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As a non-profit organization operating on a challenging budget, tracking your reach online is often one of those laborious yet essential tasks. At this point, you may not have a clear picture about how effective your different marketing strategies are. Google Analytics, a free website analytics tool, allows you to focus your current and future marketing efforts on the advertising channels that produce the most reach and the majority of donations, providing your organization with the transparency and efficiency it needs.

Although there are many paid tracking solutions available, Google's free analytics tool supports, analyzes, and optimizes websites of all sizes. Let's get to know the basics of this robust and sometimes daunting tool, as well as some of the downsides you ought to know about.

Google Analytics Dashboard

What Information Does Google Analytics Provide My Nonprofit?

Analytics tracks user visits, page views, and unique visitors. What's more, it also captures wisdom previously available only through expensive tracking solutions like Omniture, Webtrends, and Unica. In the past two years Google has added visual overlays, conversion funnel tracking, and motion graphs, all of which can help your non-profit organization understand:

• How many have answered your calls to action, such as downloading or donating
• Where your website traffic is coming from (email, search engine, direct links)
• What users are clicking on
• How many of your users are returning to your site and how often
• How many have answered your calls to action, such as downloading or donating
• What pages of your site users spend the most time on

Sounds Great. How Do I Set Up Google Analytics?

Helpful articles and resources by Google

Setting up Google Analytics does require a bit of technical knowledge.

After signing up for Google Analytics with your Google account (using the same login as your Gmail account), you will have to add a small snippet of code to the bottom of each page you want tracked. This piece of code needs to be copied and pasted just before the closing </body> of the HTML. Pasting at the bottom of the page ensures that Analytics starts tracking only once the rest of the page has loaded.

Depending on your site's setup, adding the code could be tedious, or call for a slick find/replace operation. If you're in such a situation, you're probably in the market for a modern website running a web-based platform such as Wordpress or Drupal that has built-in modules that allow you to "set it and forget it."

Start Learning About Your Donors and Volunteers

See where your donations and users are coming from

Installing and configuring is one thing. Gathering data is the next. So how do you turn all of this data into actionable information? Google Analytics provides advanced reporting options that allow you to customize reports specific to your organization’s goals and needs.

Let's say you want to gather more volunteers for your cause. You had a small budget and decide to send out an email blast as well as create a targeted PPC campaign. If you want to see how many users came to your site from the email and compare the numbers to the results from the PPC campaign, you can easily create a report that shows you the ROI day by day, hour by hour.

An even more valuable report to your cause would be to track which users have made a donation and where these visitors came from, at which time of the day, and how long they stayed on your site. By setting up conversions and event tracking inside Google Analytics, you can track how many times a user reaches your donation page, and how many of those users actually make a donation. You can also track where these users came from with the use of advanced segments in your reporting, letting you know where to pay special attention in your future marketing initiatives.

Let’s say in the last month your organization has received $1,000 in donations through your website. By running a conversion report in Analytics, you may learn that $600 in donations came from users who clicked on your link through an email, another $200 came by searching Google, $100 from a banner advertisement you placed on a partner’s site, and the rest came from users who came directly to your website by entering your web address. With this data you will learn which marketing channel produces the majority of your donations, while cutting time and money spent on a channel that is not performing.

Free Has its Downsides

One of the major differences between Google Analytics and its paid alternatives is the speed at which data is reported. Several paid analytic solutions now report in real time (or close to it). Analytics, unfortunately, takes 12 to 24 hours to report data.

Another key difference is that Google also tracks all of your user data and uses it to optimize its own products and services.  In essence, you are paying for your analytics solution by sharing your data with Google, which may violate some organizations' privacy policies.

Now let's get a little technical. Because Analytics lives "client side," it cannot track activity on your server directly, but only glean wisdom from what it knows is happening in each user's browser. Essentially this lack of vision means Analytics will not be completely accurate in what it reports. You won't be to track how many downloads were started but not finished, for example, since Analytics can only track a user's clicking on the link to download but not the actual download of the file--something only server-side tracking can do.

Finally, there is the issue of user experience. Like many Google products, Analytics is simply loaded with features and excels at gathering data. It does not, however, excel at giving 90% of organizations the key wisdom they need right out of the box. You'll have to spend some time getting to know it first, setting up your goals, creating reports, and familiarizing with the interface in general. Solutions like Clicky make the experience a bit less cumbersome.

The Final Word

If a paid solution is not in your organization's budget, it’s highly recommended that Google Analytics be adopted into your organization’s core tools. Otherwise, you're at risk of blindly deploying your marketing strategy without the ability to measure reach.

Note that you can implement more than one tracking solution at a time on your website—so if there is a reliable, highly customizable, user-friendly resource like Google Analytics, why not implement it as well?