Understanding your target audience is critical to building effective fundraising and marketing campaigns.

But, it’s hard to know where to begin with the research process when building nonprofit personas.

Stakeholder interviews and donor surveys can help a lot in developing your nonprofit’s personas.  However, sometimes there are still gaps.

That's where data from Google Analytics and Facebook can help.

In addition to filling in the gaps, data can also confirm findings from other research methods. You may even be surprised by some of the trends and behaviors that pop-up in your data.

If you’re only looking at pageviews, traffic growth, and Facebook Page Likes, you’re missing some huge opportunities to understand your target audience.

We've all been there... Google Analytics and Facebook reports can be overwhelming when you start digging into it.

So much data! How do you know what matters?

This guide is here to help you get started sorting through what matters and how to use the data effectively.

By setting up just a few simple reports we can dig deep into data that will help you learn more about your donors, volunteers, members and other target audiences, so that your communications efforts can be more effective.

Use Segments To Compare Behavior and Find Trends

Google Analytics segments are a way to look at discrete user groups based on demographics, type of device, location, behavior and a lot more.

Why is this important?

Take a look at this example of our client’s data.

This data shows that over 865 conversions took place on their site from traffic that originated on Facebook.  

In comparison, traffic that originated on Twitter converted just 12 times! 

Clearly, their ideal audience is spending time on Facebook, not Twitter. This is critical information when making campaign decisions, right?

How do you use segments?

At the top of almost every report, you’ll see an area where you can add segments. Choose the ones you want to compare, then click apply.  

Segments may be one of the most important features that you can use when doing research.

It's important to realize that this process is about looking for trends and anomalies. Not all reports are going to give you a nugget of information.  But, keep digging and you can find incredible insights.

Take some time to explore the different segments that are available. You can also make custom segments.

Some popular segments that Google Analytics provides out of the box are:

1. Organic Traffic

2. Paid Traffic

3. Social Traffic

4. Referral Traffic

5. Convertering Traffic

6. Non-convertering Traffic

7. Return Visitors

8. New Visitors

9. By Device

Pro Tip: Segment Traffic By Conversions

When researching your target users, you should be looking for users that have completed a transaction or taken an action on your website to engage with you.

This could be a donation, volunteer sign-up, newsletter sign-up, or any other action that shows an interest in your work.

These are the people you want to target, right?

In Google Analytics these are referred to as conversions.  

If you don’t have conversion goals setup on your website already, do this first. Start by using your nonprofit logic model to decide what actions on your website contribute to your business goals. Then setup a goal and goal value associated with that conversion.

When performing research, we use segment to learn trends and behaviors that are specific to your audience.  

Think about questions like:

1. What external marketing channels do they come from?
2. How often do they come back to the website?
3. What pages do they land on?
4. What topics are they interested in?
5. What actions do they take before they convert?

Hacks to Find Donor and Volunteer Demographics

Now that you understand how to use segments, you can segment to learn a lot about your target audience.

Demographics are critical to getting your messaging and campaigns strategy correctly.

Compare the campaign strategy for communicating with a 60+ year old versus a 30 year old. Different channels. Different messages. Different asks.

Demographic information lays the bedrock for much of what we do in communications.

You may already have a pretty good grasp on your donor and volunteer demographics based on other research that you’ve done.  But are you getting the full picture?

How do you know your intuition is accurate?

Use Facebook Audience Insights to Perform Donor Research

Facebook Insights is a little-known tool in Facebook that will provide all kinds of amazing information about people that like your Facebook page or have interests in your mission.

In addition to demographic information like age, marital status, and education, Facebook Audience Insights will tell you about their additional interests so you can start to put together a full picture of your personas.

It can also help you identify potential strategic partnerships.

Go to your Facebook Ads Manager. You can find the Audience Insights in the main menu under Plan.

Once on the page, add your page name into field “People Connected to” field.

This will bring up your audience information. In addition to age, gender, marital status and education level, you can find out location information and additional page likes.

We like to focus on additional Page Likes, as this can tell you a lot of additional information about their interests.

Use Google Analytics Demographics Information

Google Analytics has also developed an interface for analyzing demographic information of users visiting your website.

Some information, like location, has always been available.

However, more recently, Google has given us information on things like age, gender and interests.

