By Geneviève Cassan
Where are donors coming from? What content is most effective in converting visitors into registrants? Where are users losing losing interest? How does social impact site traffic?
Fortunately, Google offers a free tool that allows you to answer these questions called
Google Analytics!
Google Analytics (GA) provides the tools to measure and analyze how people find and interact with your website and eventually take action to support your mission (Corrado, 2013). Here are a few reasons why you should strongly consider incorporating GA into your engagement strategies:
1. It will help you easily track your most popular pages
The "Behaviour" tab offers a multitude of options to help you understand your visitors’ behaviour. By exploring the "Site Content" section, you’ll be able to determine which pages are the most engaging. Ultimately, this will give you precious insight regarding the most popular content, and will help you build future campaigns or communication in a better and most efficient way.
2. It will allow you to create and compare segments
Google Analytics gives you the ability to create segments based on plenty of attributes, such as mobile traffic, or new users, and this will help you determine if your visitors’ behaviour differ from one another. They’ve also just recently launched a new demo version of GA, where you can get inspiration on how to create segments or which reports to use (Google, 2016).
3. It will indicate you where your visitors are coming from
The ‘Acquisition’ tab will give you precise information about your website’s traffic (including referrals, and channels). This will help you guide your future promoting and advertising efforts based one those that have been the most successful (ie. social, direct, referral, etc.). That’s also where you can track the result of your Google Adwords campaigns.
4. It will provide you with general yet helpful statistics
The "Audience" dashboard contains valuable statistics to get to know your visitors. That’s where you’ll find out about who they are, where they’re from and what are their interests. Moreover, "the three most important metrics on this dashboard are Pages per Visit, Average Visit Duration, and Bounce Rate. As a general rule, you want to increase the first two and decrease the third." (Good, 2014)
5. It will reveal your conversion rate
Last, but certainly not least, GA has a section where you can track conversion rates, meaning how many Website’s visits have led to a donation. Just like the "Acquisition" tab, you can organize your data by channel, and see which ones are the most profitable.
raisin makes gaining these user metrics easy. With the click of a button, your fundraising is instantly connected with Google Analytics, allowing you to leverage Google's tools to record, track and analyze fundraising campaign activity efficiently.
To learn more about how your non-profit organization can utilise raisin's online fundraising solution in conjunction with Google Analytics, please get in touch with our Business Development Manager,
Gus!
Sources: