Google Analytics was initially built during a time when people had hit counters on their websites. Since then, the way we use the internet and the data businesses need to track has dramatically changed. People are using multiple devices and using various apps, all of which are completely different ways to access information on the internet.

As a result of this ever-changing environment, Universal Analytics has finally come to a point where it can’t keep up with everything. There are some things Universal Analytics simply cannot track and some things it was tracking but it wasn’t very accurate. All of these changes in the way we do things is why Google created GA4. It has AI machine learning and privacy built right into it.

If you jump into Google Analytics, you may see a notice at the top announcing a sunset date for Universal Analytics of July 1, 2023. At that time, Universal Analytics will stop collecting data. You will still be able to log in and view historical data for six months. At the end of 2023, Universal Analytics will be completely shut down and the historical data stored there will be gone.

While you still have plenty of time to set up your GA4 account, I urge you to not wait until the last minute.

Please visit https://www.skyrocketradio.com/blog/migrating-from-universal-analytics-to-google-analytics-4 for more details on this episode as well as links we point out in the podcast.

Sadly, I find that more and more stations are not properly promoting their websites as they should. If you treat your website(s) as a separate radio station(s) that you can generate traffic and revenue from, then it only makes sense to consistently drive your listeners and followers there as often as possible. It’s not like you’re asking them to do something rather than listening to the radio station. In fact, you’re asking them to become more involved with the station.

The stations that I hear promoting their website, most often tag the website address to the end of a sweeper or the announcer may randomly slip in “for more visit our website” without giving a specific reason why listeners should take that action. I seemingly hear announcers promote what’s on the station’s Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok pages more often than anything.

So, today, we’ll talk about how to best promote your website.

1. Promote the website within and educate.

This is the biggest issue. If the radio station owner or GM doesn’t see the website as a priority, then it will not be a priority for everyone under them. If you want to see your traffic and revenue growth, then the website should be a part of every meeting. Whether this is promotions, sales, or programming meetings. If you’re talking about the radio station or about your group of stations, the website(s) need to be an equal part of that conversation.

2. Adjust how you promote the website on-air.

Back when I was on-air, I was told by our consultants that talent, “should continuously sell listener benefits several times per hour. Help listeners ‘use’ the station with words that sell a benefit so that they connect the station with the listener’s lifestyle or activities.”

See examples at https://www.skyrocketradio.com/blog/stop-promoting-social-media-channels-on-your-website.  

Personalities should tease and sell the benefits of visiting the website as well, rather than simply noting that the website has content.

See examples at https://www.skyrocketradio.com/blog/stop-promoting-social-media-channels-on-your-website.  

3. Tease your content links on social media.

Don’t simply share links. A social media best practice is to add a comment or question in front of everything shared on social media. Simply sharing something without comment is the lazy way and, admittedly, I’m guilty of it too.

The page or post headline should grab attention and entice you to jump into a news story. However, how many LOCAL news titles have you clicked on this week because they enticed you by the headline? Even experienced writers will confess that it can be tough to write a compelling title for any piece of written work.  So, it’s up to your social media team to jump in and help by adding an additional sentence or question to the post.

You should find that you’ll get more engagement and more shares (which should equate to more page views on your website) by engaging with the content you post and share on social media. Simple page shares without any interaction do not facilitate many reactions from your followers.

Need help with your website?  Reach out to us at skyrocketradio.com.

You read that headline correctly but please don’t get me wrong. I am a big advocate that every radio station should be on whatever social media platforms their listeners are on so they can engage with them there and share out content that ultimately leads back to the station website so that traffic can be monetized. Once you have visitors on your website, where you want them, why send them back to social media?

We advocate using the properties you rent (social media) to drive the properties you own, like your website, newsletter, stream, etc.

For more detailed show notes on today's episode, including a list of what to take away from your website right now, please visit https://www.skyrocketradio.com/blog/stop-promoting-social-media-channels-on-your-website.

Need help with your website?  Reach out to us here: https://www.skyrocketradio.com/contact.

This week we got a call from a station asking if their news posts could be set to automatically expire after a certain day and time. For example, you post a local news story about a new farmer's market being held in your town square this Saturday.  On Sunday, the news story will be old news and you'll run the risk of someone reading and thinking that it's the following Saturday instead of the one that just passed.  So, their question is a valid one. 

However, there are certain implications to consider when you remove any content from your website.  When Google indexes website content so that it can be found in search results, they expect it to be valid.  When someone clicks on a search result and they find a "page missing" error, the search engine gets a pingback saying errors were found. Therefore, they penalize your entire site for the content no longer being there. 

