Google Analytics Keyword (not provided)

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If you’ve been paying attention to keyword traffic in Google Analytics over the past month, you may have noticed a growing number of “(not provided)” in your results. This is due to a new feature released by Google in mid-October of this year. What’s happening is that Google has begun encrypting searches for users who are logged into Google.com. The side-effect of this is that Google will no longer provide the keywords that user searched for when clicking on organic (non-ads) results.

The Results

Google’s software engineers estimated that, when fully rolled out, this change would only affect single-digit percentages for all Google searches. However, when you get down to individual sites, that percentage can be quite different. Below are a few of our properties and the “not provided” percentage over the past month.

nd.edu 6.5%
agency.nd.edu 16.35%
blogs.nd.edu 11.18%
conductor.nd.edu 5.25%
research.nd.edu 13.83%

As you can see, for AgencyND and the Research site, that’s quite a bit of traffic for which we’re not getting keywords.

What Now?

If your site is set up with Google Webmaster Tools, you’ll still be able to view “an aggregated list of the top 1,000 search queries that drove traffic to their site for each of the past 30 days.” Granted, this does not provide near the amount of data and reporting available in GA, but it at least lets you get the keywords.

References

Hiring: Interactive Creative Director

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We’re looking for an interactive creative director.

The ideal candidate is an active contributor to the web design community. You love to create stuff. You have experience leading, not just managing. And if this wasn’t your career, you’d still find ways to be creative because that’s who you are.

You have a passion for web, design, and marketing – all wrapped up in high attention to detail. You are well-versed in (and can speak intelligently about) web design, user experience, interface design, information architecture, copywriting, website usability, Adobe Creative Suite, web development tools, general office technology. You have superb presentation, communication, and client management skills.

If you are interested, apply online at jobs.nd.edu.

Q&A: How does my site get found in search engines?

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We have a website constructed and published online, but it needs to be easily searchable via Google. Could you help us get it into the public eye?

The biggest way to get your site into search engines (especially Google) is to have other sites link to yours. Google’s algorithm is influenced by many factors, but the largest is the quantity and quality of sites linking to you (including how they link to you). This isn’t always in your control, but Google has published a useful set of Google Webmaster Guidelines that will help improve the chances that you are found, indexed often, and ranked highly.

There are also many, many sites dedicated to SEO (search engine optimization) that can be useful. One of the most popular is SEOmoz, which offers many resources and tools: SEOmoz Resources

Don Schindler (managing director of AgencyND) wrote a great intro to search marketing on his blog.

Finally, check out our local resources such as http://blogs.nd.edu or our Campus Communicator brown bag sessions (announced via our private Campus Communicators LinkedIn group), where we educate colleagues about marketing communications topics.

Events Now Available on m.ND.edu

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Events Icon

A long overdue feature is now available on m.ND.edu. Powered by the official University calendar, the events module provides access to:

  • Today’s Events
  • Upcoming Events (next 7 days)
  • Academic Calendar (next 90 days)
  • Athletics (next 14 days)
  • Arts & Entertainment (next 14 days)

You can download any event to your mobile device. Most event listings will also provide a location link to the University map.

Academics Now Available on m.ND.edu

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Academics Icon

As a convenience to our mobile users, we have added a list of academic majors, programs, departments, colleges, schools, centers, and institutes. The content is broken into the following categories for easy access:

  • Undergraduate Majors
  • Graduate and Professional Programs
  • Departments, Colleges, and Schools
  • Centers and Institutes
  • The Arts at Notre Dame

Blogging: B!@g is not a four-letter word.

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Over the lunch hour, AgencyND copywriter Mike Roe presented Blogging: B!@g is not a four-letter word. He has been kind enough to share his slides, which we’ve posted on Slideshare:

PSST: Are you doing anything noteworthy?

Mike shared a number of recent social media rankings from Klout’s Most Influential Colleges on Twitter to the TrendTopper MediaBuzz Internet Brand Equity rankings. And Notre Dame didn’t rank in any of the major categories. ND is being too darn quiet and people aren’t talking about us.

Aside: Across 28 campus Twitter accounts, there are about 11,000 total tweets. @oaknd1 (one employee in AgencyND) has over 25,000 tweets.

9 reasons why you should have a blog (in addition to or instead of Facebook or Twitter)

There are plenty more reasons, but if you need more than nine then maybe you’ll never be happy and a blog wouldn’t help anyway.

1. Tells the world you’re passionate, serious, committed, and invested.

Blogging takes a level of investment that shorter forms do not, and visitors recognize this.

2. What if your other social media goes away? (Facebook could go the way of Friendster, Twitter could go the way of Google Buzz)

Your blog is yours to take with you, even move it to other platforms. Social networks change, your blog is yours. And Twitter has been known to delete old tweets.

3. Blogging improves how your website ranks in search results.

Inbound links, internal links, fresh content, click-worthy links, and Tweet-worthy posts all affect how you rank in search engines.

