Posted by: Peter | August 1, 2008

Google Analytics for Non-Profits and NGOs

What it is Google Analytics?

Every non-profit should know as much as possible about its visitors. An excellent tool for this is Google Analytics. The information it extracts from your non-profit site is extraordinary. Your online marketing plans should always consider this or other similar valuable tools. With web analytics you can get many useful statistics and charts. These include:

  • Countries, cities and neighborhoods of your visitors
  • Daily visitor trends over time
  • The average time spent on your site
  • Most popular pages of your site
  • The number of pages read during each visit
  • Sites that refer the most visitors to your site
  • The pages on the referral sites that link to yours
  • Keywords people use to search for your site
  • Bounce rates, or the % of visits in which people instantly left your site.
  • The number of visitors that are accurately following the path you had designed to reach a target page. This uses the “Defined Funnel Navigation” goals feature.
  • Data on the number of clicks each link receives using overlays.

Here is a tutorial on what this tool can provide:

There are many other tutorials on this product on the web. This screencast tutorial from NewFangled.com has additional interesting ideas that could work for your non-profit or NGO. They also have a very good blog post on this topic.

Activating Google Analytics is relatively simple. First you need to create an account and then you generate the special Google Analytics HTML code for your website. Place this code at the bottom of each website page. To make it easy, most webmasters just place it in the footer of their website design template, style or theme. Each time a webpage is viewed, it sends a report back to your Google Analytics dashboard. This tutorial shows you how.

Benefits for you

Your non profit or Non Governmental Organization (NGO) can benefit in many ways from the data Google Analytics has to offer. Here are a few examples:

  • Create a marketing relationship with the sites that refer the most visitors to yours. If these sites are blogs, encourage them to write about your some more about your operations.
  • Use the maps to target specific cities or neighborhoods with direct marketing. Make those cities with the most visits to your site the priority locations in your marketing campaigns.
  • See whether the keywords people use to reach your site are the ones you think they should be using. Consider adding content or changing the titles of your pages to meet your keyword needs. This data can also be obtained for specific pages on your site.
  • Consider eliminating keywords with high bounce rates or adding more content for your low bounce rate keywords.
  • Use the bounce rates and visit times to determine how engaging each page is. Try to improve the rates for your most important pages such those that cover donations, volunteer efforts and the like.
  • Stop spending on advertising using keywords that have high bounce rates or that searches send to the wrong pages.
  • Use your top 10 most popular pages to place your most powerful messages or calls to action
  • If you have a donations page you can use the e-commerce features of Google Analytics to determine the value of your online marketing initiatives. The conversion rate of those visitors who become donors, the average value of donations and the number of donations you have received can all be tracked. If you plan your strategy correctly you can map your conversion data to geographic, campaign, and keyword factors.
  • The ecommerce feature can be used to determine the number of page views a visitor reads before making a donation.
  • Use the data on your visitors’ screen resolution, browser type , browser version and flash version as factors in designing your website layout.
  • You can filter out visits from your own offices in your reports so that they don’t skew the data related to your site.
  • Target your advertising to those sites that refer the most visitors to your site.
  • Consider creating a special page just for visitors that click through on advertising from a specific site. Sites like Facebook allow you to show advertising only to specific demographic groupings. Use this to see how effective your campaigns are.
  • Use “Navigation Analysis” to determine how people browse through your site.  See whether they are making the right decision after reading your most important pages.
  • With “Advanced Segments” you can get all this information mentioned before with very specific filters. For example “all visitors who have stayed more than 3 minutes or viewed more than 5 pages and then ended up on our donations page”. You could consider designing your site with only these viewers in mind.

There are many other ways to utilize analytics, sign up for an account and start practicing.

Where to Add Analytics

It is important to have Analytics running on all the websites under your control. These include:

There may be other candidates. Think hard to remember what other sites under your control could use this valuable feature.

Sustainability

Remember you will find these and other ideas on the web that will describe methods of how to improve your websites. Unless you assign someone in your organization to be dedicated to these tasks and regularly report on them, it won’t be done. To have a sustainable or growing presence on the web you will need to make this analysis a regular part of your operation.

Conclusion

There are many examples on the web that outline how Google Analytics has been helpful including this one from the Rutgers-Newark Law Library for the Center of Law and Justice. With this knowledge you can view your website in a new light and make your site more useful for your visitors.


Posted in Non-Profits

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