Google for Nonprofits Blog: July 2013

How to keep track of multiple marketing channels (and save time) with Google Analytics

Monday, July 22, 2013

Together we’ve walked through how to design a nonprofit measurement strategy and how we can use Google Analytics to get the metrics that we need. Now that you’re off to the races with your new measurement plan, here are a few non-technical things you can do to make monitoring your data easier and more insightful.

Monitor KPIs with a custom Analytics Dashboard. Using a custom dashboard will help you easily view metrics that are important to you in Analytics. If you’re looking for a template, here’s a Google Analytics Dashboard for nonprofits created with our measurement strategy in mind. Remember, you need to have Ecommerce tracking implemented to track donations and goals configured to track KPIs. If you’re not using those features then you will not see any data in the dashboard.

Understand how your marketing activities work together with Multi-Channel Funnels. Often an online donation isn’t the result of a single effort like an online ad, but actually the result of multiple marketing channels working together. If we only examine the last touchpoint before a donation or other online goal is made, we could miss several important insights and opportunities. That's where Multi-Channel Funnels come in.

Multi-channel funnels allow you to see interactions across different digital media and show you how those channels then work together together to reach an online goal, like a donation or volunteer sign-up. When you set-up goals or track Ecommerce transactions in Google Analytics, Multi-Channel Funnels will automatically generate five reports to show you that data. Using this information, you can get a deeper understanding of the value your marketing efforts.

We hope these tips help you implement and easily track a measurement strategy in line with your mission. If you'd like to learn more about Analytics, visit our YouTube channel and Google+ page for more tutorials, updates and ideas on how you can leverage our tools to help your nonprofit.

Posted by Justin Cutroni, Google Analytics team

New Learn with Google Summer Webinar Series

Thursday, July 18, 2013

At Google, one of our goals is to help make the web work for you. Today we’re announcing our summer series of Learn with Google webinars, which will teach you how to use digital to build brand awareness and give you the tools you need to drive sales. Each of our sessions gives you deep-dive educational content, across a breadth of products and marketing objectives, in a format that’s convenient for you. Every webinar is led by Google product experts and includes time for audience Q&A. Sign up to start becoming a smarter digital marketer now.
Upcoming live webinars:
July [Shopping] Google Shopping 101: Overview of Shopping & Product Listing Ads [Search] Improving Your Search Campaigns with Remarketing Lists for Search Ads [YouTube] Driving Direct Response with Video
August [Shopping] Google Shopping 201: Product Listing Ad Optimization Essentials [Shopping] Google Shopping 301: Advanced Optimization Tactics [Search] Taking Advantage of New AdWords Features [YouTube] Building your Business with YouTube Video Ads [Social] Kick-Starting Social with Google+
September [Display] Planning Display Campaigns with the New Display Planner in AdWords
Webinars are held Tuesdays through Thursdays at 10am Pacific/1pm Eastern.
Visit our webinar site to register for any of the live sessions and to access our large library of recorded content. You can also stay up-to-date on the schedule by adding our Learn with Google calendar to your own Google calendar to automatically see upcoming webinars. Learn with Google is a program to help businesses succeed through winning moments that matter, enabling better decisions and constantly innovating. We hope that you’ll use these best practices and how-to’s to maximize the impact of digital and grow your business. We’re looking forward to seeing you at an upcoming session!
Posted by Erin Molnar, Marketing Coordinator, Learn with Google

You’re changing the world. We want to help.

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

A couple of weeks ago, we celebrated the winners of the Google Global Impact Challenge in the UK, awarding prizes to nonprofits for some amazing, innovative uses of technology to help their causes. Today we are thrilled to go one step further and launch the Google for Nonprofits programme in the UK, starting in England and Wales.
Google for Nonprofits is a one-stop-shop that offers access to our suite of free and discounted products and tools. If you work for a nonprofit, you can apply to join the program today. Once your organisation is approved, you get free Google Apps to cut IT costs and operate more efficiently, up to $10,000 a month in advertising on Google AdWords to reach more donors, and premium features for YouTube and our mapping technologies to raise awareness of your cause. We’ve also developed other online resources such as educational videos, case studies and better ways to connect with other nonprofits.

Over the years, Google has donated over $1 billion worth of products to nonprofits, and several UK organisations are already using our tools. BeatBullying, a charity that fights online bullying, uses Google Apps to enable more sharing and collaboration amongst colleagues; the Royal National Lifeboat Institution uses Google AdWords and YouTube to raise awareness and recruit more supporters; and WaterAid uses Google mapping technologies to show where their work is making a difference.
We’re inspired and humbled by the amazing ways nonprofits are making the world a better place, and look forward to supporting the work of more UK nonprofits.

Posted by Xiaonan Zhao, Product Manager, Google for Nonprofits

Using Google Analytics to measure your organization

Monday, July 8, 2013

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

For Nonprofits Blog

How to keep track of multiple marketing channels (and save time) with Google Analytics

New Learn with Google Summer Webinar Series

You’re changing the world. We want to help.

Using Google Analytics to measure your organization

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