Google does not have access to this data on all users, so it is not nearly as accurate as Facebook. Regardless, Google Analytics can be a nice compliment to that information.

Find this information under Audiences -> Overview.

How Should You Use Google Analytics Demographic Data?

Demographics are one of the foundations for understanding your users.

If you don’t understand your nonprofit “customer” (meaning donor, members, clients, etc.) then your marketing campaigns aren’t going to be successful.

Here are a few ways we’ve used this information to develop personas with clients:

Demographic data supplements stakeholder survey and interview information. If you aren’t doing regular surveys or stakeholder interviews, you need to start.

Demographic data will help you create your almighty donor and client personas that underpin your marketing efforts.

Location data focuses your campaign approach. One of the advantages of digital marketing is that you can fish in a targeted area of the ocean, rather than casting a wide net to see where you might find fish.

Location data allows you to identify new locations where you might expand your marketing efforts and find new constituents. It also allows you to see how campaigns in particular locations might be lifting your overall performance (think radio PSA, billboard, newspaper ad or article).

Don't forget that all of this is in context of your work.

Perhaps you're wondering if your target audience is urban or rural.

Perhaps you're interested in knowing what regions you need to target for an acquisition campaign.

What are some creative ways you can use this data in your marketing efforts?

Using Event Tracking To Understand Behavior

Google Analytics events are ways to track behavior on your site that may not be business critical, but do show user engagement or behavior trends.

In particular, it can help you understand how users are engaging with content topics and how users are using your user interface.

Here are some common events that we setup on client sites:

Page Scroll Tracking. Using a tool like Google Tag Manager you can setup events to fire based on how far down the page users scroll.

This can help you learn more about how users are navigating your landing page, or you can use this to find out which blog posts are getting the most engagement. This could help you adjust content strategy and the topics of your content.

Video Watching. Events can also be fired when users what a video. This would give you insights into which videos are most popular, and the topics that resonate most with your users.

Track UI calls to action. For example, let’s say that you have a banner image on your homepage with a button that has a main call to action.  

You can track the number of times that users click on that button versus using the main navigation to get to a location on your site.  You could do the same thing for sidebar call to action buttons, etc. Again, these are not main conversions, but it would inform you how users are navigating your site.

Using Traffic Channel Analysis to Research Your Target Audience

How is traffic coming to your website? More importantly, which traffic is most engaged and converting on your website?

You can see an overview of traffic by channel under Acquisition -> Overview in Google Analytics.

Use Traffic Channel Segments to Dig Deeper

Instead of using the overview report, I prefer to use segments and compare behaviors.

Some questions that are helpful to ask yourself:

1. Which channels drive the most conversions?

2. Which channels drive the most engagement with content?

3. Does a particular channel drive most of the conversions for one goal? Meaning do volunteer sign-ups come from Twitter, but donations come from Facebook? If so, this can lead to two distinct personas.

4. Are there clear demographic patterns based on channel?

Use Organic Search and CPC Campaigns to Learn More

When you connect Search Console and your Google Grants account, Google Analytics will provide really powerful information about what users were searching before they landed on your site.

Why does this matter?

Search queries can provide a really clear view into a user’s motivations and concerns.

If you can connect traffic to search queries and behaviors, then this can help you model your target audience's motivations and concerns.

If you have connected these services to your Google Analytics account, go to Acquisition -> Search Console -> Queries  to see organic search queries.

You can see your Google Grants data by going to Acquisitions -> Google Ads -> Search Queries

You’ve Done Your Research. Take the Next Step…

If you have completed surveys, stakeholder interviews and done your data research you’re now ready to build your persona!

Here are some tips to creating your personas:

1. Create your personas with a group of colleagues. Each individual in your organization has a unique experience with your personas, therefore a unique perspective. Bring those experiences together to build a 360 degree view of who your persona is.

2. Spend a minimum of 20-30 minutes per persona. It’s worth taking time to get the details right. Don’t assume anything, and make sure your assumptions are backed up by data and survey results.

3. Think outside the box. Don’t just hone in on donors. Think about strategic partners, press, clients, board members and others.

“I’m a real data person.”

I hear this all the time from our nonprofit clients. And, honestly, we love data too!

The real question are you making marketing and fundraising decisions based on accurate data? And, how do you know how our marketing decisions are affecting our key business goals.

Or, like 58% of Executives (according a survey by PwC research), are we making decisions based on our previous experiences and "gut" feelings.

