The Nonprofit Guide to Google Analytics - Tapp Network.pdf

The Nonprofit Guide to
Google Analytics
Presented by: Tapp Network
Julian Gerace & Kyle Barkins
05.17.2023

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Introductions
Julian Gerace is the Digital Solutions Manager at Tapp
Network. With over 8 years of experience in digital marketing,
Julian is an expert in developing and executing data-driven
marketing strategies that increase his client’s efficiency and
effectiveness. He is skilled in various digital marketing
disciplines, including search engine optimization, web
development and integration, social media marketing, and
email automation. Julian is passionate about using digital
marketing to make a positive impact in the nonprofit sector, and
he has worked with dozens of nonprofits to help them achieve
their fundraising and engagement goals.
Julian Gerace
Digital Solutions Manager
Tapp Network
Kyle Barkins
Co-Founder
Tapp Network
Kyle is the co-founder of Tapp Network, has a background
of more than 15 years in marketing and application
development. His experience includes launching more
than 250 websites and automating the online lead
generation process for over 1000 professionals. His
previous projects have also included the syndication of
clip-able, shareable, searchable broadcast videos to more
than 40 million viewers per month, as well as the
development and deployment of a number of educational
and communication platforms for nonprofits in 8 different
languages and in over 200 countries.

A Mission-Driven Marketing
and Technology Agency
Empowering Organizations for Good
www.tappnetwork.com
Tapp Network is a mission-driven digital marketing and
technology agency serving organizations that seek to
accelerate their digital transformation to make the world a
better place.
In partnership with TechSoup, Tapp provides website
development and digital marketing support services for
nonprofits around the globe as they strive to increase their
capacity building, fundraising, and community impact in
these challenging times.

Agenda
• Google Analytics Overview
• The basics of Website Traffic
• User behavior & conversion rates
• Practical Applications

Google Analytics for
Nonprofit Organizations
• Google Analytics is a free and powerful tool
that can help nonprofit organizations to
measure and analyze their website
performance.
• Understanding how your website is used is
the most valuable piece of digital marketing
data
• Data-driven decision making helps increase
efficiency and effectiveness

Answer in the Chat: Which of these goals is
most important for your organization?
A. Raise Awareness
B. Drive Donations
C. Attract Volunteers
D. Support Program Delivery
E. Build Community
F. Advocate for Change
G. Share News and Updates

What do you get with Google Analytics?
• How users navigate your website
• User acquisition and content performance
• Conversion rate data
• Mid-funnel campaign performance

Getting Started
Installation and Key Definitions
Traffic monitoring and event collection.

Getting Started With Google Analytics
Technical: Consult a professional or use
Google’s Setup Assistant. Add the tag to
your sites to start the data flow into your
data streams.
Strategic: Identify all touchpoints you’d
like to track and your conversions. Plan
out your events.

Data Streams
Data streams are a new concept in GA4, replacing the traditional tracking codes used in
Universal Analytics (UA). Instead of generating a separate tracking code for each website
or app, you can set up a single GA4 property and create separate data streams for each
source.

Data Streams
• Simplified implementation: Setting up a data stream is simpler than generating and
managing multiple tracking codes.
• Streamlined data collection: Data streams in GA4 are designed to capture more
complete and accurate data than traditional tracking codes.
• Better data control: With data streams, you can control how data is collected and
processed for each source, allowing you to customize your data collection to suit your
needs.
• Easier data sharing: Data streams make it easier to share data between different
sources, such as between a website and a mobile app.

Events
In GA4, events are user interactions with your website or app that you want to track,
such as clicks, downloads, video plays, or form submissions. Events provide valuable
insights into user behavior and engagement, allowing you to measure the effectiveness of
your marketing campaigns and make data-driven decisions about how to optimize your
website or app.
Events are the main building block of GA4.

Understanding the basics
1. Website Traffic
2. User Behavior
3. Conversion Rates

Traffic
GA4 provides a range of data about your
website visitors, including where they're
coming from, what pages they're viewing,
and how long they're spending on your
site.

Sessions: Represents a period of user interaction with your website or app. It starts when
a user initiates an event or pageview and ends after 30 minutes of inactivity or at midnight.
Pageviews: An event that tracks the loading of a page on your website or app. It occurs
when a user visits a specific page or refreshes it. Each pageview event is counted as an
individual interaction within a session.
Sessions vs Pageviews

Understanding different types of website traffic
• Direct Traffic: This is traffic that comes to your website by typing your website URL
directly into their browser or by clicking a bookmark.
• Organic Traffic: This is traffic that comes to your website from search engine results
pages (SERPs) when someone types in a query related to your website and clicks on
one of the links that appear.
• Referral Traffic: This is traffic that comes to your website from other websites that
link to your content. Referral traffic can include both links from other websites and
clicks from social media platforms.
• Paid Traffic: This is traffic that comes to your website as a result of paid advertising,
such as Google Ads or social media ads.

Applying traffic information to your digital marketing
• CTA Structure: Are your CTAs driving traffic to the pages you want users to interact with?
• Configuration Errors: Are users hitting your 404 page after viewing a certain landing page?
• Copywriting Effectiveness: Are you getting platform engagement on your emails and social
posts but not seeing traffic reflected on your site?

