[This is a section from my upcoming ebook, "3 Fundraising Metrics For Your Nonprofit and Charity Website". -Shabbir]
Measurement of prospective online donors in the process of giving is critical to optimizing your website. However many nonprofits use third party donation forms that they cannot tag with an analytics product, such as network4good's DonateNow product, Amazon's SimplePay, or Paypal. If this is your situation, you lack key visibility. You merely know how many people were surfing your website, not how many started the giving process, or even which pages motivated them to consider donating.
All you have is some number of visitors to the site, what pages they liked, and then some number of donations that you received. How the heck are you supposed to optimize that? It's worse than flying a plane purely on instruments. It's like flying a plane on half the instruments in fog.
Today I'm going to show you a trick in Google Analytics to help you track links to third party pages that, for whatever reason, you don't have the ability to put a Google Analytics tag on and measure.
What are we aiming for?
Ideally you want to have a marketing funnel that let's you associate visitors to the site (uniques), people who started the donation process (prospects), and people who finished (donors). That marketing funnel should look something like this:
But what you have right now is probably this amount of information:
Did 95,000 people start giving and only 1,000 of them (roughly 1%) finished? If so then you should be immediately reworking your donate form. Did 5,000 people start giving and then 1,000 (20%) finish? Then you may also want to look at how you call people to donate, it may not be eye catching or persuasive enough.
If you don't have data about how many people started the process, you don't know where you should be focusing your efforts.
If you're using Network4Good's DonateNow product, you can't put a Google Analytics javascript tag on the donate page to find out. So how do you get this data?
Using phantom page tags
The answer is to instruct Google analytics to record a "click" on your donate link as if it was a page visit. Since we assume that clicking on Donate is almost the same as arriving at and viewing the donate page, we can fill in the missing data. And, it turns out, it's really easy.
Let's say your existing donate button has a link that looks like this:
<a href="https://npo.networkforgood.org/Donate/Donate.aspx?npoSubscriptionId=XXXXXXX">
Typically XXXXXXXX is your Network4Good DonateNow account number. If you want to fool Google Analytics into thinking that clicking on that link took you to a page named "/outbound/network4good", just add an "onClick" Javascript tag to the link
<a href="https://npo.networkforgood.org/Donate/Donate.aspx?npoSubscriptionId=XXXXXXX"
onclick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/network4good'); ">
In fact you can add the onClick text to your website exactly as I've done it here. Now check it the next day to make sure it's recording in google analytics correctly. You should find that over time it registers pageviews and unique visitors in the Content tab of Analytics, which means that over time you can see the prospecting trend:
Note that the rise and fall of the people clicking to donate must be normalized with the level of unique visitors for the week to get a prospect rate. (More on that in my upcoming ebook)
You can also use the Navigation summary report to display what pages are most important for driving traffic to your donation page, and focus on their optimization first.
In this example the homepage was the source of half the donate clicks. If you're looking to see where to start optimizing this site, I would start there.
Is this just a trick for donations?
No! If you're using Constant Contact for email lists and you haven't programmed to their API, your subscription form is not hosted by you either. No problem, just give it a link (as I've circled above) and you're on your way to tracking that as well.
What about the completed donations, how should I measure them?
You could try and measure the thank you page, which depending on the flexibility of your tool you might have some control over. However I recommend looking at the actual donation report you receive from the tool and use that number. There's nothing more final and comforting than "money in the bank" (or at least "money marked for settlement" if you're a credit card payment processing geek).
If you try this yourself, let me know how it goes. There's more information on how link tagging at Google's excellent "How do I manually track clicks on outbound links?" page. I'm always interested in how people measure their sites, and look for my upcoming ebook in the next few weeks, we're just doing the final design and layout now.
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