What is Web Analytics and Why is it important?
Web analytics is the study of user behavior on a Web site. Web analytics seeks to give you a better understanding of what people are really doing on your Web site. Are they doing what you intended them to when you built the Web site?
If you are taking the time and expense to build and maintain a Web site, your organization should take the time to find out what kind of impact your Web site is having. Web analytics can assist you in determining the following two things:
1. Are your business objectives and/or goals being met?
Most Organizations have a Web site that can be defined under three broad different purposes and these purposes are not mutually exclusive. These purposes are:
A. Information - All nonprofits and businesses for that matter, use Web sites at minimum for informational purposes. The Web site provides you the opportunity to tell the world about all the great work that you are doing. They also typically inform the public about management, job opportunities, location etc.
In this situation, you will want your Web analytics to be able to inform whether or not the world is finding out about your organization. In this case you will want to know the total number of people coming to your Web site, where they are coming from and how long they are staying.
For nonprofits, these metrics are important to demonstrate to your board, management and funders that there is interest in the work that you are doing. These metrics will help inform the reach of your organization.
For example, here at TechSoup we are proud to report to our board, members, funders and the nonprofit community that The TechSoup forums receive over 100,000 visitors per month with over 30% of visitors coming from outside the United States.
B. Fundraising - Organizations also use the Web site to raise money. Most nonprofits have the option to donate to the organization in some form or another. Many nonprofits have the option to actually donate money through paypal or some other tool.
In this situation, you will want to measure how effective your Web site is at raising funding for your organization. You will want to measure how many people donate on your Web site. How much donations amount to that come from the Web site. And finally, perhaps the most important what percentage of visitors to your Web site make a donation. This is also known as a conversion. What percentage of visitors to your Web site are convinced to actually donate money. This will inform you on two things: 1. That your message is convincing. 2. That your Web site is doing what you intended it to, raise money.
C. Delivery of services – These services can take multiple forms. It can be as simple as providing articles. Services can be information distribution like workbooks. It can take the form of Online services such as the event you are taking part in.
In this situation, you will want to understand the extent that your services are being used. If your service is content delivery, such as with the TechSoup Learning Center you will want to track how many visitors are coming to the articles. You may also have content in the form of a download. You would want to track the number of downloads. Again you will also want to track the conversion rate for the downloads. What percentage of people downloaded out of the total number of visitors.
2. Another broad purpose of Web analytics is determining how are users linking through the Web site on the links that we created. In other words, what are people linking through on? Can we make these links better? For example, TechSoup created a link to subscribe to the By the Cup Newsletter. Is this link being used? Tomorrow Yann will go into testing links. Stay tuned till tomorrow to find out more about this fascinating topic.
So tell me community, what is the purpose of your Web site? Are you able to determine if your visitors are in fact doing what your Web site is designed to do? Is your Web site suppose to inform about your nonprofit? Raise money? Get volunteers? Is it effective? How have you come to that conclusion?
This article was orginally produced by Malin Coleridge during TechSoup's 2-day online event - Making an Impact: Web Stats for Nonprofits and remains the copyright of TechSoup - see Creative Commons licence for details