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Google Analytics 4 for NonProfit Advertising: A Comprehensive Guide

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Vlad is a web analyst at VIDEN with 5+ years of experience in digital analytics, specializing in Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager (360), Looker Studio, etc.
Google Analytics 4 for NonProfit Advertising: A Comprehensive Guide

Nonprofit organizations differ from businesses and have their unique mission and goals. However, like any organization, nonprofits need to market themselves effectively to reach their target audience and achieve their objectives. Effective advertising plays a big role (investments in digital advertising by nonprofits increased by 28% in 2023), but it’s equally important to measure and understand the outcomes of these efforts. According to the Salesforce.Org Report, 76% of nonprofits lack a data strategy. 

Data-driven advertising empowers nonprofits to allocate resources more efficiently by providing actionable insights into user interactions and campaign performance. By tracking and analyzing detailed metrics, nonprofits can fine-tune their advertising efforts to maximize engagement and conversions, ultimately driving greater impact with every campaign. With the help of Google Analytics 4 (GA4), nonprofits can optimize their advertising strategies, reach their target audiences, and achieve their mission-driven goals.

In this blog, our nonprofit data analytics expert, Vlad Babok, will explain how nonprofits can leverage GA4 to enhance their advertising efforts.

Table of Contents:

  1. Data Analytics for Nonprofits: Why GA4 is Great Solution for Nonprofit Advertising
  2. Maximizing Impact Through GA4: The Client’s Success Story
  3. The Impact of Implementing GA4 for Nonprofit Advertising
  4. Key Findings
  5. How to set up Google Analytics 4 for Nonprofit Advertising
  6. The Bottom Line

Data Analytics for Nonprofits: Why GA4 is Great Solution for Nonprofit Advertising

Nonprofit analytics for advertising offers the following advantages to ensure your fundraising success:

✔️Enhanced User Journey Tracking

Nonprofits often have diverse audiences, including donors, volunteers, beneficiaries, and advocates. GA4’s event-based tracking allows organizations to monitor the complete user journey across websites, apps, and other digital platforms. This holistic view can help nonprofits understand how different audience segments interact with their content and where they drop off in the conversion process.

✔️Improved Audience Segmentation

GA4 enables more precise audience segmentation based on user behavior and demographics. Nonprofits can create custom segments to target specific groups, such as recurring donors or new volunteers. This capability is essential for tailoring advertising messages and ensuring they resonate with the intended audience.

✔️Cross-Platform Analysis

Most nonprofit organizations operate across multiple digital platforms, including websites, social media, and mobile apps. GA4’s cross-platform analysis provides a unified view of user interactions, making it easier to track the effectiveness of advertising campaigns across different channels. This insight helps in allocating resources more efficiently and identifying the most impactful platforms.

✔️Prioritizing Data Privacy and Compliance

With rising concerns about data privacy, GA4 is built to comply with regulations like GDPR and CCPA. This is crucial for non-profits, as it assures your donors and stakeholders that their data is managed responsibly. GA4’s robust data controls help maintain trust and transparency, which are vital for sustaining long-term relationships with your audience.

✔️Detailed User Interactions Tracking

GA4 transitions from session-based to event-based tracking, where every interaction (clicks, video views, downloads) is an event. For nonprofits, this means you can gain a detailed understanding of which content engages your audience and drives them to take action, such as signing up for a newsletter or making a donation. This insight allows you to optimize your communications and outreach strategies effectively.

✔️Seamless Google Ads Integration

For nonprofits leveraging Google Ads, GA4 offers seamless integration, making it easier to measure the success of your campaigns. By understanding which ads drive the most valuable actions on your site, you can refine your advertising strategies to maximize return on investment (ROI). This is especially important for nonprofits, where every advertising dollar must be optimized.

✔️No-cost Integration with Looker Studio

GA4 provides a free and seamless integration with Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio), allowing nonprofits to create custom, visually appealing dashboards and reports without additional costs. This feature is invaluable for nonprofits with limited resources, as it offers an easy way to analyze, visualize, and share data with stakeholders in a clear, actionable format. With Looker Studio, you can create tailored reports to track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as donation trends, volunteer sign-ups, or content engagement, helping your organization make data-driven decisions and effectively communicate your impact to donors and board members.

Maximizing Impact Through GA4: The Client’s Success Story

Let’s review a straightforward case where a nonprofit agency decided to leverage the power of Google Analytics 4 to improve the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns, particularly in increasing donations and engagement.

Initially, the client had very limited tracking capabilities – they weren’t using Google Analytics or any robust tracking tool to measure the users behavior and performance of their campaigns. Most of their decisions were based on gut instinct or high-level data from the platforms they advertised on, like Google Ads and Facebook Ads.

It became clear early on that without proper tracking in place, it was impossible for them to optimize their ad spend or truly understand user behavior. We recommended setting up Google Analytics 4 (GA4) from scratch, which allowed us to build a foundation for making data-driven decisions and optimizing their campaigns more effectively.

