What Do Web Analytics Say About Your Planned Giving Website?

Many charities already use Google analytics or other online tools that help a web user analyze information about visitors and determine the effectiveness of web content. One question charities often ask me is how to understand the statistics for their planned giving website and how content is performing on their page.

How Visitors Find Your Site

At a very basic level, web analytics should tell you the total number of visitors to your website and breakdown those visits by time of the day and day of the week. However, for marketing purposes, it is more useful for you to track data on your visitors’ origins. In other words, your web analytics are useful in determining how visitors come to your planned giving website and where they come from.

If you have downloaded Google analytics or are using the GiftLegacy analytics tools, you can track the level of visits you are receiving from the front page of your charity’s website to your planned giving homepage. This may tell you volumes of information about how easy it is for a donor to find the planned giving information on your website. It is also useful to assess other ways that donors access your site including access through use of a short URL, bookmarks and links from an email newsletter.

What Your Visitors “Experience”

When donors visit your planned giving website, they “experience” your site. Their experience tells you a lot about whether the information you have provided is motivating and engaging enough to maintain their interest and current enough to ensure a repeat visit. With Google and the GiftLegacy analytics tools, you can learn a great deal about the frequency of your donor visits including how often your donors come to the site, the time between site visits and length of time on the site. The depth of a donor’s visit is important because it tells you how many pages the visitor clicked and the average time the visitor stayed on the site.

Your Best Performing Content

If you want to determine how your content is performing (i.e. the level of interest generated by your latest article on wills and bequests) you can do this by viewing the page views for a specific article or page on your website. The average page views tell you the top viewed pages or most popular pages. More telling is the average time spent on the page, which helps you know how much of the article was likely read. It is also useful to review the top landing and exit pages for your website. This tells you what your supporters will look at first and read before leaving your site.

By analyzing your planned giving web statistics, you should gain a clearer sense of how donors and prospects are viewing the information and what articles and features are of most interest. If you know that an article on the benefits of charitable gift annuities was a top landing page, you will want to feature similar articles in the future or feature other gift options with the same prominence.

For GiftLegacy websites, analysis of web statistics and content performance informs our decisions on the best new information to provide for our planned giving websites. For more information on using planned giving analytics to maximize your marketing, please call 1-800-858-9154 and ask to speak with a GiftLegacy marketing specialist.