I've always been told to never remove anything from the internet because it will hurt the search engine optimization of your website. I can understand that for major things like switching domains or major pages with information that lots of people see and use on a regular basis, or even a news story with significant historical value.  But for a news story about a date-specific farmer's market event? 

As a radio station, I believe it's safe to assume that your listeners and website readers are most concerned with what happened recently, what's happening right now, and what could be affecting them in the coming days.  It would be much different if you were a business blogging about how to properly change a tire, repair a window, or paint a fireplace.  That type of content is more evergreen than the daily news content we are likely populating our websites with. If you are producing new content daily as you should, then any hit you may receive from Google from a missing post from a year ago should be inconsequential, because you're delivering more relevant content each day to replace it. 

A year or so ago, Hubspot CRM recently deleted 3000 posts from their blog and their SEO improved dramatically: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/remove-outdated-content. 

"PublishPress Future", formerly "Post Expirator" is a free plugin that can help you with that: https://wordpress.org/plugins/post-expirator. 

The Search Engine Journal did a fantastic article a few years ago titled, "How & Why You Must Improve or Remove Your Old Content": https://www.searchenginejournal.com/improve-remove-old-content/300961.

Should you remove old content?  Our stand is "yes", especially if the content is news-related, not historical or evergreen in nature, and older than a year.  There's really no reason to keep it on your site.  Removing old content can help your website from a server perspective as your backups will be smaller and much easier to re-instate if your website ever goes down. 

Do you need help with your radio station website, reach out to us at skyrocketradio.com. 

Google Analytics is a free tool to help you tell how well your website is performing and it can give you all sorts of valuable insight, such as where your website visitors are coming from, which pages are most popular, and how long visitors stay on your site. Once a week, radio programmers and the appropriate staff members should take some time to review their website statistics.

We spoke with Johnny Boswell, the owner of Boswell Media in central Mississippi, about how he utilized Google Analytics in his online strategy.  Johnny has three radio stations and two unbelievably performing news websites: https://www.breezynews.com and https://www.kicks96news.com.

Here are the setup steps that you will need to perform inside of Google Analytics for each of the websites you wish to track: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9304153.

Once you have that code in place and you’re collecting data, here’s what you should be looking for:

1. Total Unique Visitors

2. Traffic Sources

3. Top Pages and Top Landing Pages

4. Bounce Rate

5. Goal Conversions

Instructions for setting up goals: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1032415.

Conclusion:

There are alternatives to Google Analytics, but they all come with hefty price tags. It’s just hard to beat this free tool that can help you build your radio station’s online audience.

A great way to stay on top of Analytics is to have your reports emailed to you each week. If you are running a WordPress website, be sure to install Google’s official “Site Kit” plugin to track stats directly within the WordPress dashboard.

Need help with your radio station website?  Reach out to us.

Seth Resler is a 25-year broadcasting and podcasting veteran who worked on-air and in programming at several major markets before crossing into online marketing. He’s now the digital strategist at Jacobs Media working with radio stations across the country, helping them design and implement action plans that combine websites, social media, email marketing, search engine optimization, content marketing, lead generation, and other online tools.  I've followed Seth on his personal blog years before he became the "Digital Dot Connector" for Jacob's Media.

Here are posts that reference the topics we talked about...

Jacobs Media: Your Radio Station’s Secret Marketing Weapon In 2021? (Wait for it….) E-mail

Jacobs Media: Moving Listeners From Your Rented Digital Assets to Your Owned Digital Assets

Jacobs Media: How To Conduct A Usability Test For Your Radio Station’s Website

Skyrocket Radio: Breaking Up with Your Home Page Slider

Jacobs Media: 4 Things You Can Remove From Your Radio Station’s Homepage

Jacobs Media: Here’s What You Should Put in the Main Menu of Your Radio Station’s Website

Jacobs Media: How to Write an Effective “Advertise With Us” Webpage for Your Radio Station

Jacobs Media: How to Rewrite Your Radio Station’s “Advertise With Us” Webpage for the Pandemic

Jacobs Media: For Radio DJs, Digital Content Should Be An Extension of — Not An Addition To — The Show

Jacobs Media: How Any Radio Station Can Repurpose Its Content

If you want great information that will help your website and your digital team, be sure to follow Seth's "Connecting the Dots" blog at https://jacobsmedia.com/category/connecting-the-dots. You'll be sure to get valuable insight to move your digital efforts forward.

