Posted Friday, January 20th, 2012 at 3:00 pm by Marissa (46 posts)
In October of 2011, Google announced that users logged into their Google Account would be redirected to Google’s secure search page. If you’re logged into Gmail, Google+ or any other Google product, instead of going to http://www.google.com, you will be redirected to https://www.google.com.
This caused an outcry in the web analytics world. Before November 1, analysts knew the keywords users entered in search engines to get to their website. And that was pretty powerful information. If 10,000 visitors came to your website by using the search term “xyz”, but 9,000 of them bounced, you knew you had better do something to fix up that landing page.
But this information is essentially no more, or at best, flawed. Google claimed the security change would affect a “minority of your traffic” in Google Analytics, but that’s not what we’re seeing. After a few months, the curves show the results for “not provided” climbing astronomically. For most, “(not provided)” becomes the #2 result for organic search, usually behind the branded search. In some cases, it is even ahead of branded search. That is hardly a minority of traffic.
This is an example “dangerous free“. We had very valuable data and now we don’t. But what can we do? It was free. Google had no obligation to give us this data.
I recommend reading Avinash Kaushik’s blog post on the topic. He helps you get beyond your missing data and find other ways to come up with actionable insights in the presence of (not provided).
Posted Wednesday, January 18th, 2012 at 11:39 am by Kristin (9 posts)
Beaconfire Consulting is growing!
I’d like to welcome Lisa Kaneff to the Beaconfire family as one of our Senior Marketing Consultants. She joins us from PointRoll, a interactive marketing solutions agency, as their Brand Marketing Manager.
We also have the following open positions. Know someone who is passionate about helping nonprofits accomplish great things on the Internet? If so, please pass this message along.
Online Campaigns and Marketing Director
We’re looking for an experienced, cause-driven interactive marketing professional who can leverage their consulting expertise and leadership skills to lead our online campaigns and marketing service line, and help our nonprofit clients shape and execute breakthrough online campaigns.
Interactive Marketing Client Manager / Consultant
We’re looking for a smart, cause-driven interactive marketing professional who can leverage their marketing experience and project management skills to help our nonprofit clients shape and execute breakthrough online campaigns.
PHP Web Developer
We’re looking for a Software Engineer with PHP skills, who will work closely with our project teams to develop and implement websites and applications for our nonprofit clients. Knowledge of eZ Publish or Drupal a plus.
Posted Friday, January 6th, 2012 at 4:51 pm by Jen (1 posts)
If not you should be, here’s five reasons why.
Multi-Channel Analysis
Now native to Google Analytics 5, this series of reports allows you to see how your different marketing efforts are working together to drive conversions over a 30 day period. Of these reports the three most interesting are as follows:
Posted Friday, January 6th, 2012 at 3:35 pm by Marissa (46 posts)
The Internet is awash in free tools, and I love them, both for my own personal use as well as for our clients. With all that’s out there and wonderful, why wouldn’t you want to use a free tool? There’s always a caveat. If a company changes its business model, goes out of business, or just plain decides they don’t like you, you can lose your data, with little to no recourse. I wrote it about this in April of 2010, when Ning changed it’s business model. And now it’s happening again on a wider, more noticeable scale.
There is an excellent article in the Washington Post by Cecilia Kang on what happens to your data when a service goes under or is acquired. The results range from the good (Google takes over, imports all your data and makes the user experience even better), the bad (you’re data gets sucked into a vortex never to be seen again), and the ugly (your data is sold to the highest bidder).
So remember – what is free today may be gone tomorrow. Always good to have a backup plan.
Posted Tuesday, December 20th, 2011 at 3:11 pm by Cara (12 posts)
Falling squarely into the highly productive category herself, my colleague Amy Knox forwarded an article to the staff titled 7 Things Highly Productive People Do by Ilya Pozin. Always looking for tips and tricks I read it with anticipation.
Some of the tips were basic things that, if you read lists like this you’ve come to expect. For example, an old favorite, create small attainable tasks for yourself instead of a great big complex one. I, personally, enjoy the satisfaction of checking things off my To-Do list and have been known to add a task to my list simply to experience the momentary feeling of satisfaction that comes with checking them complete. Shower, Check!
Posted Thursday, December 8th, 2011 at 10:00 am by Scott (3 posts)
Use these super-simple but astoundingly powerful tips and techniques to bump your mobile sites from mediocre to magnificent.