User Behavior
Tracking user behavior in GA4 can provide
valuable insights into how users interact
with your website or app, and help you
identify opportunities to optimize the user
experience.

Events (again)
By tracking events in GA4, you
can gain insights into how users
interact with your website or app,
and optimize the user experience
accordingly. It's important to
choose the right events to track
based on your business goals
and the user actions that are
most important to your website or
app.

Kinds of Events
• Automatic events: These events are collected automatically by GA4 without any additional configuration.
Examples include page_view, scroll, and video_engagement events.
• Recommended events: These are pre-defined events recommended by GA4 based on your industry and
business type.
Examples include view_item, add_to_cart, and purchase events. Recommended events can be
customized to match your specific use case.
• Custom events: Custom events are events that you define based on your specific tracking needs. Custom
events can be used to track any user action that is important to your business, such as form submissions,
clicks on specific buttons, or interactions with custom widgets.
• Enhanced measurement events: Enhanced measurement events are additional events that are collected
automatically by GA4 when you enable enhanced measurement. Enhanced measurement events can help you
gain more complete insights into user behavior without having to manually set up event tracking.
Examples include outbound_link and file_download events.

Bounce and Exit Rates
Bounce rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page sessions, i.e. sessions where
a user landed on your website or app and left without any further interaction. In other
words, bounce rate is the percentage of sessions where a user did not engage with your
website beyond the landing page. A high bounce rate may indicate that your website or
app is not meeting user expectations or needs.
Exit rate: Exit rate is the percentage of sessions where a user left your website or app
from a specific page. Unlike bounce rate, exit rate takes into account all sessions where a
user interacted with more than one page before leaving. Exit rate can help you identify
pages that have a high abandonment rate and may need optimization.

Conversions
A conversion is any user action that's
valuable to your business; for example, a
user purchasing from your store or
subscribing to your newsletter are
examples of common conversions. You
mark specific events within GA4 as
conversions.

Halftime
The complexity of the Google Analytics Platform is
directly tied to its usefulness. There is a lot to learn!

Use Cases
Let’s dive into 2 high-impact use cases of your
new Google Analytics Knowledge
• Measuring Fundraising Campaigns
• Tracking Marketing Campaigns

UTM parameters are tags that you add to the end of your URL, which allow you to identify the source,
medium, campaign, and other attributes of each click that comes to your website or app.
1. Source (utm_source): This parameter identifies the source of your traffic, such as a search
engine, social media platform, or email campaign.
2. Medium (utm_medium): This parameter identifies the medium of your traffic, such as organic
search, paid search, social media, or email.
3. Campaign (utm_campaign): This parameter identifies the specific campaign that is driving the
traffic, such as a product launch, holiday sale, or fundraising campaign.
4. Content (utm_content): This parameter allows you to track the performance of different versions
of the same ad or email campaign. For example, you can use this parameter to track the
performance of two different headlines in your email campaigns.
UTM Parameters

Measuring the Success of Fundraising Campaigns
1. Set Up Your Events: Make sure your donation landing page and forms have appropriate events
set up in GA4 and they are marked as conversions.
2. Set Up Reports: Get your reports ready so you can easily provide weekly updates.
3. Tag Your Materials: Use clear and descriptive labels for campaigns and content in your UTM
parameters so you can see where your users are coming from and how your digital marketing
efforts are performing outside of their platforms.
4. Use Data To Optimize Landing Pages: Use scroll events or your conversion rate to inform visual
changes to your landing pages. There may be a user-experience issue to be addressed.

Tracking the Success of Marketing Campaigns
1. Use Consistent Tagging: Use the same campaign names across your emails, social media
posts, and other materials to give the most accurate picture across platforms.
2. Set Up A Funnel Report: Turn your user journey into a GA4 report and see how people filter from
new user to conversion.
3. Tag Your CTAs as Conversions: Make sure that GA4 knows the actions you want your users to
take so it can report on them. Whether its a form submission, an email address click, or leaving to
a third-party registration site, set up your conversions before sending out your materials.

Key Takeaways
GA4 is a free, powerful tool to help you understand how users
are interacting with your website and digital marketing
materials.
Data-driven decision making will increase the effectiveness and
efficiency of all of your digital marketing efforts, not just on your
website.
GA4 offers basic information at a glance but retains the ability to
do complex reporting.

Website Development
TechSoup Service Offerings

Website Maintenance Services
Starting at
$499/mo
Keeping a website running smoothly is not an easy job! Our
website maintenance services are designed to ensure your
site is always performing at its best. From broken links to
building new pages for your fundraising event, you’ll have
access to the technical experts and can submit requests to
make those repairs or turn that creative website idea into a
reality.
Your dedicated Account Manager will ensure the
successful delivery of requests. Requests are managed
through our ticketing system and timelines will be provided
within 48 hours of receiving any request.
Dedicated
Account Manager
Available
9am–8pm EST
No Contract.
Cancel Anytime.

Thank You!
sales@tappnetwork.com
www.tappnetwork.com

The Nonprofit Guide to Google Analytics - Tapp Network.pdf

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