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Website Marketing Tips for Nonprofits (Part 2 of 3): Analytics

In this blog mini-series, we’re covering some essential digital marketing tools.  If you missed the part one about SEO, go back and check it out here.  In this post, I wanted to talk about another critical tactic for your arsenal: tracking web analytics.  

What is Analytics?

Web analytics refers to the collection of data through your website for the purpose of analyzing it to identify patterns, trends, and the behavior of your users.  Doing this gives you all the details of what’s going on with your website visitors.   

Why is it important?

Knowing how visitors engage on your website helps you understand what is working and what isn’t.  An effective digital marketing strategy is data-driven. Analytics provides all the information you need to leverage your nonprofit website, quantify the results of your efforts, and focus your goals and strategy for high-impact results.  It gives you critical information about your site’s traffic, conversion, and content. Your organization can use that information to help you strengthen your connection with your audience and position for strategic growth. 

How do I get started?

There are many free and paid tools out there to track analytics on your website. One of the most popular choices is Google Analytics because it’s free. Though it requires a little technical setup as you need to add a piece of code to your website to use it. Getting started with analytics can feel like opening up the floodgates of data and information.  So here are some important metrics you’ll want to pay attention to first:

Web Traffic – who is visiting your site?  How many people click through your site during any given period of time?  Of those, how many are new, unique visitors? How many are returning? Tracking this data and its growth helps you determine the reach of your nonprofit.  It is a great starting place as you build an audience and measure the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategies.

Bounce Rates – this refers to visitors who visit your site, then “bounce” (as in leave quickly) instead of hanging out and interacting.  This data can be used to analyze the effectiveness of your web design, content and user experience. For example, if you experience a high bounce rate from mobile users it could indicate that your website is not optimized effectively.  Which brings us to…

Traffic Source – Where is your web traffic coming from?  How are they navigating to your site? Is your traffic organic or being directed through paid marketing efforts?  Analyzing traffic source data help you determine the success of marketing efforts, as well as bringing attention to potential new markets.  It can also inform where to focus paid marketing to get the highest return on your investment.

Popular Pages – Which pages on your site are grabbing the attention of your audience?  Which pages are having the most impact? How can you leverage that attention and interest to increase conversions and impact?  Figuring out which pages are the most popular will also shed light on which area of your site may need improvement.

Devices – Are your visitors using a desktop computer or their mobile phones to view your website? If 80% of your visitors are accessing your website on their mobile phones, but your website isn’t mobile-optimized, you could be missing out on a large opportunity to engage with them. It’s important to know how viewers are experiencing your website. 

Website analytics help nonprofit organizations like yours make data-driven decisions about how best to focus their time and resources to leverage the true potential of your website.  

At GrowNP we understand how important analytics are to your organization.  That is why our sites include Google Analytics Integration which measures these data points and much more. 

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