Tracking the success of your digital marketing campaigns
1. Maximising Opportunities: Ensure You Are Tracking The Success Of Your Digital Fundraising Campaigns Third Sector Digital Fundraising Conference 11 May 2011 By Ashley Clarke
2. I’ll cover Why do we measure? What do we measure? What metrics can we measure? Digital KPIs How do we measure? Analytics Analysis Digital user journeys
4. Why we measure Ensure we understand the performance of campaigns Ensure we are investing budgets wisely Create benchmarks and KPIs to measure future activity against Ensure we are continually optimising results
8. What we can measure Web traffic Traffic sources Clicks Page views/unique page views Time on site Goal completion/conversion Facebook Likes, comments, active users Twitter followers, re-tweets, mentions, reach And similar on YouTube, Flickr etc.
10. Well, it depends… What are your objectives? What is it you want to gain from this activity? How effectively are you engaging your supporters? What is it they want to gain from this interaction? Once you know what you’re aiming for, you can measure it It is a waste of time and money measuring everything
24. Identify channels that work for your supporters Facebook? Twitter? Website forum? Do your supporters prefer to remain anonymous?
25. Social referral Becoming an increasingly integrated part of the web experience Based on the idea that people trust friend recommendations more than search results Social referral was the biggest driver of web traffic in March 2010 and Christmas period Facebook Reached Top Ranking in US, Experian Hitwise, March 15, 2010
26. Type of social referral Facebook Like Now posts a full story to newsfeeds, giving readers more information about the link Tweets/Retweets Google +1
27. And this can all happen without us knowing… …unless we’re measuring it
39. Facebook measurement Activity on your Facebook page Daily/monthly posts User interactions (likes, comments, mentions) User Activity User demographics (know who you are talking to!) Number of new users How active current users are Link with Google Analytics/your web analytics package to track activity there too
48. Third party payment page Who makes it here? Who drops out at this stage? Where in the process do they drop out? Can monitor closely, with event tracking on forms etc. If lots of people drop out, why is this? Cross domain tracking Identify follow specific user journeys, and measure who completes the payment process
49.
50. Analysis All the data you have collected means nothing without interpretation
51. Analytics and analysis Analytics data gives us a snapshot of how our audience behaves on our site Analysis provides insights into why We use this information to increase conversion to donation?
52. Digital user journeys and user experience What can you do to improve your site’s performance?
54. Why charity websites lose donations Increasing Online Giving to Non-Profits and Charities (US study), Jakob Nielsen, March 2009
55. Plug the holes! Could number and value of donations/income be higher if site had a better giving experience? Content Navigation Donation process User testing can identify errors that can be easily rectified
To understand the factors that lead to success – what generates the best response, income, new donors etc.Avoids plowing money into the same activity that doesn’t workMake sure we are making progress with our activity – in the right directionDitto
What do people do on your site/landing page/Facebook pageHow are people engaging with content you have produced? To what extent are they engaged? Are they sharing your content?For fundraisers, this is key, but we need to understand the factors that led to the generation of income, so we can do it again and do it better
Page we developed at beautiful world for Centrepoint Christmas cash appealAudience participation – look at this fundraising appeal web page (before revealing your arrows). What do you think we could measure here? What would be useful?Specific things like how many visitors clicked which button, then those who went on to actually donate – leads onto conversion rates, click through rates. Event tracking?IncomeMultiple areas to donate – which is most effective for getting click throughs? Which is most effective for conversion?Are supporters socially engaged with this campaign?Do people click through to supporting campaign content?Where did people come from? Offline sources? How integrated is your online campaign with warm mail packs?
Need to know what the benchmark is in terms of what you are aiming to do
Google Analytics data – you’re probably already collecting it–If not, it is easy and free to set up an accountOr your charity may use another web analytics package
Referring sites e.g. Facebook or TwitteronSearch engines e.g. how well people can find your website through search engines
Is there anything engaging on the page that visitors are driven to? Needs to be looked at in terms of traffic source. E.g. Cold marketing is likely to have a far higher bounce rate than search engine traffic. Warm and/or direct traffic are likely to have amongst the lowest bounce rates.Is there something about the page that makes people want to leave? Is there anything that makes them want to stay. Is this the only page that people need to see (e.g. What is Motor Neurone Disease)
Are your call to actions engaging enough for people to read on?Is the content people click through to compelling enough to donate/engage with?There is always a degree of difficulty to analyse these things – context always adds to resultsMake the point about this being additional to your traditional analysis of offline fundraising appeals (i.e. income, net income, average gift, ROI)
How do you find this out?
What is measured to find this information outIs socially referred traffic engaged though? Fewer page views per session and a higher bounce rate. The content people are directed to could the be only thing they need to see before deciding to donate.What happens to conversion rates?
Google updated search algorithm to reflect friend recommendations.This ultimately affects what people read on the web.Don’t forget to reference YouTube, blogs and forums occasionally, so it doesn’t look like you’ve forgotten about themI think it’s fine to say you’re focusing on Facebook because of the extremely high number of users – it means it’s really important for charities – and Twitter, because of its power to spread stories and generate conversation and engagement
These tools can be used to track conversations across social media networks and gauge brand visibility and online buzzThere are more – so look around and find out what suits your budget and needsHow sociable / addictomatic / google alerts / samepoint – quick view of mentions online – does reportScout labs/SM2 – gives you more of a dashboard similar to google analytics
Just want to emphasise that THESE ARE JUST SOME – lots of FREE Twitter measurement tools available, just experiment with what works for you. You can experiment with them and see what one fits you the best.
Shorten and track your URLs that you tweet/post to social networking site.
TweetStats – (your profile) includes tweet timeline, daily tweets and your mentions and RT’s. Also great for producing Tweet clouds – so you can see if you’re speaking more about your charity (and less about your lunch!)
Twitter Grader – gives you a score out of 100 rating your Twitter influence.
Is 33 good? Brings up a good point of giving context to your measurements
It might be useful to compare your activity with other, similar charities
Comparing stats like these can start to help you develop digital KPIs for the futureWhere do you want to be a year from know?
Great thing about Facebook (and online as a whole) is that you can make changes quickly and see the effect they have.You can try out lots of things at a low cost and quick turnaround
Where have they come from? Engaging with content on the page? Event tracking allows you to see if, for example, people played the video at the top of the page.
Is anyone engaging with the content socially?Who clicks buy? (this might be ‘donate’ for a more traditional fundraising campaign)If you have multiple donation options (e.g. single, regular gifts, gift sites etc), which gifts are viewed the most? What are their conversion rates like?
Who makes it this far?More sophisticated tracking code can identify the field where people drop out of the payment process.If a lot of people drop off at the same point, you can look at why this may be – questions too probing/ completely irrelevant? Can you reduce the number of fields people are required to fill in at this point? Focus on getting the donation and balance this with the desire to capture additional data – which could be captured at another point or may not be needed.
Cross domain tracking allows you to link pre and post payment page journeys – therefore recording your conversionsCan we show the whole thing, since people can Like and tweet from this, which can also be tracked?
Places emphasis on measuring something that is useful rather than interesting
Usability problems: page and site designunintuitive information architecturecluttered pagesover-formattingContent issues: writing for the webunclear or missing informationconfusing terms
Results from analysis of your Goals will identify where things are going wrongUse this data to improve user journeys and experience