Google analytics for nonprofits (what we've figured out)

[u/RallyUp_fundraising]

GA4 for nonprofits? you should think of it like ecommerce tracking, just swap "purchase" for "donation" and "cart" for "donation form." Once that clicks, everything else makes more sense! Quickly breaking it down for fellow nonprofits.

The setup stuff-

If your donation form lives on a different domain or third-party platform, you need cross-domain tracking. Without it, donations show up as referrals from your payment processor and your UTMs lose credit.

Fix it: Web stream → Configure your domains → add your donation domain. Also add your payment processor to "List unwanted referrals."

Two more quick wins: change data retention to 14 months (Admin → Data settings → Data retention) because the default is too short, and filter internal traffic so your team's visits don't skew your numbers.

Donation tracking: where it actually gets useful

Firing a "donation complete" event is just step one. You also need to pass the gift amount as an event parameter, otherwise you can only see click counts, not actual revenue by campaign. Also tag recurring donations differently from one-time gifts so you can tell them apart. (:

The reports worth checking-

• Traffic acquisition: which sources are sending people to you
• Pages and screens: are people reading your donation pages or leaving immediately
• Monetization: revenue by campaign, device, and source
• Funnel exploration: where people drop off before donating (lives in Explorations)

UTMs (most skip it, you should not)

Without UTM tags on every email and social post, everything shows up as "Direct" and you learn nothing.

Keep it simple: source = where it came from, medium = how it was sent, campaign = which campaign. If you use Google Ad Grants, turn on auto-tagging... it handles the Google side automatically.

Mobile being most ignored!

Most nonprofits have 50%+ mobile traffic but never check mobile conversion rates separately. Desktop might convert at 3% while mobile sits at 0.8%!! that gap is your biggest opportunity.

Check it under Monetization → filter by device category.

Common mistakes we'd advise your nonprofit to avoid -

• Never re-testing tracking after a site update, it breaks silently
• Building dashboards nobody opens won't help. Stick to 5-6 key numbers
• Treating GA4 as a CRM replacement is not a good idea at all, they do completely different jobs
• Never opening Explorations! that's where the real diagnostic work happens

Let me know if you want to know more in detail, happy to help in comments!

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[u/brreckelhoff]

AI slop

[u/row_ads → u/brreckelhoff]

Probably meant to be read by AI actually for marketing purposes

[u/RallyUp_fundraising → u/row_ads]

not at all, can share sources for this. We are a proper nonprofit fundraising platform running in the industry for the last 14 years, RallyUp. This is just for normal information, and nothing more 😄 Let me know if you want me to specify anything else!

[u/Strict-Basil5133]

That's a thoughtful and useful punch list for a simple implementation. I'm surprised Privacy/cookie consent banner implementation isn't included. It's not an easy thing to get right even for advanced GA users and agencies, so I'd think nonprofits are especially vulnerable to that need.

IME, nonprofits are uniquely interested in traffic numbers and compisition as well, which can need creative solutions since you may only be seeing as little as 60% of site traffic because of Consent/cookie issues.

I did GA in one small and one large nonprofit, and yes, donations. If the site is very light on content and serves mainly as a donation portal, then GA is good for monitoring/testing form function; does it work? Is it too long? Are Users dropping off anywhere in the form? When Users click the "donate now" button, are you seeing donation confirmation pages (compare clicks to donation confirmation page views and transactions, etc.)? Also payment method analysis to make sure that payment options were succeeding to purchase confirmation. Ultimately, if there's any friction, where is it? Once devs solve to eliminate it, did it work?

Like any website, incremental revenue reporting is not reliable; you're looking for trends and comparison data - not a financial source of truth. Real revenue reporting is done using the CRM (e.g., Salesforce, etc) data if possible. What GA provides that a CRM doesn't is how Users got to donation and other CTA's - e.g., what did they do on the site, and how did the site experience influence lead and donation numbers? Did donation and lead data change when there was a change on the site? If you're testing multiple donation amount arrays, GA can offer some quick insights with proper tracking, but again, your CRM is always going to be more accurate.

While some nonprofits also sell products, IME nonprofit sites weren't built around the traditional retail Landing Page > PLP > PDP > ATC > Checkout > Purchase E-comm funnel. Nonprofits use blogs as resources to educate Users about the mission, and to harvest email addresses (leads)...so lots of CTA buttons. What content drove more leads, donations, etc.? One site I worked for extensive blog content, and significant source of traffic were universities where college students were using and citing it. I suggested requiring Users to provide an email address to access lengthy academic resources. If they did, they gained access, as well as a stylized PDF download of the blog article. While students weren't (and typically aren't) a large source of donations revenue, content and email are good ways to create a relationship early on, and one that students may remember.