As your nonprofit inbound marketing plan seeks to meet goals of raising awareness, generating donations, creating advocates, and recruiting volunteers, regular website data analysis could help you to increase your site’s effectiveness and accomplish your goals.
Some of the critical data you should be evaluating includes:
Traffic Sources
The amount of traffic your website receives is not nearly as important as the quality of the traffic and leads. Taking a look at where your web traffic is coming from is one critical point toward understanding how to use it to your benefit. Use your data to answer questions like these: Is your traffic direct? Or is it driven by social media outlets? Email marketing? Organic searches? Pay-per-click programs?
Ideally, you will see a mixture of sources that deliver visitors to your website. Diversity in sources allows your website to avoid being heavily dependent on just one source (like pay-per-click), spreading the marketing efforts out more effectively. If your site is heavy on social media links, you may want to begin a targeted email marketing campaign to bring balance.
Also, use site traffic data from previous years to set future benchmarks. This allows your organization to more clearly see how your marketing efforts are working and what needs to be tweaked.
Conversion Rate
When looking at conversion rate data, take the time to specifically focus on conversions coming from the Donation Page. This is what counts the most for most nonprofit organizations. Anything from 2-5% conversion rate is considered to be healthy. Finding out how many visitors are turning into donors allow you to better understand possible missed opportunities on your website and build your organization’s financial base. You can do this by looking at Google Analytics or your HubSpot data to see which pages assisted in conversions? What pages have a high bounce rate and exit rate? You can then setup A/B tests on these pages to make sure your visitors are having a great user experience.
Donation Page Bounce Rate
Data based on the number of people who find their way to your donation page but don’t actually complete a donation is extremely insightful. Hopefully, your nonprofit inbound marketing plan takes visitors through the journey and culminates with a donation—or series of donations. Anything more than 50% bounce rate coming from people who have made it to your Donation Page may mean that you need to do some re-thinking about this page. Is it too complicated? Does it ask for too much information?
Read More: 7 A/B Tests to Try on Your Nonprofit's Donation Page
Time on Website
An important factor in determining the effectiveness of your nonprofit website is how much time visitors are spending on your site. This information allows you to know ahead of time how much time you might have to get the attention of your visitors, keeping your message short and simple.
If the average visitor stays on your website for less than 10 seconds, then it may be that you’re drawing in the wrong people. Or maybe your website doesn’t make it easy to find what they are looking for. Bringing the right visitors in and keeping them on your website can be accomplished more effectively when you discover what might be driving them away.
Bounce Rate & Exit Pages
Information about your website’s overall bounce rate gives insight into which pages people are on when they decide to leave. If you can sense a pattern regarding which pages produce a high bounce rate, you can begin to create A/B tests targeted at content, imagery, CTAs, etc to help move them down the funnel further.
Inbound Links
Developing quality links that lead to your website grows your visitor base. As your organization uses events and blogger outreach to develop its lead base, these activities will naturally bring quality inbound links to your website.
While data analysis might seem like a boring way to spend your time, this information can actually bring you a myriad of options for developing the reach of your organization through your website. For help with your organization’s nonprofit inbound marketing, schedule a consultation with LyntonWeb’s nonprofit marketing experts.
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