How to choose the right analytics tools to measure your nonprofit’s success

Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, foundations, cause organizations, businesses, brands, administrators, consultants, social media managers, individuals.

By Laura S. Quinn and Kyle Andrei
Techsoup article courtesy of Idealware

Web analytics tools help you track your site’s statistics, which let you see how many people are looking at each page, what sites they came from, and other information to help develop a picture of who your audience is. But which Web analytics tool should you use? Data-tracking needs are similar for all organizations, including nonprofits, libraries, small businesses, and corporations. But given the vast array of analytics tools out there, selecting the right package can be overwhelming.

Idealware talked to six nonprofit experts about the Web analytics tools they’ve seen work well. We also consulted postings on a number of nonprofit listserves and scoured reports on the topic. In this article, we summarize what we’ve learned to help you understand what to consider when choosing an analytics package and identify free tools and applications to help you better monitor your site’s visitors.

Which data should you analyze?

There’s no point in looking for a tool unless you have a sense of what information you want to track. Needs can vary from simple traffic-monitoring to complex analysis on the behavior of specific user groups, support for multivariate testing, and more.

What important metrics and figures should you keep in mind when selecting a Web analytics package? We’ve broken them down into three overarching areas to track. The first thing you want to track is an accurate measure of how many people are using your site, which is neither as easy nor as clear-cut as you might think. Metrics that address this include hits, visits, unique visitors, and page views. Next, you’ll want to track who the visitors to your site are, in broad terms, and what they’re doing when they visit – in other words, what site features and pages engage them? Which ones go ignored? Last, it can be beneficial to track where visitors to your site are coming from. This can help you find similar sites or better understand the types of things that lead people to you.

These areas should be enough to get you started, but powerful Web analytics tools support even more sophisticated analysis. There are people who make a living analyzing Web statistics – if you have a large site and the desire for deep usage analysis, you may want to consult with one of them.

The world of analytics is complicated by the fact that not every software tool handles metrics in the same way. Determining what sequence of Web actions to interpret as a “visit” or a “unique visitor” is complex, and somewhat subjective. Different tools calculate these figures differently. Some types of software – called “log analytics” software – look at traffic based on a log of what pages your web server provides, while others rely on what’s reported back by “cookies” – pieces of information sent back by each user’s browser. Don’t be surprised if your metrics vary somewhat among tools.

Software offered by your Web hosting service

So now that you know what to track, what Web analytics software should you use to track it? You may already have some of the tools you need. Many shared hosting companies, like DreamHost or LunarPages, offer Web statistics through the same control panel you use to administer e-mail addresses and check available file space.

AWStats and Webalizer are the two most common, and both are relatively basic “log analytics” packages that offer information about visits over time, most-visited pages, referrers, search strings, and some data about your visitors’ browsers and locations. Webalizer is a bit more popular, but AWStats’s reports are generally considered somewhat easier to understand.

Because these built-in tools are purchased and maintained by your Web host, there are no fees or installation required. While basic, they are perfectly adequate options if you simply want to keep an eye on your own site.

Site counters

You may have seen site counters on the bottom of Web pages – basically, they’re a numerical display that counts and displays the number of visitors to your site. A quick word about site counters: Don’t use them. All the free tools listed here will give you the same information without interfering with the look of your site.

Google Analytics

In a class by itself, Google Analytics offers substantially more functionality than the basic tools, and is free – unlike most of the more advanced tools listed below.

Unlike Webalyzer or AWStats and other tools provided by hosting companies, you need to install Google Analytics on your site. This involves pasting a chunk of HTML code provided by Google into every page. This piece of code sends back “cookie” information to the Google server. Adding the code requires basic HTML know-how, but Google’s directions are pretty detailed and clear, and the process shouldn’t require a huge amount of time. Once added, Google displays your statistics in a custom reporting interface you can view online.

In addition to the reports offered by tools like Webalizer or AWStats, Google shows how often visitors come to your site, tracks visitor conversion across a series of pages, compares the behavior of different types of visitors (such as new vs. returning, or those from different referring sites), and much more. A selectable date range allows you to analyze any given time period instead of being limited to a monthly view (as you are with AWStats and Webalizer). Almost every set of metrics can be sliced and diced to drill down to exactly what’s of interest to you.

New features continue to be added every few months, creating an increasingly powerful tool. The powerful reporting and filtering tools let you set up custom reports and segments to view specialized subsets of your data. It won’t easily let you track advanced Flash sites, and does not automatically track downloads of files like PDFs, but otherwise is a great free option for analytics.

More powerful analytics packages

Large organizations may want to look beyond Google Analytics for more powerful features. There’s no shortage of available options. More advanced tools like Lyris HQ Agency Edition (formerly Click Tracks), WebTrends and SiteCatalyst provide substantially more: more control, more powerful metrics, much more freedom to perform detailed user segmentation, the ability track detailed patterns, and in many cases, sophisticated data charts such as trees or interactive layouts that make it easier to track complex sites.