1. Speed up rendering by harnessing the GPU.
Mobile devices have very powerful gpu processors, but they’re only used by mobile browsers if there’s an animation-esque style(s) to trigger them. Toss -webkit-transform: translateZ(0); in your css to make it happen via html5rocks.com
2. Scale images in the browser.
By default, images will stay fixed to their original size. With a tiny little css we can tell the major browsers to scale these images in relation to their container with max-width:100%;.
3. Fix safari landscape to portrait resize bug.
Sometimes safari fails to scale correctly when rotating from portrait->landscape->portrait. That’s bogus. Update your meta viewport tag with the fix via stackoverflow: <meta name = “viewport” content = “user-scalable=no, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, width=device-width”> <meta name=”apple-mobile-web-app-capable” content=”yes”/> via stackoverflow.com
4. Put Content first
Switch the order of content and navigation using display declarations: @media screen and (min-width: 30em) {
body {
display: table;
caption-side: top;
}
[role="navigation"] {
display: table-caption;
}
} via adactio.com/journal/4780/
5. fix page navigation
empty a tags <a href=”#”> won’t moving pages to the top of the page like they do on desktops. If you have pages with long content, help folks jump around wiht a little js $('#jump-to-top').click(function(e) {
window.scrollTo(0,0);
e.preventDefault();
});
$('#skip-to-bottom').click(function(e) {
bottom = $(document).height();
window.scrollTo(0,bottom);
e.preventDefault();
});
Posted Monday, December 5th, 2011 at 12:55 pm by Kristin (9 posts)
Are you an experienced, cause-driven online marketing professional looking to lead nonprofit clients in their online marketing and fundraising programs?
Do you want to help shape breakthrough online campaigns that help families in need become self-reliant, protect wildlife and the environment and battle chronic and fatal diseases?
Are you a creative self-starter with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and desire to be part of a fast moving, high performing project team?
Beaconfire is expanding its Online Campaigns and Marketing team! We’re looking for one or two smart, passionate interactive marketing professionals to join our family.
Senior Interactive Marketing Consultant who can leverage their consulting expertise and leadership skills to help our nonprofit clients shape and execute online campaigns.
Posted Friday, November 4th, 2011 at 1:06 pm by Rob (20 posts)
Curious about how you can use analytics to maximize ROI of your mobile outreach? Avinash Kaushik (@Avinash), Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google, led a great webinar earlier this week, discussing how you can engage with mobile audiences and take a mobile-specific approach to tracking your results:
Here’s a few key takeaways nonprofits can use, along with a link he provided that will create a custom mobile report within your own Google Analytics setup.
Posted Monday, October 31st, 2011 at 9:12 am by Russ (2 posts)
It may not be news to most of you that Beaconfire really values the people who work here ☺ … However, some of our really talented colleagues have had to leave the DC area, but we didn’t want to lose them. So remote working was born!
How has it worked out? And what do you watch out for? Keep reading…
Posted Monday, October 24th, 2011 at 4:32 pm by Eve (41 posts)
There is so much happy bouncing at Beaconfire HQ right now that is frankly hard to type but I’m thrilled to report that we will be representin’ in force on FIVE, count ‘em, FIVE panels at sxsw 2012 in March! (along with the 4th year of The Beacon Lounge)
Posted Thursday, October 20th, 2011 at 6:05 pm by Eve (41 posts)
For any organization, redesigning your website can be a little like giving birth. It’s messy, it can be scary at times, there’s a pretty solid deadline and by the end of the process you have magically created something special. Color me dramatic, but today I have the great honor to welcome the newly re-imagined adcouncil.org into the world both as it’s biggest fan (Smokey, call me!) and as one of its midwives.
When Ad Council approached Beaconfire about this monumental project, the FanGirl in me let out an embarrassing little squeal. What self respecting, red blooded Creative Director wouldn’t be thrilled at the chance to help one of the most iconic American brands reinvent itself online? We couldn’t wait to get started.
Posted Friday, October 14th, 2011 at 12:34 pm by Kristin (9 posts)
Yes, Beaconfire is hiring! We currently have an
Online Marketing Consultant / Client Manager position open.
Are you an experienced, cause-driven online marketing professional looking to lead nonprofit clients in their online marketing and fundraising programs?