The Impact of Implementing GA4 for Nonprofit Advertising

Once we implemented GA4, we were able to transform the way the client understood their website traffic and advertising performance. Here’s a breakdown of how GA4 made a significant difference:

✨Advanced Event Tracking

Before GA4, the client had no way of tracking detailed user interactions on their site beyond basic ad performance metrics from Google Ads or Meta Ads. With GA4’s event-based tracking, we set up custom events to capture key actions such as clicking the ‘Donate’ button, filling out any forms on the website, and interacting with website elements during the donation funnel, signing up for a newsletter or downloading resources, and more.

This data revealed that many users were clicking the ‘Donate’ button but dropping off before completing the donation, which is an obvious behavioral factor for some portion of the traffic, but the marketing team had no insight into this as they had no way to collect this kind of data.

Further analysis showed that most of the drop-offs happened on one page of the donation funnel. Some users did not reach the final step, and some of them dropped out on the first pages of the funnel. Thus, a certain number of potential donors left the site at the last stage of donation. One of the clear reasons for user drop-off was the inconvenient/multi-stage donation funnel, which is not well optimized for the average user’s behavior.

Armed with this insight, the client simplified their payment process and, emphasized security and trust elements on the page, and optimized the website for mobile device users. This change resulted in a ~20% increase in donations value within one month.

✨Granular Audience Segmentation

GA4’s audience segmentation capabilities allowed us to create highly specific groups based on user behavior, something the client had never been able to do before. We set up segments for…

  • Donors with High Engagement Across Multiple Channels. Segment users who have not only interacted with multiple channels (email, social media, organic search, etc.) but have also engaged deeply across those channels over time. These users might have watched videos, clicked through several educational articles, or spent time comparing donation options across devices. This can help identify which digital touchpoints are most effective in nurturing long-term engagement before a donation.
  • Recurring Donation Potential Based on LTV and Session Frequency. This segment focuses on users who have donated before and show recurring behaviors such as high session frequency and high value events (such as frequently downloading reports or subscribing to newsletters). Combining life-time value (LTV) metrics with recurring behaviors allows nonprofits to target individuals likely to become regular donors and nurture them with personalized communication.
  • Users Exhibiting High Exit Rates on Key Conversion Pages. Identifies users who land on critical pages like donation forms or volunteer sign-up pages but abandon the process after spending significant time on the page or scrolling without completing the action. This segment allows nonprofits to investigate friction points in the donation process and optimize conversion funnels.
  • High-Intent Visitors From Social Media Who Interacted with Donation Appeals. Segment users who arrived from social media platforms and specifically interacted with campaign-related content, like donation calls-to-action (CTAs) or videos. These users may not have completed a donation, but their behaviors indicate a higher intent, suggesting they can be retargeted with a strong call to action via remarketing campaigns.
  • Long-Term Prospective Donors with Repeated Visits Over Extended Periods Users who have interacted with your nonprofit’s content over an extended period but in a non-linear pattern (e.g., sporadic but significant engagements every few months). These users may be in a longer decision-making process, and understanding their behavior can help in designing long-term nurture campaigns, focusing on sustaining engagement until they convert.
  • Volunteers Exhibiting High Event Engagement but Low Donation Interaction Users who frequently interact with event-related content (e.g., attending webinars, participating in volunteer activities, or downloading event materials) but show minimal or no donation behaviors. Nonprofits can use this segment to encourage volunteer-donors, converting active volunteers into financial supporters by recognizing their commitment and providing tailored donation appeals.
  • Users Interacting with Specific Advocacy Campaigns but No Donation Attempts. Focuses on users highly engaged with specific advocacy or awareness campaigns (such as reading articles or signing petitions) but who have not proceeded to any donation-related activity. This insight can guide how to strategically nurture these users from advocacy support into financial contributions, emphasizing the tie between their advocacy and the impact of donations.
  • High Value Corporate Donors Engaging with CSR-related Content. Segment organizations or corporate donors interacting with specific CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) content on your site, such as sustainability reports, impact measurement resources, or corporate volunteering information. This segment helps nonprofits identify potential corporate partnerships and strategic opportunities for large-scale giving or sponsorships.

By collecting and analyzing audience data, we discovered which user groups were most inclined to achieve the goal of the advertising campaigns and who were more engaged in the process of interacting with the site.

Having passed this information to the client, the agency performed appropriate adjustments in the advertising campaign strategy, which resulted in a 20% increase in the click-through rate (CTR) and attracted 30% more traffic in just 1 month.

✨GA4 Exploration (Custom) Reporting

We created GA4 custom reports to visualize the entire donation funnel, tracking which platforms (Meta, Google Ads, Bing, etc.) were driving traffic, user engagement, and, most importantly, donations.

Need help configuring Google Analytics 4?

