I Don’t Have Time for Metrics
Chapter Leadership Brief 11.3.23
By Lynsie Slachetka, Owner/Chief Digital Officer, aJuxt Media Group
The clock is ticking on end-of-year fundraising! As we count down not just to a New Year, but a new annual report, tax filing, or budgetary analysis, nonprofit leaders everywhere are bracing for the holiday season, and with it the rush of year-end giving.
According to the 2023 M+R Benchmarks Report, December giving accounts for roughly one fourth (26%) of annual nonprofit revenue! With Giving Tuesday quickly approaching, and print deadlines for annual appeal mailers looming, one thing is for certain: your team can’t afford for the organization’s year-end marketing to fall flat.
The truth of the matter is that when it comes to empowering your marketing analytics to help tell your nonprofit’s mission and story, it’s not as time consuming or technical as people think.
Here’s three website traffic metrics you can easily check prior to making budget decisions for the upcoming year-end campaign season:
(P.S. They take less than five minutes to check!)
- Top Referral Source: What tactic is driving traffic to my website and which tactics are converting?
Before wasting time or money, it’s critical to understand if your paid advertising campaigns, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), various social media platforms or other referral sources are outperforming or underperforming. When you need to decide where to spend advertising dollars, this information is free and right at your fingertips. So often when marketing money is spent we focus on impressions and total clicks. 2024 is the perfect time to start pushing the envelope on measuring true ROI and conversions. You can now see whose “first visit” was because of a paid LinkedIn campaign and if they took the conversion action your brand would hope for.
Follow these steps:
Pro tip: If your events and conversions aren’t set up in GA4, follow these simple steps to make sure this information is available next quarter!
- Top Performing Content: What website pages are people visiting?
Ask yourself, “What’s critical for people to see when they arrive at my website? If your goal is to drive donations and your giving landing page isn’t in your top pages, you may need to change your outreach efforts. Whatever your reason is for driving your audiences to a page, be sure there’s a clear, visible Call To Action.
Here’s how to pull your top content in GA4 so your nonprofit can leverage similar strategies across your various content platforms.
- Year Over Year Comparison: How has my organization’s website traffic improved? Has there been a change in referral sources within the last year?
It’s important to see beyond the micro-monthly trends. We suggest pulling a year over year comparison report. Fluctuation in social media platform deliveries and algorithm shifts on search platforms can impact not just your total website traffic numbers but the composition of the website audience. If you know that most of your donors are local and you are seeing a surge of traffic from overseas, pinpointing which campaign is driving irrelevant traffic can help you make a crucial budget decision or shift a marketing tactic.
Loving this and want more details from your data? Several other default GA4 reports could prove to be helpful for your organization. Here are those report names and the insights they provide:
- Monetization – What is your donors’ level of donation completion ? e.g., do start the donation process and check out immediately or do they leave the website at a specific point in the process?
- Retention – Whether your audience is coming back
A high retention rate could suggest your website is updated and changing enough that users come back frequently. In the same way, low retention–especially with a short average session duration–suggests that your site is not drawing people in and keeping their interest over time.
- Demographics – Who are your website donors?
Does your app draw in more teenagers or middle-aged individuals than your website? If, for instance, you have a significantly lower percentage of 40-50 year olds visiting your app, the design of the site, content on your site, or other marketing materials may not appeal to this demographic.
- Tech – What technology are your customers using
Do you have more mobile users than desktop users? Does a specific browser have an extra high bounce rate or low engagement? If so, you may need to check your site’s performance on that browser and adjust accordingly.
If there are reports mentioned above that you plan to check regularly or need to share with fellow board members consider using the free Looker Studio tool to pull the data relevant to your organization’s goals into a single easy to read space.
It may not seem like you have the time to check these metrics, but when time is money, like it so often is in the fundraising space, your time is valuable and your metrics matter.
If you’re looking for year-end campaign support, metrics mastery, a 2024 social media strategy, or just a sounding board for your marketing needs, our team is here to help. Check us out online at aJuxt.com.
Lynsie Slachetka
Lynsie is an adventurous audience development specialist, social media strategist and integrated marketing professional whose motto is to keep it “Targeted, Focused, and Strategic. Then the brand story can be heard.” Lynsie is known for diving into analytics and finding the hidden egg that unlocks authentic brand audience engagement.
Lynsie’s career in communications spans over a decade. She has extensive knowledge in digital advertising, search engine optimization, social media management, and brand reputation management. Lynsie worked for Hearst Digital Media Services and was co-owner of a Tallahassee-based marketing agency, Voxy Media Group, before stepping away for new ventures. She’s a Midwestern gal with a heart for the world. Lynsie loves communications—the art of effective advertising. She also loves her kids, hubby, kayaking and exploring. Her motto is: “Nothing is impossible if you just start it.”