They’ll also support complex or Flash-based sites that Google Analytics will not, and offer professional technical support as well. More advanced features come at a cost. The lowest-end packages start at about $100 per month, and you’ll likely need to pay $500 per month or more to get features that rival Google Analytics.

Choosing a package

The first question to ask yourself when deciding on an analytic package is, will Google Analytics meet my needs? If it will, there’s no point in spending money on a more advanced tool. In fact, Google Analytics is a good default option for a lot of organizations.

If your needs are even simpler, check to see if you have a control panel and analytic tools available through your Web host. Or, if you’re familiar with web statistics tools and want more than the analytics and limited control that Google offers, picking a more powerful analytics package might be the way to go.

The right package can make a big difference in your ability to understand visitors’ needs and your site’s traffic. Choosing the right option means you’ll be able to track exactly what people are doing on your site, get all your questions answered, and maybe even sleep a little better.

For more information

• Marketing Sherpa’s Buyer’s Guide to Web Analytics Software
  It costs $249, but provides detailed overviews of 39 different products and extensive advice on how to choose.
• Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity
  Avinash Kaushik’s update to his previous book, “Web Analytics: An Hour a Day.”

This post originally appeared at the TechSoup learning center. It is condensed and republished under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial No Derivatives license.

Related

• All about metrics and Web analytics (Socialmedia.biz)

• Guide to social media metrics: Articles & tutorials (Socialbrite)

• Getting started with social media metrics (Socialbrite)

• How to measure your social media success (Socialbrite)

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Why embracing data should be an important part of your leadership strategy

Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, cause organizations, social enterprises, brands, businesses, social media managers, marketing professionals, individuals.

I recently presented a workshop titled “Data Driven Leadership” at the Massachusetts Nonprofit Network/AGM annual conference along with colleagues Marc Baizman and Steve Backman. The question we addressed in the workshop was: What online data can help a leader make informed decisions around programming, advocacy and fundraising? Marc, Steve and I have expertise in Google Analytics, in understanding customer segmentation and databases, and in identifying social media metrics, respectively. Each of us thought about how the data from our respective areas of expertise could shed light on an answer. The hardest part was choosing what to eliminate from our presentation, as we only had one hour to cover this enormous topic!

Getting started with gathering data

We created a DIY worksheet for the session titled, “Make Your Data Work for You.” It offers sample questions to get you started thinking in the areas of marketing, programs and services, development, and volunteers and advocacy. For every sample question, it asks you to set the priority level, consider what data you’ll need to answer that question, and where you can find the answer. There are a lot of spaces for you to customize the worksheet to your needs. You can read and download the worksheet.

For every leader, thinking about the real organizational questions that the data could offer is the place to begin.

Below are summaries of our segments of the presentation, written individually by each of us. You can also view the SlideShare presentation above for the complete takeaways.

Using data from Facebook Insights

I focused on four questions that have implications for advocacy, programming and fundraising:

• How many people care about the organization, and how deeply?
• What do fans care about the most, and how deeply?
• What is the organization doing to reach the most people?
• What do you know about who cares about the organization?

Facebook has made answering the question of how many people care about the organization, and how deeply, very simple: Look at the “People Are Talking About” metric on the organization’s Facebook fan page. Facebook Insights is all about fan engagement now, and helping page administrators understand what content fans want to engage with the most. For a deeper dive into the newest version of Facebook Insights, take a look at my post about the upgrades to Facebook and Delicious.

To understand the power of page post metrics, I highlighted a news story republished by Hebrew University that questioned Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Looking at the per-post measurements, the wall post had higher engagement than the general PATA metric and was shared by so many fans that it had tremendous viral lift. By looking for patterns in per-post engagement, we can also see that similar news and science stories are popular with fans of The Hebrew University’s page. Knowing what fans are most interested in hearing about from the organization should guide future alumni communications and fundraising.

Last, thinking about demographics also offers programming, advocacy and fundraising guidance. Facebook Insights break down the demographics of your fans as well as the demographics of who is talking about you (that PATA metric). In some cases, who is talking about your page, “the super-engaged,” may have different demographic characteristics than page fans.

The value of Web analytics

Marc Baizman focused on Web analytics. Web analytics can be a great tool for you to use, but you need to clearly define what indicators are important to your organization, and then you need to take action based on what the data tells you! Marc focused on asking several simple questions that Web analytics can help answer, such as:

• How many people look at our site?
• How do people find our website?
• What are people looking at?
• What do we want people to do, and are they actually doing those things?

While he offered these sample questions, you should formulate your own questions based on what’s important to you. Remember that although Google Analytics is free, your staff’s time isn’t, so get help if you need to. A good place to get free help is the Analysis Exchange.