Do you want to help shape breakthrough online campaigns that help families in need become self-reliant, protect wildlife and the environment and battle chronic and fatal diseases?
Are you a creative self-starter with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and desire to be part of a fast moving, high performing team?
We’re looking for a motivated, experienced individual with a thorough understanding of the nonprofit sector, interactive marketing and the integration of online marketing with traditional forms of outreach. If you know your way around online fundraising, digital advocacy, social media, Google ads, and supporter engagement and want to use your skills to help nonprofits take their online efforts to the next level, then this job is for you.
Posted Friday, October 14th, 2011 at 12:28 pm by Kristin (9 posts)
Yes, Beaconfire is hiring! We currently have a Front End Web Developer position open.
We’re looking for a smart, curious and energetic person to create front-end templates with a focus on maintaining the highest quality with regard to coding standards, accessibility, and browser support, including mobile.
In a team-based environment, the Front End Developer will
build and modify Web pages in HTML, CSS and JavaScript from creative design layouts;
interact with CMS templates and themes;
propose new front-end solutions and processes;
and work with team to implement them successfully.
Basically, if you get excited talking about all the possibilities of HTML5 and CSS3; eat JQuery for breakfast; and/or dabble in mobile site development, this job is definitely for you.
Posted Thursday, October 13th, 2011 at 4:49 pm by Sara Franco (3 posts)
Beaconfire recently adopted a new bug/task tracking tool, Jira. Now that we have been using Jira internally for a while, we have started to roll it out to our clients. It’s a great tool to store all the tasks, bugs and enhancements on a project and help track the progress of those tickets. Here are some key points/helpful hints to how we are rolling Jira out to clients:
Posted Monday, October 3rd, 2011 at 12:12 pm by Rob (20 posts)
With the experience we’ve gained since the mobile W3C Mobile Web Best Practices were released 3 years ago, we’ve noted a few of the most important tips for providing an enjoyable user experience that will keep your mobile site visitors coming back for more.
Mobile detection: When people visit your main website there should be a script that checks if they are using a mobile browser. If so, they should be redirected to your mobile site.
Posted Friday, September 16th, 2011 at 5:47 pm by Amanda (4 posts)
Happy Belated Programmer Day! This past Tuesday’s “holiday” was brought to our attention through this rather amusing article.
The day was marked with a lack of flowers, breakfast in bed or greeting card. Let it be know however, this != lack of appreciation! Perhaps the PMs will fare better on their holiday by assigning everyone a task to observe it ;).
Here are some other topics of interest on the Beaconfire back channel this week:
Posted Monday, September 12th, 2011 at 3:00 pm by Rob (20 posts)
In a major step in the evolution of website design, the Boston Globe relaunched their site today using a Responsive Design approach. For a consistent experience across mobile and desktop browsers, they redesigned the site to add and remove columns to the layout based on the width of your browser window.
Posted Tuesday, September 6th, 2011 at 4:23 pm by Rob (20 posts)
Managing website redesigns and enhancements can be significant undertaking. Here at Beaconfire we put a lot of thought into ensuring maximal efficiency in our development process, and a core part of that comes from effectively using project management tools.
A few months ago we began using JIRA for tracking bugs and tasks, and while it’s still an evolving process, here’s a quick glimpse into how we’re taking advantage of JIRA’s flexibility to keep projects running under budget and deadline.
Posted Wednesday, August 31st, 2011 at 2:52 pm by Rebecca (8 posts)
When it comes to evaluating the effectiveness of your website, usability testing is one of the most eye-opening steps you can take. There are a growing number of tools and techniques that we at Beaconfire have used, including:
And there are new tools being introduced all the time.
So, which approach is best for your website? Are some more effective than others? Do low-cost, rapid methods produce the same results as traditional usability testing studies?
Posted Wednesday, August 31st, 2011 at 1:26 pm by Scott (3 posts)
Ever wonder how come sometimes things just never work out the way you planned? Do you ever lie awake at night dreading a site launch because you just know it could have been better, but over the course of the project you make exceptions for mistakes, errors, bugs, and the like, just to keep things moving. Well, if that’s you, then you’re no stranger to web development. We’ve been pondering this question over here at Beaconfire and have come up with some tips and tools that can help keep your project’s code from getting derailed and launch as the shiny, happy, beautiful site you dreamed it would be.
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