What does it take to really make to be a data-driven marketing team? 

In this post, I want to provide a starting point for any organization that is looking to do a better job making data-driven marketing and fundraising decisions.

We will provide tips on how to better collect your data from your website, email marketing and social media marketing channels. Finally, we will look at how to make it digestible and actionable.

Setup Google Analytics Conversions

At Rootid, we get asked a lot: “what metrics in Google Analytics is most important to track?”

The answer is… It depends.  

I know, that is not the answer you were looking for. But, it’s true.

Every organization has different inputs, outputs and outcomes they're looking for. If you haven't defined this at your organization, it's worth doing a logic model exercise. It will clarify your marketing and fundraising a lot!

If you do have a firm grasp of your business logic model, then the most important data to track are your KPI (Key Performance Indicators).  Or, simply put, the actions that you want users to take.

Some examples of KPI’s:

• Online Donations
• Newsletter sign-ups
• Membership sign-ups
• Applications submissions
• Contact form submissions
• Etc.

When you are thinking through your communications strategy, think who are your audiences, and what do I want them to do.

If you don't know your audiences, try using surveying and stakeholder interviews to learn more about their motivations, interests and how to message to them.

So, why do you want to track KPI’s?

First, these are actions on the site that provide value to your organization (more to come on this).  They are actually transactions with some monetary value, or they may provide engagement value now that leads to monetary value later.  

Meaning, they indicate a how users are engaging with your organization.

Secondly, goals should be the main data point that drives your marketing strategy decisions. Goals allow you to filter the mountains of data that Google Analytics provides in order to show you information about those users that are performing the actions that provide value.

Interestingly, you can also look at the behaviors of user that do NOT convert, and try and figure out how to better make them convert.

Finding trends in this data can help you make larger decisions about how to improve your website, messaging, campaigns and much more.

You can find out things like, where users originated from, what channels are most effective in producing goals completions, etc.  

Assign Value for Your Google Analytics Goals

When you are setting up your Google Analytics Goals, it’s really important to add a value in your Goal Details when setting up your goals.  

Many of our clients say, “well there is no monetary value to our volunteers. Volunteers are not paid.”

True. Kind of….

It is correct that no money it exchanged, but every transaction has a value to your organization. Here are some ways to think about a few common transactions:

1. Volunteers: If your average volunteer shift is 4 hours, and they perform a service or task that a paid employee would have to do if the volunteer was not there, that’s value. You could say then that the task volunteers perform is worth $10/hr (I made up this value, feel free to assign your own). Therefore, each volunteer sign-up is worth $40.

2. Newsletter Sign-ups: If on average you generate $20 per email that is on your newsletter list each year (Formula: Total Donation Amount from Newsletter List / Number of Emails on Your List = Average Value per Email), then you can easily say that each email sign-up is worth $X per year to your organization.

3. Membership Applications: if your membership dues are $50 per year, then each membership sign-up is worth $50.

There are a few reasons why using values matters:

First, goal values will help your team make strategic decisions about where to invest staff time and resources. Which efforts are truly generating the most value for your organization.

Second, you can also use this data to figure out which marketing channels are producing the most value to your organization. We will talk more about this in the UTM tags section below.

Finally, if your organization is doing any paid advertising, you can use these values to understand ROI (return on investment) and ROAS (return on ad spend).

Setup Google eCommerce Settings

There are some transactions that have immediate value.

For most organizations, generating revenue through donations, memberships, tuition or some other means is a critical part of their business model.

Google eCommerce settings was built for online retailers, but it is a critical piece of data for nonprofits as well.

In a nutshell, eCommerce settings will track the amount of money that spent on your website on a transaction by transaction basis.

You might be saying, “that seems like an issue with donor privacy!”

The good news: Google is just tracking the amount and product of each transaction.  There is no personal information that gets logged with the transaction data.

For nonprofits, it will provide you powerful insights into which marketing activities are generating the most money online.

If you use a 3rd party system (like Classy, Action Network, etc.) to process your online payments, there may be a chance that it provides a simple plugin that dynamically sends this transaction data directly to your Google Analytics account.

If your online payment processor does not provide feature, then you will likely need to work with a developer to get this setup correctly on your site. The implementation often requires some custom javascript code on your donation page.

