Making most of digital fundraising data: Google Analytics

The good old days of Web 1.0

A world without the WWW is hard to imagine for most of us - although it is not that far away in the past. I get a little nostalgic when I think of setting up my first email address back in 1999. Back then the world was like this (ok, this is quite some time ago ..). 
Some 20 years ago, the overall number of websites around was ridiculously low for today´s standards. To get any idea about how a page was performing, web marketers had to rely on things like the notorious visitor counters  or wrangling log files created by web servers. The latter was definitely a hassle as access to these files was required in the first place, configuration file hacking or programming was necessary, only static reports etc. 

Data-driven Digital Fundraising today

Nowadays the common denominator for most organizations having a digital presence is definitely running a website. In a context of marketing and sales as well as fundraising, this page often acts as kind of hub to which other digital channels and communication activities point. Running a website requires sound management. And as management is in essence a data-driven discipline, an evidence-based approach also is key in a web context...

This is where Google Analytics comes into play. It has the capacity to answer questions like these for online fundraisers and decisions makers in general:

• How did users find and get to the site?
• Who visits the website and when?
• What kind of traffic does the site generate?
• How do users behave once they are on the site?
• How do users interact with the website, how engaged they are?
• What are the most and least interesting pages?
• What drives conversions? Who is most likely to convert?
• ...

Google Analytics is free in its base version which suits many use cases of websites. For big data applications, there is the even more powerful tool called Google Analytics 360 as part of the Google Marketing Cloud.

All you need to set up Google Analytics (free version) – apart from a website you have the ownership for of course – is a Google Account and the possibility to embed the little Java Script code snippet that does the magic. This can either be done by yourself or a web developer. Frameworks like Wordpress or Weebly (where this blog runs on) make life even easier through assistants. For the ones interested in what is happening under the hood, this infographic might be interesting.

Google Analytics in a nutshell

Google Analytics is embedded in an ecosystem together with tools like Google Tag Manager, Google Adwords etc. This is particularly the case on in a more advanced and differentiated online fundraising context.

Google analytics offers a lot of potentially insightful reports out of the box which can be used from day one. The main areas are:

• Realtime: This is where you will find live data, i.e. see how many users from where with which devices, where they came from etc. are on the respective site right now. It is a good point of entry particularly for beginners, last not least because it is fun to play with. Real-life use cases might imply portals with peak days of traffic (e.g. Black Friday, Giving Tuesday etc.)

• Audience: This is the node where you will find demographic, geographic, structural and technological information about the users on your site. The menu looks impressive at first glance, certain information (e.g. age and gender) requires the activation of additional tracking in the respective account. This might affect the privacy policy of your respective site. Sociodemographic data like age and gender are mainly derived from people who are logged in to a Google account and from third-party DoubleClick cookies (user tracking cookies).
• Acquisition: This node helps you understand where your organization is acquiring its visitors, i.e. whether they coming via search engines, display advertising, social media, partner links etc. This is also where to look for specific campaign data in case this is relevant for your site.
• Behaviour: This node contains reports on how visitors are interacting with the content on the respective website. It includes information on the “user journey” of visitors and might provide insights on how they experience your site.
• Conversion: This node holds more advanced reports that require the setup of Goals and / or Ecommerce Tracking. In case you have one or several clear-cut “fundraising sales objectives” with your site, using these reports is definitely beneficial. The Conversion section does not only provide information on so called Goal Completion but shows the path users took until they converted, i.e. the so called sales funnel.

Learn more

There is a plethora of resources from Google and other providers to take a deep dive into Google Analytics. These are a few:

• Google Analytics Academy
• Google Analytics Support
• Youtube Channel about Google Analytics
• Blog about Google Analytics

Moreover some Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) might be interesting:

• Google Analytics @ Udemy
• Google Analytics @Coursera

Advanced Analytics @ Google Analytics

Google analytics can moreover also be interesting in a broader analytics and data science context. Think of the following uses cases:

• Create insightful and easy-to-use dashboards for various audiences using tools like Google Data Studio or - our favourite - Microsoft Power BI. 
• In a context together with a CRM-system, analytics and decision makers will be interested in what the real digital sources of “fundraising sales” (e.g. committed gifts) are. In many cases, the labelling of the respective signups is as general as “digital”. This definitely does not account for all the digital channels, their specifics and the differentiated measures they require.
• Getting raw data from Google Analytics to apply data science methods such as time series analyses to predict website traffic, apply clustering methods, tailor attribution models based on insights generated from your conversion data etc.

To cut the long story short, analysts, data scientists etc. working in a fundraising context should - in addition to the digital fundraising experts taking care of the website and digital channels - care about digital data analyses in general and Google Analytics in particular. As 2020 just started - let´s get cracking! :-)

All the best and keep in touch as asykourdata.co or johannes.spiess@sos-kd.org.
Johannes

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