Google Analytics - Empowering Your Digital Donor Insights

Have you ever wanted to know what your donors are doing on your website? Where do they come from, and how long have they been on your website? Google Analytics (GA) is one of the most powerful and accessible tools charities can use to dive deeper into creating those donor profiles. Today we share why Google Analytics is a must-have tool for your organization and its benefits. You can understand the customer journey and improve your marketing return on investment (ROI). Imagine knowing more about your donors beyond just how much they give!

What is Google Analytics, and why is it important?

GA gives you the free tools you need to analyze data for your organization in one place! This powerful tool can help you make informed decisions about how to best present your website to keep digital traffic constantly interested and have a seamless experience that leads to donations.

There’s more, the data calculated for you could answer the most critical questions your website and communications plan is struggling to answer:

• Who is visiting my website, and where do they originate?
• What should I do to drive online traffic and ultimately make them donate?
• What pages, blog content or information are people most and least interested in?
• How many of these visitors are donating/supporting?
• Who is contributing to the cause and why?
• What are they searching for on my website?
• Are there any specific demographics we uncovered and should tap into?

How much does Google Analytics cost?

There is no cost to set up and use the software, making it a compelling reason to utilize this powerful resource.

How do these features benefit me?

Deep understanding of your donor base

You can leverage donor-centric analytics across your sites and apps; this way, you can make informed decisions that are best for your organization. The software lets you see how online traffic engages your organization and different channels' roles with advanced reporting and analysis. GA is powerful in integrating with systems used to measure donor long-term value and conversion rates through your custom donation forms. Remember, this is all done while you can focus on making those critical in-person relationships with donors.  

Get more intelligent insights to improve ROI

Use Google’s machine learning to discover new and predictive insights from your data — such as which donor demographic is most likely to donate and how they use your website. This is key to ensuring your potential donors are consistently interested in the website to prevent them from lapsing. Google machine learning does all the hard work of measuring data and crunching the numbers so you can make the final decision.

Connect your Google Analytics with other platforms

The software is built to work with other Google solutions and partner products so you can use your insights to improve marketing performance. Remember when we discussed the Google Ad Grant program a few weeks ago? If you’re new, you can check out the webinar here.

For example, you are using the grant from Google to push ads for your next fundraising event. The ads' results and clicks are easily integrated with GA; in one easy-to-use dashboard, you can see your paid ads and your homemade content to see what is working for you. 

Make your data work for you.

Analyze your marketing data quickly and collaborate with your team with an easy-to-use interface and shareable reports. You can say goodbye to excel sheets and hours of pivot tables with easy-to-see and understand analytics that tells a story of your donor’s journey. 

For example, as a charity, your marketing data can help you make smarter decisions such as:

• Comparing your most popular page against your most valuable one
• Which channels (Google Search, Social Media, a published digital) are sending your potential donors
• Understanding your traffic's actual demographic - the device they use, gender, age, location, and more so you can better tailor content to entice them to donate
• The hours in which your website is most active so that you can publish updates for more eyes to see without paying for ads
• See a flow-through of what a typical person does so you can understand their journey and optimize that journey to donate to your cause

The analytics also offers built-in technical support and a global infrastructure that delivers secure, accurate data across your sites and apps while staying entirely under your control.

So what does this look like for me?

Let’s say you want to increase the number of donations on your website significantly but are unsure how; here's how you would use GA to approach your problem.

First, you would want to understand how the digital traffic would interact with your website. Then you could filter the data and segment your traffic to identify your visitors who have different needs and goals.

After doing the previous step, you’ve now obtained data that would help them identify common themes among the people. The website visitors fell into three main groups. 

• Information seekers visited the site looking for information about the cause and history of the charity.
• Prospective event participants that wanted to take part in walks, races, and other fundraising events
• Donors that are looking to donate immediately

With this information, you can now create targeted promotions for each segment and understand what they care most, which would direct people to the right place and ultimately bring in those donations.

This is music to my ears; how do I get it?

You can use this link to start your onboarding journey with GA here!

How do I use the tool?

We have a webinar partnered with Google Canada to go over how to use the software, navigate through the UI, and best practices that align with your organizational goals.

Sign Up for the webinar here.

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