That said, it is worth investing a little bit of money in your analytics to get a TON of powerful data.

Google Analytics Goal Wrap-Up

Don’t forget, goals are essential to making informed data-driven decisions about how much value is being generated for your organization, and what channels are driving that.

Once you have your Google Analytics Goals setup, do this...

How to Use Google UTM Tags

Wouldn’t it be great if you could have a granular understanding of which campaigns, marketing channels or even individual marketing pieces (think blog posts, emails, social posts) are driving them most value for your organization?

What if we could even drill all the way down to which specific link within an email campaign is working best?

You can with Google Analytics UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) tagging!

UTM tags are built into Google Analytics, and there’s no setup required.

By simply adding some data to the end of a link, you can send a bunch of data to your Google Analytics account each time a user clicks on that link.

Anatomy of a Link with UTM Tags

So, what are UTM tags?

You likely have seen them before. Maybe without knowing it.

Below is a breakdown of what a link looks like that includes UTM tags.

How to Use UTM Tags in Your Marketing Efforts

The beauty of UTM tags is that they create “layers” of data that allow you to drill down in order to find where you are generating the most value for your organization.

Here are the 5 values that you have access to, and how we recommend your organization uses them:

• Campaign Source – this should be the platform (or vendor) where the traffic originates, like Facebook, Twitter or your email newsletter.

• Campaign Medium – Identify the medium like Cost Per Click (CPC), social media, social ad, blog post.

• Campaign Name – Identify the specific campaign that the content is a part of. For instance, “2018 Year End Donor Appeal”

• Campaign Content – If you’re A/B testing ads, then this is a useful metric that passes details about your ad. You can also use it to differentiate links that point to the same URL. For instance, if you have a banner at the top of an email and a button at the bottom of the email, this can be used to tell you which link the user is clicking more frequently.

• Campaign Term – In most cases, you will not need to use this. This is mainly used for tracking your keywords during a paid AdWords campaign. If you’re not using paid CPC advertising.

Note that these are only suggested uses. Each organization is going to find a system that works best for them. So, it is important for your team to talk through it and setup rules together.

Tools That Help Build and Manage Your UTM Tags

So, what’s the best way to build these links?

Fortunately, there are a few killer tools that can help.

1. Google Campaign URL Builder

Google URL builder is really easy to use. Just fill in the appropriate fields, and Google will spit out the full link at the bottom.  It also will shorten the link for you so you use them in your posts without seeing the ugly tags.

Conveniently, Google usually will save the last link that you entered into their tool.

2. You can also use the Effin amazing UTM Builder Chrome extension to create UTM tagged links. It auto-populates the URL and saves your most recently used values as presets.

It also has a built in bit.ly URL shortener that is a nice add-on.  Plus, it’s right in your browser, so you don’t have to bother with going to a new web page to use it.

3. Using a custom spreadsheet to generate UTM tags

Using this awesome free Google Doc from Rafflecopter to generate UTM tags is our favorite way to manage UTM tags.

First, it will help you manage your links when you have a team of marketers linking to your website across the web. This tool will help ensure that your team is using a consistent naming convention.

Second, it helps you avoid spelling mistakes, which can really screw up your data in Google Analytics. Typos can make data analysis harder (more about this in the Common Mistakes section below).

Last, if you are like most nonprofit marketing teams, you may have several different campaigns going on at the same time. By using this spreadsheet, you will be able to refer back to a list of campaigns that you may have at any given time. Keeping track of the campaigns will help you remember which campaign is which.

UTM Tag Best Practices

1. Create a naming convention for your UTMs.

You are probably not the only one on your team building links, so make sure there are guidelines about the structure of your tags.

Pro Tip: Using “+” symbol will add a space to your data, which makes them easier to read in Google Analytics. We generally recommend not using “-” or “_” in the names if you can avoid it.

2. Always use lowercase with your tags.

For example, utm_source=eMail is different from utm_source=email.

Or, utm_source=LinkedIn is different from utm_source=linkedin.

Why does this matter?

Google Analytics will respect the capitalization in your data.  So, when you use capitals sometimes and not others, your data that was meant to represent one utm_source will actually be on two different lines.

This will make your data harder to analyze.

3. Keep your URLs clean, descriptive, non-redundant and easy to read.

Avoid using the same word or vendor name in two different tags. This is redundant and will make your data confusing.

