Tracking online donations with Google Analytics Event Tracking

The goal: In this video Kevin Watson, communications coordinator at the First Universalist Church of Minneapolis, talks about his goal to encourage more congregants to donate and pay their dues online, so that the church can save time, money and a few trees too.

How Google Analytics can help: First Universalist, is using a third-party donation collection service (like GiveMN or PayPal.) This means that every time someone gives a donation to Kevin’s organization, they actually are traveling away from his website to do so.

Now, the basic Google Analytics (GA) tracking code only tracks pageviews on your website. So how can you track the number of people donating if they’re going somewhere else to complete their transaction? Short answer — you can’t. But you can track the next best thing, which is every time someone clicks on the “Donate” button using something called Event Tracking.

Event Tracking is a feature that Google unveiled in July 2009 to allow you to track a variety of user activities on your website using JavaScript events. One of the “events” that you can track is when someone clicks on a link, or in Kevin’s case, the “Donate” button on his website.

To set up the Event Tracking, Kevin would add the JavaScript  to his donate button using Google’s pre-defined syntax, which looks like this:

JavaScriptAction="_trackEvent(category, action, optional_label, optional_value)"

The “category” is the name of the object or objects that you want to track, in this case we’ll call the object “Button”, since it’s an online form. The action is the specific activity that the user is undertaking, in this case they’re subscribing to the enewsletter so we will use “Donate”. The label and the value are optional, but can be used to add additional identifying information to this event.

So, when we put this all together we get the code that Kevin can use to track the number of times that someone hits the “Donate” button. That code looks something like this:

<a href="http://donatehere.com" onclick="pageTracker._trackEvent('Button', 'Donate', '')">
<img src="/files/u3/donatebutton2.gif"></a>

Once the code is properly installed Kevin can track every time someone clicks on the donation button by going to the Content section and then selecting Event Tracking in his GA dashboard.

From tracking to optimizing: Once Kevin has an idea of how many people are clicking onhis donation button on average, he can start using that benchmarking information to optimize his site.

For instance, as noted earlier hitting the “donation” button does not necessarily mean that a user actually completes the transaction. By comparing how many click “donation” and how many ultimately end up contributing Kevin can identify if there are problems with donation page, or, if he were using GiveMN, possible problems with his messaging there.

Kevin could also begin experimenting with the placement of the button on the webpage, or even with what pages the button is posted on in his site. He might find that more people donate if he places it higher on the page, or on a different pages in addition to the homepage.

If he decides to put the button multiple pages, this could be a great opportunity to add something to the “value” field, like “AboutUsPage” so that he can track which “Donate” button position on his site is performing the best.

Note: To use Event Tracking you need to have the newer Google Analytics tracking code on your site. If you’re not sure, check out the GA tracking code before the closing body tag on one of your webpages. If it says “ga.js” in there, you’re good to go.

P.S. – Special thanks to Kevin for being my first interviewee for these videos! Kevin can also be found online at Aidan Web Services, his  web design and marketing business.

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