Digital Data: How to Start the Year Strong
Chances are the end of 2021 was a blur. Between Giving Tuesday closeout, finishing your end-of-year campaign strong, baking and/or eating holiday treats, there was a lot happening! Plus, many of us are dealing with the Omicron wave (if you are, stay strong!).
Some of us might not have had time to review and digest our online performance from last year (no shame). It’s easy to get started, and now is the perfect time to peek under the hood of your digital platforms to discover data that can help inform your work. Here are our three steps:
1. Discover your Top Website Traffic Sources:
How are people getting to your website? What are the main drivers of traffic? Are people using Google to find your organization? What third-parties are linking to your site: perhaps your partners, funders, news sites? Is your social media driving visits?
Organizing this information can help you benchmark your current traffic sources, plan for how you might want to evolve it, and monitor your progress throughout the year.
2. Identify the Top Website Pages:
Once a user gets to your site, what pages are they visiting? It’s likely that your “Home,” “About” or “Jobs” might be getting top traffic, but what are the next top landing pages? Is an older entry still showing up on your 10 most visited pages?
With this information, you can infer what interests people the most (or where their searches are taking them). If there are other pages and content you want to highlight that aren’t currently receiving a lot of traffic, you need this baseline to start making changes. What can you do to boost that traffic?
BONUS: Consider investing in a Google Ads setup.
With a bit of setup and some ongoing maintenance, your nonprofit could be eligible for a Google Ads Grant of up to $10,000 per month in Google search advertising. Promoting key web pages at the top of relevant search results can yield an influx of new traffic and help boost your overall organic search ranking. Learn more about the Google Ads Grant and apply.
3. Explore your Top Social Media Posts
What social content gets people most excited about your work? Which networks generate the most post engagements? It’s simple to begin assessing. To start, review a few different top performing posts from these perspectives: Reach, Engagements, and Engagement Rate.
Reach is the number of people who saw you post in their feed. Keep in mind that only about 4% of your followers will see a post organically, so judge success accordingly.
Engagements are the number of people who took action on your post. This can be likes, link clicks, comments, shares, etc. We love this stat because we are all about action. The more people taking action, the better.
Engagement Rate is often calculated as Engagements divided by Reach.
Each social media platform calculates these differently, but just taking a quick look at some of your top performing posts in each category can help you learn what is resonating most with your audience so you can continue testing and adapting.
BONUS: Find your search data.
By looking at your search data, you can better understand what people are looking for that brings them to your site. You can see this data with the free Google Search Console. Learn how to setup Search Console, and get a jump start on analyzing your data next year!
How to take it forward.
It can be hard to compare your organization to others, as each is unique. What matters most is that you can track your data and study the progress you are making – based on your own context and the investments you are putting into your digital work. That comes with setting concrete objectives, building a strategy that helps you reach those objectives, monitoring and adjusting until you smash your targets, and doing it all over again.
That said, the team at M+R produces an excellent annual E-benchmark report that gathers data from many nonprofits across different sectors; it’s a great source to understand how your online performance stacks up against peer organizations.
Set a calendar reminder. Look at the data on a weekly/monthly/bi-monthly basis and adapt as you go. This way, you will get to the end of 2022 knowing that your work was impactful.
This article was written by Edith Asibey, Vivian Gallegos, and Jamie Lonie. For more information about our team click here.