The importance of website performance measures for non-profit organizations.

The goal of many non-profit organizations is to spread awareness about a problematic issue to as many relevant people as they can and raise money to alleviate or solve that issue.

In order to know if an organization’s message is being effectively heard and by how many people, companies utilize analytics to measure the performance of a website, social media channels and/or ad performance.

A non-profit organization can measure the number of sign ups to their website. In addition, by acquiring valuable information (such as phone numbers or email addresses) about the people that made donations, or that expressed a concern about the problem, organizations can selectively invite people to participate in future events.

Also, they can measure what social media channels are delivering most of the traffic to their website and how much traffic is coming from organic search versus paid advertising (such as pay per click, banner ads, or others).

Time spent on the web page and bounce rates should also be measured- Google Analytics is a great tool to monitor this information. By monitoring visitors’ behavior on the website, companies can determine what content on their website interests and engages most of the visitors and what content isn’t performing well. They can also determine what content people tend to share and what content people find indifferent. For example, non-profit organizations can make videos with the life stories of ill people they aim to help and they can write about these or similar stories on their blog page.  By monitoring customer behavior, they can see what customers did next after watching a video or reading a blog (e.g. did they sign up and make donations or did they just leave the website). If videos are attracting most of the visitors’ attention and tend to incentivize people to make donations, then organizations can plan their marketing strategy accordingly and convey their messages by spreading videos across a variety of social media channels and by incorporating them into their websites.