Successful measurements are a tangible way to analyze how well your nonprofit is achieving its mission and objectives. Now that we’ve discussed how to set up a measurement framework, how are you going to gather the data? Fortunately, a fairly basic implementation of Google Analytics will give us almost everything we need. Here are four steps to get you started.

1. Tag your pages. Once you sign up for Analytics, you’ll be given a tracking code to paste onto your pages so you know when your site is visited. With your pages tagged, you can see all kinds of data including daily visits, time spent on site by country and traffic types. If you need help getting started with tracking, check out this step-by-step guide here.

2. Track KPIs with the Goals feature.  Goals are completed activities that happen on your site, like someone filling out and submitting a volunteer sign-up form.  We can easily translate the key performance indicators (KPIs) we designed in our measurement framework into Analytics Goals. For example if your KPI is volunteer sign-ups, you could track it by setting a goal of how many people reach the volunteer sign up confirmation page. Remember, you get 20 goals, so there are more than enough for all KPIs across the various business strategies. Learn how to set yours up here.

3. Measure donations and donation type with ecommerce tracking. Ecommerce tracking allows you to track total donations and differentiate donation type as a different product. This feature also enables reports that will give you insight into the behavior of your donor, including how many times they visited your site before donating and how many days between their initial visit to your site and their donation. Understanding how, why and when people give can help you make better decisions about allocating resources and future marketing efforts. You can begin implementation by activating the reports and installing additional code here.

4. Segment users with custom dimensions. Custom dimensions is a feature that lets you collect custom data with Google Analytics. For example, you could use a custom dimension to segment your website visitors into groups like volunteers and donors. When someone submits a donation your custom dimension will indicate the user is a donor. Or when someone volunteers via your website, they’ll be identified as a volunteer. With that segmentation, we can gather specific data on our donors and volunteers which allows us to measure our KPIs and get a better understanding of our users. To begin using custom dimensions, follow our implementation instructions here.

If you'd like to learn more about how you can leverage our tools to help your nonprofit, visit our YouTube channel and Google+ page for more tutorials, updates and ideas.

Posted by Justin Cutroni, Google Analytics team