So, do not do this:

Try to make your data flow like you would read a sentence.

For example, “the user came to our website from facebook, by clicking on my post from our 2018 giving tuesday campaign.”

Do this:

4. Create a system that works for your organization

Ultimately, there is no right system for every organization.  You will need to work with your team to generate a system that works for everyone.

Write it down, and stick to it!

Common Mistakes to Avoid

1. Creating unique campaign names for each medium and source

You want your UTM links to span multiple marketing channels. That’s one of the purposes of UTM - track how each channel contributes to a specific overarching campaign.

If you tag your links correctly, here’s how your data should look.

2. Making spelling mistakes when using Google Analytics UTM tags

If you have multiple administrators creating tags, or you are building many tags each day, it’s really easy to make spelling mistakes using something like the Google URL builder.

Especially when you have longer campaign names, it can become very easy to mistype something.

We recommend using the free Rafflecopter Google Doc to build your links. That way, you are consistent with your campaign naming.

This will guarantee that your Google Analytics data remains clean and useful.

3. Using UTM tags to track internal links - Don’t do it!

Unfortunately, sometimes we see clients add tags to their main menu, or buttons on their homepage.

They set values like utm_medium=mydomain.com and utm_source=homepage+banner.

The bad news is that if a user clicks on a link on your Twitter account that has UTM tags, then clicks on the button on your homepage that have different UTM tags, the original Twitter UTM tags get overwritten.

In your Google Analytics report, your Twitter post would no longer get credit for the user’s actions. Instead, you would simply see that the user came from your homepage banner.

The original referrer will be overwritten and your data will be messed up.

You should never use campaign tagging for internal links.

If you want to track how users are interacting with your website, use a tool like HotJar, or another heatmap service.

UTM Tag Wrap-Up

Once your UTM tagging is in place, it provides you a 360 view of how your marketing channels are contributing to website conversions. On almost all of the reports within Google Analytics, you can filter you view to show any of the UTM data layers (campaign, medium, source) to parse your data.

By using these data layers, your team should be able to better understand which marketing efforts were most successful, find trends and then use that data to continuously improve your campaigns.

Building Meaningful Data Reports with Google Data Studios

By this point, the important tracking pieces are in place. Now, we need to make sense of the data we are collecting.

Making your data digestible is critical to making data-driven decisions.

We have seen a lot of different ways to manage data reporting from our clients.

1. Google Analytics custom dashboards
2. Excel Spreadsheets
3. Custom Data displays in 3rd party services

However, none of these other options include the flexibility, professional visuals and dynamic nature of Google Data Studio.

Get started with your reporting using our Nonprofit Google Data Studio template.

Download Our Dashboard Template

Connecting Data Sources

First, Google Data Studio allows you to connect data from multiple data sources. It takes less than a minute to connect each source.  Some of our favorite connectors include:

• Google Analytics
• Google AdWords
• Facebook
• Facebook Ads
• Twitter
• Google +
• LinkedIn
• MailChimp
• Stripe Payment Processing

Each connector has a setup of metrics that you can add to your reports and display in a professionally designed way.

Professionalize Your Data Visuals

Second, Google Data Studio provides a beautiful visual design suite that allows you to make your data really stand out.

It’s really easy.  

The drag and drop interface allows you to select from a number of different types of data displays like bar graphs, line graphs, data tables, pie charts, to name a few.

You can also add design elements like colored backgrounds, custom graphics and dynamic link text if you want to refer to outside resources.

Settings up the reports to use your brand colors, fonts and logo is really easy.

If you don’t want to start from scratch, Google provides wide variety of starter templates that are easy to customize to your liking both visually and with your data.

Sharing Your Data Reports

Last, sharing beautiful reports is extremely easy with your team, colleagues and board.

One of the other great features, is that the data is dynamic. Users that are viewing the report can change date ranges, filter by data sources and much more. It makes the data a much more interactive experience.

Not only does this make the data more interesting, but there is definitely a sense of professionalism and intrigue around the reports.

Just think, you will never have your monthly analytics report thrown in the trash again!

Conclusion

Now your ready to be a data-driven marketer. That’s a powerful feeling!

To recap, remember that data will empower your team to be better decisions, but it needs to be measured in a smart way. These techniques are a starting point that will help you make better decisions in your marketing strategies.