you can pick up by searching for link:http://blog.helpfultechnology.com on Google or Google Blogsearch or using services like BackType) are maybe the highest form of engagement, where people are moved to respond – hopefully positively – to your content.

Measuring social media stats is both easy (they’re often public, and pretty straightforward) and hard (they’re spread over lots of sites, and can overlap or tell conflicting stories). Tools like PostRank (h/t Treepixie) are emerging to help disentangle the mess, and put these stats alongside your own site’s web analytics.

What analytics don’t tell you

With so much information, it’s easy to assume that’s the whole story, but of course it isn’t. Web analytics tell you what machines think people do, not why they do it, or even who they really are. Beware of treating one-off spikes and troughs as trends or significant patterns – maybe Google just tweaked their algorithm that day, or your site went down for an hour without you noticing. It’s also hard to assess the true extent of engagement from hard stats alone, and that’s often better done from a deeper sense of what people who come to your site say in the comments and do when they send you enquiries and feedback forms. Above all, be careful of attributing cause and effect to the stories you see in the stats: use the flexibility of stats to compare alternative approaches before deciding that you’ve been doing it wrong. See what norms you can glean from tools like Alexa or Hitwise if they’re appropriate to your audience, or informally from friends and colleagues if like me you operate on a smaller scale. And remember that stats can’t tell you much about the who and why – so consider using an old-fashioned visitor survey or subscriber questionnaire (or even just a blog post asking people to tell you a bit about themselves in the comments) to understand the visitor profile of your readers and what they want when they get there. More about that in another post, I suspect.

Congratulations for getting this far – you can be sure I’ll be watching the time on page carefully to see if you read it properly