It seems like every day or week there’s a new headline about another app or website being hacked. And these are typically the higher profile websites. In fact, a hacker attack occurs every 39 seconds in the US, affecting one in three Americans every year.

A successful intrusion can result in a huge loss in traffic and revenue if your site has crashed or been suspended on your hosting provider. It could even result in identity theft of your admins and members if you run a membership site. Personal data like passwords could be at risk.

No matter how big or small your website is, you can still become a target. So, it is very important to secure your website, which means putting protection in place to keep out hackers, bugs, and other nefarious entities.

So, how do cyber-attacks work?

Cyber-attacks work by infecting your computer with malware or spyware. These types of attacks are often delivered through email attachments, malicious downloads, or websites that you may visit.

Cyber-attacks usually take the form of viruses, worms, Trojan horses, or the latest trend, ransomware. In these attacks, the hackers demand payment to remove the infection.

While it’s impossible to create an absolute impenetrable fortress with your website, it is possible to put measures in place to make it very difficult. Many times, a little difficulty is all it takes to send hackers on to their next target.

Here are steps you should take today to protect your website against cyber-attacks.

1. Have a Comprehensive Security Plan

2. Use Secure/Strong Passwords Everywhere

3. Check/Clean Spam Comments on your Website

4. Scan Your Local Computer for Malware and Spyware

Conclusion

Good website security starts with you. As a website admin, it is your responsibility to ensure that you have a safe and secure website.

You wouldn’t leave your front door open, so why would you do the same with your website? Web-based malware and spyware attacks are on the rise, so do all that you can to ensure your team is security-minded so that your website is protected and not an easy target.

Need help with your station website? Reach out to us at https://www.skyrocketradio.com.  

Our WordPress maintenance checklist covers a list of essential things you should do religiously each month to ensure that your website runs smoothly across multiple devices. While this is a monthly list, you'll see better results if they can be performed weekly or even daily.

1. Perform a website speed audit to ensure it’s loading quickly: Page speed can affect SEO and user experience. GTMetrix, WP Checkup, and Google’s Page Insights are great tools that pinpoint where your slowness could be coming from. This could be large images, a heavy homepage with lots of elements, or even a slow hosting provider.

2. Monitor your website security daily: Security is such a major concern. Run a daily test to spotlight intrusions, file changes, and malware.

3. Review Google Analytics: The best way to know how well your site is doing and what’s working is by reviewing your Analytics data. 

4. Clear your trash: Old pages, posts, expired events and contests, obituaries, banner ads campaigns that have ended… all of this is simply taking up space and can cause your site to get slower over time.

5. Clean your media files: One of the main reasons you may run out of space on your hosting provider is because you have excess media that is no longer being used. These files add up over time.

6. Ensure images are optimized: Optimized images load faster and that helps with SEO and user experience. Ensure your authors know the value of the optimization process.

7. Check your navigation menus: Poor navigation is one of the frustrating spots for users. Check everything to ensure things are easy to find and hassle-free. Is anything missing? Be sure to check on desktop and mobile.

8. Check for broken links and missing pages: These can dramatically reduce your SEO. Do a search for “broken link checker” and enter your site for analysis.

9. Review your forms: Are contests easy to enter? Do the “contact us” and “advertise with us” forms work properly? Are those forms still going to the appropriate people?

10. Review the “Advertise with Us” page: Keeping this current and relevant is crucial because you don’t want to miss an advertising opportunity. How can it be better?

11. Check and delete spam comments: Ensure that spammers have not gotten through to comment on your website. Deleting all spam comments helps to keep your database clean and fast.

12. Reply to comments: If you have comments enabled, reply to them when necessary to improve user engagement.

13. Change your passwords: One of the most effective ways to prevent a malicious attack is to update your passwords often. And ensure they are strong passwords.

14. Remove inactive website admins: Ensure ex-employees are removed from the website admin. In the deletion process, it will ask if you want their posts to be attributed to a different author.

15. Review your site on multiple devices: Ensure things are still working the way someone would expect them to. If your site is experiencing an issue on a device you don’t use very often, it may take a long time to resolve and that could result in lost visitors.

While this list of for WordPress websites, the same can be true regardless of your content management system. Every website needs continuous maintenance to work properly.

I spend a lot of time navigating radio station websites all over the world and consider their efficacy from both a marketing and user perspective. I’m often surprised by odd navigational choices, inconsistent calls-to-action, and content that provides little informational value, much less a reason or me to return again tomorrow.