“Statistics show that companies that regularly blog attract 7x more traffic than those that don’t.”

4. Blogs provide opportunities to make regular posts to your outposts (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.).

Use your blog as your home base, and let your new content filter out to the social media platforms.

5. Blogging allows you to control your content and ensure that content isn’t going anywhere.

Social media flows past — when was the last time you went back to re-read two or three days’ Twitter or Facebook activity?

6. Blogging allows you to truly interact with and engage your readers.

Blogs often spawn comments, emails, and regular subscribers.

7. Analytics tells you everything.

How much do you know about your exposure, reach, and influence in other platforms?

8. Connect with coworkers.

Blogs help you communicate ideas with your peers and colleagues, and can even work for internal teams.

9. Our competition is blogging.

Our peers and our aspirational institutions are out there telling their stories. By many measures, it looks like we aren’t.

Get a Blog at Notre Dame

Sign up and get going in under 5 minutes (longer, if you can’t decide which design to use). Visit Blogs.nd.edu

“Blogs remain the hallmark of expertise and opinion.” Brian Solis

Blogs make it easy to discover, evaluate, and converse with subject matter experts. They can increase awareness, lead to opportunities, and propel you into recognition that isn’t normally considered the standard for evaluation for your field.

Q&A (selected)

Q: Is there a rule about how often you should blog?
A: No. Consistency and quality are more important than quantity.

Q: Where do you get ideas for blog posts?
A: Subscribe to other blogs, magazines, and trade publications — use those for inspiration for topics. Or blog about those articles themselves. Use those to get your ideas flowing. If you have colleagues or faculty who don’t blog, ask them for ideas (or even guest posts).

Q: How do you build awareness of the blog so you can engage students?
A: Build it into your other marketing efforts — drive people there. Consider drawing them into the other

Chas’s Additions

Check out Chris Brogan’s blog — he’s one of the top bloggers in the world and has shared all kinds of advice and resources around blogging.

My Best Advice about Blogging
40 Ways to Deliver Killer Blog Content
50 Ways to Take Your Blog to the Next Level

Brian Solis (mentioned in Mike’s presentation) has a number of posts about blogging. Here’s one about the continued relevance of blogs: Rumors of the Death of Blogs are Greatly Exaggerated

And for academic use, eduBlogs also uses WordPress to provide academic blogging environment and they are kind enough to share tips and resources.
10 Ways to Use Your eduBlog to Teach

Webcams Now Available on m.ND.edu

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Webcams IconThe webcams on ND.edu have always been popular features. As I write this, the Clark Memorial and South Quad webcams are both in the top 10 of the most visited pages on ND.edu. So if you’re one of those frequent webcam visitors, you can now get a mobile optimized version of the webcams page on our mobile site.

Custom Sizes for Mobile

The webcam images can be rather large for mobile devices. For example, the Clark Memorial image is 704px wide. Even in landscape mode, the iPhone is only 480px wide. To better serve our users, we’re making use of a service called TinySRC that will serve a webcam image to you that is re-sized specifically for your device. If you want to view the full-size image from your device, simply select the re-sized image and it will open the original raw image.

ND.edu Popular Sites Safari Extension

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When we redesigned the University’s website in 2007, we replaced many links in the primary content of the homepage with "Popular Sites", a customizable list of links. Popular Sites has been quite successful (judged by the high number of clicks) and is used as a convenient homepage by many campus users.

Now, in order to better serve the University community, we’re releasing a series of browser extensions that will provide similar functionality but also be available to users no matter what site they’re currently on. These extensions will provide quick links to only those pages users want, from any point on the internet.

We’re working on extensions for several popular browsers, and the first out the door is for Safari The others will be released in the next few weeks and months.

Download the Safari Extension for ND.edu Quick Access

  1. Open Safari.
  2. Go to the AgencyND labs page and click on Safari Extension. This will automatically download and enable the ND.edu Quick Access extension. Alternatively you can access the extension directly from the project repository.
  3. You’ll see the toolbar above the site window.

Once you’ve downloaded the extension, you can change the default links in the toolbar, if you’d like. Here’s how:

Customize the Safari Extension for ND.edu Quick Access

  1. Open the Safari Preferences window (Click Safari and then Preferences in the top left of your computer screen.
  2. Choose ND.edu Quick Access.
  3. Check the links you want included and un-check those you don’t.
  4. Close the preferences window.

Note: If you use Safari on Windows, you must have Quicktime installed if you want the Victory March feature to work. Download Quicktime.

Watch this blog for future releases. The Chrome extension will be announced shortly.

Weather Now Available on m.ND.edu

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Weather IconIf you’ve lived in South Bend for more than a week, then you know how unpredictable the weather here can be. Well now if you’re on the go and need some quick stats on the current weather, we have you covered at m.nd.edu/weather. There you’ll find the current temperature and other conditions for South Bend, as well as links to mobile versions of Weather.com and Accuweather.com for extended forecasts and maps.

As always, if you have any suggestions, issues or feedback, please let us know.