Has your NGO mastered Google Analytics yet?

Digital measurement tools are not exclusive to for-profit marketing managers! With online fundraising on the rise, a sharply designed website is a great tool to showcase work and encourage donations. However, NGOs often adapt web strategies in a haphazard manner, and find it difficult to measure the outcome of their online work.

While there is a whole world of paid media and services, we’ll focus on two free tools that NGOs can use to analyse their online reach and performance – Google Analytics and Page Insights on Facebook (covered in the next piece).

Google has provided a free, easy-to-use analytics service that helps measure how users are interacting with your website. Google analytics provides tools to see if more people are visiting the website, trying to donate or discovering your organisation online. While there is a paid version, NGOs can benefit with the free version which provides sufficiently deep insights. Caveat: Procuring an analytics id provides Google with access to your website performance data. If this is an issue, a private service provider could be considered.

Here are five simple steps to get a better understanding of your website performance:

• Ensure that your site has a Google Analytics ID: The ID is a unique 8-digit number generated by Google on which data for your website is stored. Getting and placing an ID on all your web pages requires some amount of technical expertise. If you’re not comfortable trying it out yourself, ask someone with a tech background to do it for you.
• Block your own IP addresses from Analytics: Once set up, Google Analytics will record each visitor to your website and add the numbers up for you. Make sure you block your own IP (internet protocol) address as it will count the number of times you visit your own website, skewing your numbers. If there is a shared connection in office, you could block that as well.
• Measure, measure, measure: Now that your data is clear, you can start overviewing it. How many visitors do you have a day, where are they from and what pages are they viewing most? Do a lot of people click on the donate button but not complete a transaction? Your analytics numbers give you a tentative idea about what interests people most and is a cue for the kind of content you should promote through your newsletters and other social media channels.
• URL Builder: The URL builder feature allows you to mark website links that you send other people. This feature allows you track how many people have clicked on links in your email signature, donation emails and more. Using the URL builder is an indirect way of measuring donor interest.
• Align your content with your website: Once you’ve set up Analytics and learnt how to tag your links, you can mark content from your social media channels, blog or newsletter when it is redirected to your website. Google Analytics will measure this as well.

Remember: Tag all your content with utm links so that you can track what kind of content is most likely to get people back to your site.