Your website should have fresh and relevant content, but it should be attractive so that it invites visitors back. Visitors flock to attractive destinations. A website with a great design and relevant content provides a better user experience that can help in building your station brand, gaining more visitors and boosting your digital sales.

Is your website a destination or a disappointment?

You might look at your station website every day, so it may be difficult to look at it with fresh eyes. Regardless, try pretending that you’re someone new to town and have never been to the site. Ask yourself these questions…

1. Why would I want to visit this website today and what would make me come back tomorrow? Can you immediately see something that would immediately draw you in, if you simply stumbled onto the website without any prior knowledge of the radio station?

2. What do the website owners want me to do once I get here? Is their main focus me entering a certain contest, visiting a local event, learning about news in my area, or just playing the stream?

3. Is the website well-organized with easy navigation and clear calls to action? Multiple slides of every daypart are not effective in moving people around the website. They are most often a distraction.

4. Can I easily find the information I’m looking for? I should be able to easily find specifics about a news story, event, contest, or even something about the on-air personality.

5. Is your navigation menu clean and in words that regular people would understand rather than industry jargon that is only familiar to us radio people?

6. Can I complete tasks easily? Examine the process of signing up for a contest or contacting the radio station. What obstacles could be removed to make these processes easier and faster?

7. Does the website support the station and company brand? When you have multiple people editing the website, brand updates and site updates can become disjointed.

Prioritizing the User Experience

If you’ve never completed a website usability test, Seth Resler with Jacobs Media has some great tips for that in his “Connecting the Dots” blog: https://jacobsmedia.com/conduct-usability-test-radio-stations-website.

How do you tweak your website into becoming a destination?

1. Prioritize usability & user experience

Conclusion

Visitors flock to attractive destinations that have fresh and relevant content. They return because they had a great experience. Finding content, entering a contest, or contacting the radio station was easy to do. People return to destinations like Disney World because of the great experiences they have.  Take a look at your station website with fresh eyes and put some of these practices in place to make it the best destination it can be.

Need help with that? Reach out to us.

There are a few different methods to display a video on your website and the advantages of using a third-party service like Youtube and Vimeo versus uploading and displaying video from your hosting provider.

Downsides of hosting video yourself

Uploading large video files to your website can not only take forever but they could be denied by the hosting provider due to upload size and timeout limits. If you have multiple people watching your video at once, it can slow or even crash your website due to exhausting those resources.

One video format, codec, size, and resolution does NOT fit all applications and devices. Streaming services re-encode your uploaded video to several different formats and resolutions and serve the right video to the user based on their viewing device and internet speed.

Video hosting services exist and thrive because they solve these problems. They also give you access to additional features such as analytics detailing how long your viewers watch your videos.

YouTube deserves special attention because it's the largest video hosting service in the world and the second-largest online search engine in the world. It’s also extremely easy to use and FREE!

There are some downsides to using providers like YouTube but most people are ok with them. Like…

Ads – YouTube generates revenue by advertising, whether they be pre-roll or banner ads at the bottom of videos.

Related Videos – Many embedded videos will show a thumbnail grid of related videos after your video has been completed. An algorithm chooses these videos based on context and relevancy, so a video might show up that you don’t want to.

Regardless of these downsides, with both free and paid options available, there isn't really a need to host your video on your web host.

How to embed a third-party service video

Within WordPress, adding a video has become as simple as pasting the video’s URL into a post or page. WordPress has built-in embed functions that take a known provider’s URL and convert it to an embedded video player, without you having to do anything else. For a full list of supported sites, visit the WordPress Embed Codex at https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/hooks/oembed_providers.

For a little more control, use a shortcode or editor block with additional settings that allow you to stylize the video and placement to your liking.

If you don’t use WordPress, then you can always choose the embed options found inside any of these third-party services. Be careful with this embed method because iframe codes will have explicit width and height values set in the parameters and these will not automatically adjust depending on the device a user could be watching from. To make the videos responsive to all devices, you must do a little more code work wrapping the iframe within a responsive DIV element and that might not be easy for those not familiar with HTML and CSS.

Conclusion:

We’ve talked about the downsides of uploading video to your website server in how those videos can take up lots of space and exhaust your server resources to slow or even crash your website. This is what makes a third-party video service the clear winner on how to display video for your website visitors.

I should also mention that the same can be said for large audio files as well. They also take up lots of resources to play. This is why we advocate that you use a streaming service for those as well like SoundCloud or a podcast provider.

In the end, keep in mind that the right solution exists to keep your website ripe with great content while never slowing your visitors down. We would love to help you with that. Reach out to us.