Google analytics
Google Analytics is great tool for non-profits. With there own website installed the Google analytics is on of the best tool to know about the motivation, who and were from guests are coming to your website.
A few of the key insights you can learn from using Google Analytics are:
- Measure every page and (just about) every click on your site
- Know when someone comes
- How they arrived – keyword, search engine, link
- When they last came
- What they downloaded
- Did they achieve their goals?
Before we get too preachy about Google Analytics, there are some limitations to the tool – after all, it’s free. First, Google Analytics delays processing data for at least 12 hours, not real-time. While this isn’t an issue for most organizations, if you run a campaign you can’t see in real-time the effectiveness of your donation page and make midday adjustments to improve afternoon conversions.
Additionally, Google Analytics requires more knowledge within your organization to configure it to collect data the way some of the more expensive packages do. Google itself does not offer any sort of consulting aside from the FAQ. Your organization will have to do a cost-benefit analysis of Google Analytics before selecting it, because sometimes it costs more in staff time to configure it than paying for a solution that comes with a consultant.
Still with rather limited knowledge you should be able to install the code in to your site.
The three biggest advantages:
1. It’s rather easy to install .
2. It’s free.
3. It’s very user friendly.
Installing Google Analytics
1. If you don’t already have one for your organization, sign up for a Google Account here.
2. Sign up for Google Analytics here.
google analytics signup
3. Follow the on-screen instructions. Note that “Website’s URL” should be your home page and “Account Name” should probably just be your organization’s name. After continuing, fill out your contact information and agree to the terms of service.
4. The next step is the most important one. Google generates the code that you must copy and paste on every page of your website that you wish to track. Every time this snippet of code loads on your website, it will send information back to Google to tell the analytics package to monitor the user’s activity on your website.
Paste this code immediately before the last code in your page (usually tag). If you are using a cms site, you might have to find out where the footer is stored. It depends on cms systems, for wordpress it is for example you go to Appearances -> Editor and click on Footer (footer.php).
If you don’t place the code on a page, Google will not track visitors to that page
5. After continuing, Google will then check to see if the code has been properly installed on your website. If it’s all good, then you should expect to start seeing data in about 12 hours.
