The Importance of Data Analytics: Measuring Success in Digital Marketing for Non-profits

Website tracking and data analysis are some of the most important factors to set your charity’s online presence up for success. Yet many organisations are missing out on these free and easy to get insights and the benefits that come with them.

This article explains how website analytics can help your Not-for-profit organisation grow, how to get started with website tracking and what metrics to keep an eye on.

Why is Data Analytics relevant for my Organisation?

You get to know your audience

Even the most basic tracking setup gives you the chance to learn something about your audience. It is an opportunity to collect information such as your visitor’s demographics, browsing behaviour and actions on your website and then use these insights to tailor content and messaging specifically to them.

You can improve your website

Without data analysis, you are running blind and can only make assumptions about how visitors use your website. With analytics, you take out the guesswork and understand which are the most popular pages on your website, how much time visitors spend on your site, from which pages they exit the site and much more.

Tracking how people navigate your website can help improve it, make it more user-friendly and get people to spend more time on your site.

You can track user actions on your website

In addition to the automatically tracked basic events, certain activity on your website requires extra setup. Usually, this is done via Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and/or Google Tag Manager. The effort pays off, however, once you find out whether people take the actions you want them to take or not.

For example, do you get donations, signups for a newsletter, event registrations or an enquiry? After all, these are core events for your charity and you want to know whether your website prompts people to donate, register and enquire or if they simply leave without taking any action at all.

Optimise Google Ads campaign performance

Measuring conversion events is not only relevant in Google Analytics but becomes even more important when you run campaigns in your Google Grant account. You will automatically get some basic metrics about campaign performance like impressions, clicks, ad quality and more. 

More important, however, is what happens after someone clicks on your ad. What do visitors do when they arrive on your site? Can they find what they were searching for? And how are they interacting with your website and what it has to offer? 

These insights make a big difference when optimising your campaigns, keywords and ads. If you can track the entire journey from the first ad click to the final conversion, you can identify which keywords, ads and campaigns are your top performers and which ones need improvement.

How to get started with website tracking

Most Content Management Systems (CMS) like Shopify, WordPress or Squarespace come with some basic website analytics and reporting tools. They automatically track metrics like the number of website visitors, which pages were visited or how much time people spent on each page.

More effective, however, is the use of GA4 which provides more comprehensive data insights and can also be linked to your Google Ads Grant account to measure paid campaigns’ performance. Most CMS nowadays have an integration or widget for GA4 so you don’t need to touch the website code but simply copy and paste your GA4 account ID into your CMS’ integration.

If you run Meta (Facebook & Instagram) ads, implementing the Facebook Pixel is helpful too. Similar to GA4, most CMS nowadays have an integration for Meta tracking so all you need to do is copy and paste your Pixel ID and data will start flowing.

Which metrics should I keep an eye on?

Which metrics you should focus on depends on a few factors, mainly your website goals (e.g. educational vs transactional) and whether you run any paid campaigns or want to look at website improvements only.

If your focus is on website improvement only, keep an eye on the following metrics in Google Analytics 4:

• Users (= number of website visitors)

• Events & conversions (= what people do on your website)

• Average time spent on site (= how long visitors stay on your site or on individual pages)

• User acquisition (= how people find your website, e.g. through Social Media, organic search, ads or referrals)

• User attributes (= age, gender, location & other demographics)

If you run paid ads campaigns, pay additional attention to the following metrics in your Google Grant or Meta Ads account:

• Ad impressions & clicks (= how often ads appear and are clicked on)

• Click-through rate (= the ratio of impressions to clicks)

• Conversions (= website actions such as donations, signups, form submissions)

• Conversion Rate (= the ratio of clicks to conversions)

For more details on Google Ads performance metrics and how to work out what is relevant for your organisation, take a look at this comprehensive guide.

Conclusion

Website analytics and tracking is an invaluable chance to get insights into your audience's behaviour and help increase overall online presence and performance. Implementing tracking is easy thanks to most CMS having integrations for tracking IDs and don’t require website code modifications.

Take the chance and use these insights to help your charity thrive online. If you need more guidance on how to set up tracking and analyse website data, get in touch with the friendly team at BeeKind Marketing.