Using Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a powerful tool. And with a $0 price tag, it’s a tool that your nonprofit can’t afford not to maximize. Access to data alone won’t increase donations to your cause but understanding these reports and reacting to donor behavior can.
NOTE: If you haven’t activated your Google Analytics account, do that first.
Enable Demographics and Interest Reporting.
Demographics and Interest Reporting is your go-to report for details on your online visitors. This data is crucial, but takes only a few clicks to turn on: Open Reports in your Google Analytics admin. dashboard, navigate to the Audience > Demographics > Overview report and click Enable.
When you dig in to your site’s demographics you can test assumptions about your online audience, determine the direction of a creative campaign or retarget where you spend your advertising dollars.
Set goals in Google Analytics.
A goal represents a completed activity on your site, such as signing up for your organization’s newsletter or clicking ‘Donate Now.’ Setting goals that align with your nonprofit’s digital strategy allows you to measure effectiveness and adapt tactics. You need to determine which actions are important to your organization for the report to be relevant to your nonprofit’s strategy. The four types of goals are:
- Destination: A specific location on your site
- Duration: How long someone spends on a page.
- Pages/screens per session: How many pages does it take for the prospective donor to get your online donation page.
- Events: An action on your site, such as signing up for a newsletter or downloading something.
If your nonprofit wants to know if prospective donors are watching a video on your website, you’d set a Google Analytics goal for this event. Instead of only knowing the number of people that have visited the page, you now know how many are engaging with the content as well.
Once you’ve set your goals, the reports will appear in your dashboard so tracking is at your fingertips (instead of hunting through tabs to make sense of numbers). Remember to name your goals in a way that make sense as this is how you’ll access them.
Track online donations with Enhanced Ecommerce for new donor insights.
Donating money online is comparable to purchasing a product, so why not track your donor’s online journey the way a retailer tracks a customer? Make sure your website supports Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking (this may be a question for your nonprofit’s website provider or developer).
When you activate ecommerce tracking, you’re able to better understand who your donors are and how they interact with your nonprofit online: How many times do they visit your site before making a donation? Which social media platform is more likely to guide them to your donation page? How many prospective donors make it to the confirmation page and leave before completing a donation? Then use that data to inform and adapt your practices. (With the examples above, you could consider a landing page with more information, increase your ad budget on Facebook, or streamline your checkout process).
There are two types of ecommerce reports in particular that you should reference:
- Shopping Behavior Analysis: By combining constituent behaviors, transactions and events, this report follows how people respond to just about every event throughout your entire website, from landing on the site to making a donation.
- Checkout Behavior – Compared to the Shopping Behavior Analysis, this detailed report focuses on the prospective donor’s actions on your checkout page. For each step of the donation process, you can create a tag to track how a donor reacts to your site (such as creating an account, entering payment details or confirming their gift).
Instead of just seeing where your donors come from to get to your site, you can see how they move through it, how much time is spent on your online donation page and at what point they may leave before completing the donation. And when your nonprofit is working to increase those conversions, having – and understanding – this data can make a big difference.
Source: Rai Masuda
Achieve Agency Blog December 2017
Learn about more online tools and tips in the Managing Technology course on June 22.