Google Analytics is a powerful measurement tool, but for many non-profits it isn’t clear how to make use of your data. So how do you make it work for your organization? A good place to start is building a direct connection from your organizational values and goals to the data you track. This will help make your findings meaningful for you and your team. Here’s a six-step process to get you started.
1) Align your website goals with your organizational goals
Behind every good site is a clear, measurable set of website goals. As you create or revise your goals, its important to directly align those goals with your larger organizational goals. Starting through the lens of shared goals will help you make your reports relevant and useful for everyone on your team.
Write down your organizational goals. Then define the ways that your site contributes to those goals. Here’s an example:
Organizational goal:
- Nurture participation in programs.
Website Goals:
- Make important program information available and easy to find.
- Increase online enrollment in programs.
2) Ask some questions about your goals
Next, you’ll want to narrow in what you want to know about how people use your site. What questions do you have about how they’re behaving in relation to your goals? A good way to do this is to write questions alongside your goals. For example:
Organizational goal:
- Nurture participation in programs.
Website Goals:
- Make important program information available and easy to find.
- Increase online enrollment in programs.
Research Questions:
- Are people able to find the programs pages?
- Where are people coming from when they arrive at the programs pages?
- Is the content engaging people?
- Are users able to complete the application?
3) Apply Google Analytics metrics to those questions
Once you’ve determined your questions, you can start to get technical. Review the metrics that Google Analytics offers and think about which metrics can help you answer your questions. Google offers detailed information about metrics and dimensions for reporting. Here is a quick overview of the metrics available in Google Analytics 4 and some of the ways they can help you understand user intent and behavior:
Where people are coming from.
This metric is useful for understanding how people are getting to your site. Are they following links from emails, following links in social posts, or searching for you through browsers? If you set up tagging, this metric can be helpful in understanding how well specific email and social campaigns are working.
Session Start | How many people landed on your site
First visit | How many people landed on your site for the first time
These metrics are helpful for high-level context and understanding site usage overtime. They help you understand how many sets of eyes are getting to your pages — and how many of them were new versus returning users.
How many people came to your site and stayed on the page for at lease 10 seconds or visited another page on your site.
This metric is important for understanding how many of your site’s visitors actually engaged with the material. It weeds out sessions where people visited the page, realized it wasn’t what they were looking for, and left quickly. A high engaged user rate tells you that people are finding information they are interested in.
How many times a page was loaded.
This helps you understand how often individual pages are being viewed. It can help you think about what information is most interesting to people.
How many times a youtube video was started, watched to 25%, 50%, 75%, or completed.
When you’ve embedded a youtube video (this feature only works out-of-the-box for youtube embeds), video views will tell you how often its being started and how much of the video content people are taking in.
How many files were downloaded
This metric can help you understand how interested people are in your downloadable content and what files they’re downloading most often. This can be useful when you have a lot of PDF resources or applications and want to know if they’re being used.
How many times a link was clicked
Here you can understand what external links people are using. This can tell you how many times people are clicking through to an application page or it could tell you which linked resources are most interesting to people.
How many times a page was scrolled to 90%
This metric is excellent for telling you how much people have really engaged in the content of a page. Especially for longer pages, this metric is important for understanding if people make it to important information further down the page.
It doesn’t necessarily mean that people found what they were looking for though. Sometimes a high scroll rate can mean that people scrolled multiple times trying to find what they were looking for. You’ll want to combine this with other action metrics, like clicks, or look at the page in a path exploration to better understand if they got where they needed to go.
Here are some examples of how to align these metrics to your questions. For example, here’s how you’d align metrics to the organizational goal of nurturing participation in programs.
Organizational goal:
- Nurture participation in programs.
Website Goals:
- Make important program information available and easy to find.
- Increase online enrollment in programs.
Research Questions:
- Are people able to find the programs pages?
- Where are people coming from when they arrive at the programs pages?
- Is the content engaging people?
- Are users able to complete the application?
Metrics:
- Program and enrollment page visits and engaged users
- Traffic source to program and enrollment pages
- Scroll depth on program pages
- Clicks through to resources, relevant pages
- Files downloaded related to programs
- Ratio of program page visits to enrollment page visits to enrollment in programs
4) Put your metrics to work
With your metrics in hand, its time to dig into the data! Google has many technical help docs on how to use the platform. Here are some good ones to start with:
It’s a good idea to regularly check in on your metrics to keep a pulse progress towards your goals. Set up dashboards and explorations that clearly show the metrics that are relevant to you, so they’re there for you when you need them. It can be difficult at this point to resist the urge to jump to conclusions based on what you are seeing. It’s best to see how the data plays out over a longer period of time and multiple engagement efforts, so you know your insights aren’t anecdotal.
5) Find stories in your data to help guide your team’s decision making
At regular intervals – once a quarter or every couple months, report back relevant findings to your team. This is your opportunity to frame your findings through the organizational goals you started with. Share your thinking by walking your team back through the process: share the data you found, the questions you asked, and how they’re related to your web and organizational goals. There can be an urge to immediately change strategy based on new findings. It can be wise here to reiterate to the larger team that these are trends and patterns that offer insight, but are most useful when understood over time.
6) Adapt your strategy and measure again
When you feel solid about a particular insight make small, data-driven improvements to your strategy. Then measure again to see if it improved engagement towards your goals.
If you feel unclear about how to use your findings, that’s a great opportunity to go back and rethink your questions and metrics and web goals. Are you measuring the right interactions for your web goals? Are your goals aligned with what people are showing you they need?
Part of exploring Google Analytics is to uncover questions about engagement that you may not have thought to ask otherwise. You may uncover more questions than answers as you get started. And that’s ok! Using Google Analytics is a continuous process for connecting and understanding the people your site serves.
We can help!
If you’d like support getting the most out of Google Analytics 4, we can help! We’d be happy to move through this process with you to make Google Analytics work for you and your team.