Use smart segmentation to sort data to your advantage

Steve Backman focused on “smart segmentation.” Segmentation often comes across at first as an alien, corporate marketing concept. Steve discussed how any organization, large or small, with the best of contact management software or a collection of spreadsheets can begin to benefit from a smart segmentation framework. To reach the largest possible audience in the most effective way, you need to understand and operate from your organization’s constituent groups.

Organizations may take satisfaction in how their monthly e-mail stats rise and fall, or overall response rates to a fund appeal, advocacy campaign or event. To go deeper, you need to look proactively at how you characterize your contacts. You need to work through how to connect critical data from these separate connections and activities to generate a full picture. Steve encouraged data managers to have more passion in understanding their organization’s constituency and putting the available data at the service of organizational goals. He used quick examples from Constant Contact stats and Salesforce reporting to stress an overall framework: Find indicators that support you goal and measures you can collect.

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Welcome to the 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media. Today guest contributor Michael Martine will offer tips on how to optimize your most visited blog pages.

Guest post by Michael Martine
remarkablogger

Are you leaving money and opportunity on the table? You might be if you haven’t optimized your blog’s most visited pages. You should know what the most popular pages are on your blog and look for opportunities to optimize them for better reader engagement and conversion.

This is what web analytics is really for — not just visitor counts. What is working on your site? What isn’t? Analytics will tell you by revealing patterns of visitor behavior so you can make better content and conversion decisions. One thing nearly any analytics program, such as the free Google Analytics, will tell you is what your blog’s most visited pages are.

Take a look at your blog’s “top 10.” Are you surprised by which pages are the most popular? I hope not, because that means you’re having trouble matching your blog’s content to your goals (expect a couple of surprises in there, though). For example, my analytics told me that one of the most popular pages on my blog is the post How to Add a Blog to a Website.

Because of this post, that exact phrase and its derivatives are common searches that land people on that exact page. This was deliberate: it’s what search engine optimization (SEO) is for and why you should learn about it. Without the content there, no searches about this topic would ever reach me.

That sounds obvious, but I’m constantly surprised by bloggers who say their blog is about a topic … but then the topic’s keywords aren’t in the posts they write! If the words aren’t in the content, then that’s not what your blog is about as far as Google is concerned, and your ideal visitors will fail to show up at your doorstep via search. T

So find-tune your blog so that you have popular pages you can take advantage of. That’s next.

How to make popular pages work harder for you

If your blog has a conversion goal, you want to create blog content in support of that goal. Most blogs at least have the conversion goal of growing subscribers. If your blog is the marketing for a business or a nonprofit, you need more. You should have an email list that goes beyond the blog. You may also have products or services to sell, which means you want to direct people to those pages.

Knowing that, you try the following ideas to make your popular blog pages work harder for you:

• Keep updating and adding to popular posts to increase its value as the situation and times change. Every time you do this, send an email out to your list to let them know you’ve just updated and that you’d love their comments on it. (I learned this from Michel Fortin.) This will increase long-term traffic and backlinks to the page, which will, in turn, strengthen its authority in search.
• Create a “best of” or “popular” links list on your home page. These always drive traffic. When a page is popular, we want to figure out ways to make it even more popular, because popularity leads to greater popularity. The long-term benefits of this are the same as the previous point on updating.
• Write new posts that build on an older popular post. Not only should you link to the old post from the new one, you should also go edit the old one to include a link to the new one. Make sure you use the same keywords in for each in your post titles and in the anchor text you use to link them (anchor text is the words of the hyperlink). Why? So that you end up with a double indented listing in Google. And of course, this event warrants an email to your list (these tactics overlap).
• Create a product around the topic of a popular post. This is what I did with my post about adding a blog to a website. I figured if people were searching on that keyword and reaching me, it would be a good idea to provide visitors an opportunity to get in-depth information for a minimal investment. The strategy has been a great success. I created an inexpensive ebook about the topic and updated the post with information about it and a buy button. I get sales every week.
• Rewrite the headline and slug of a popular post. This one is a little risky, but can help you take a performing post and get it to perform even stronger for you. If a post is snagging searches for a keyword, you can often boost it by taking the important keyword and move it to an earlier word position in the headline. You can strengthen a keyword by making it plural or singular, whichever has more searches (this is where keyword research comes in). If you’re using the Headway theme or an SEO plugin, you can easily separate post headlines from the slug, which is like the file name of the post. In order to do this without breaking any existing backlinks to the post, you’ll need a redirect plugin for WordPress (a quick search will reveal several). If you’re not using self-hosted WordPress, or you don’t have a redirect plugin, don’t try this.

Give it a go

Homework: Go check out your blog’s most popular posts (after tweeting about this one, of course). Then try one or more of the methods above to make it work even harder for you.

If you don’t want to miss out on the 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media, please sign up here.

Cross-posted from JohnHaydon.com.

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