Key Findings

  • Google Ads: Despite receiving 40% of the budget, Google Ads generated only 15% of total donations. Many users visited the site but didn’t complete donations or other key interactions.
  • Meta (Facebook & Instagram): Meta campaigns, with just 20% of the budget, drove 50% of total donations and had a higher engagement rate.
  • Bing Ads: Although responsible for only 10% of traffic with 20% of the budget., Bing users donated more on average, contributing 25% of total donations value.

After the initial review of the data, it became evident that certain campaigns are underperforming and do not justify the allocated budget. As a result of a more detailed analysis of granular data, the marketing team decided to adjust the advertising strategy and reallocate the budget accordingly. As a result, the following decisions were made:

  1. To increase Meta Ads budget from 20% to 40%, given their high conversion rate.
  2. To reduce Google Ads budget from 40% to 25% and refine targeting for better results.
  3. To increase Bing Ads to 35% due to high donation amounts.

Following the implementation of these changes, the client experienced:

  • 30% increase in total donations within three months.
  • 20% higher conversion rate from better-targeted ads.
  • 25% lower cost-per-conversion.

At first glance, it might seem obvious that certain factors should be addressed from the very beginning, such as tracking key user behaviors and optimizing the donation process. However, without proper tracking and data analysis tools like Google Analytics 4 (GA4), many nonprofit organizations are often left in the dark when it comes to understanding these critical metrics. In fact, without customized event tracking set up in GA4, this level of insight would have been unavailable to our client.

Once we implemented GA4, the client gained access to a wealth of actionable data, which allowed them to refine their marketing strategies and website optimizations. Even with what could be considered “surface-level” insights, the organization was able to make critical adjustments to their advertising campaigns and website structure that drastically improved performance.

By leveraging this newfound visibility, the client could pinpoint the exact stages where potential donors were abandoning the process and make swift adjustments to address these friction points. Moreover, with the robust audience segmentation features in GA4, they were able to craft highly targeted advertising campaigns that yielded significant improvements in both engagement and conversion rates across multiple platforms.

And this is just the beginning. The capabilities of GA4 extend far beyond what we have initially uncovered. Advanced event tracking, detailed audience segmentation, and custom reporting tools provide non-profit organizations with an unprecedented level of control and insight into user behavior, allowing them to fine-tune their strategies for maximum impact.

These results highlight just how transformative GA4 can be for non-profits looking to boost their marketing efficiency and overall digital performance. This success, achieved in such a short time, is just the tip of the iceberg. With the depth and breadth of insights that GA4 can provide, non-profits have the potential to uncover even more opportunities for optimization and growth in the future. The platform’s ability to provide deeper insights into user behavior and campaign effectiveness means organizations can continuously refine their strategies and achieve even greater success over time.

 

Curious about nonprofit advertising strategies? How much should your nonprofit spend on advertising? Read our article “Digital Advertising for Nonprofits” to explore our expert tips. 

How to set up Google Analytics 4 for Nonprofit Advertising

If you’ve decided to explore the full potential of data collection in GA4, let’s review how to get started and set up tracking effectively.

Setting up Google Analytics 4 (GA4) from scratch might seem daunting if you’re not a technical user, but it’s quite manageable with step-by-step instructions. This guide will help you get started without requiring advanced technical skills.

Step 1: Create a Google Analytics Account

If you don’t already have a Google Analytics account, follow these steps:

  1. Go to Google Analytics: Visit analytics.google.com.
  2. Sign in or Create an Account: Use your Google account to sign in. If you don’t have a Google account, you’ll need to create one.
  3. Click on ‘Start Measuring’: You’ll see this button after logging in.

Step 2: Set Up Your First Property in GA4

1. Property Setup:

After clicking ‘Start Measuring’ and creating an account, you’ll be prompted to enter your property name. A property represents the website or app you want to track.

Property Name: Enter the name of your website (e.g., ‘MyWebsite GA4’).

Reporting Time Zone and Currency: Choose your preferred time zone and currency.

2. Click ‘Next’. This brings you to the next configuration step.

3. Business Information:

You will be asked to provide information about your business size and industry. Select the most appropriate options.

4. Business Objectives. In the next step, you will need to select your business objectives. The selection will affect the pre-defined reports that will be displayed in your GA4 Proper after creation. Note that this is not the final result, and these reports can be changed (added/removed/modified) in the future. Here, you can view a list of reports for each objective.

5. Click ‘Create’. After entering the information, click ‘Create’ to finish setting up your property.

Step 3: Add Data Stream

1. Choose Your Platform.

You’ll be asked to select the platform for your data stream (Web, Android app, or iOS app).

For most websites, you’ll choose Web.

2. Enter Website Details.

Website URL. Enter your website URL (make sure to include https:// if your site is secure).

Stream Name. Name your stream (e.g., ‘Non-profit – Web’).

3. Enhanced Measurement. Make sure that the Enhanced Measurement toggle is on. This will automatically track some interactions like page views, scrolls, and outbound clicks.

4. Click ‘Create Stream’. Once everything is set, click the ‘Create Stream’ button.

Step 4: Install GA4 Tracking Code on Your Website

Now that you have set up the property and created a data stream, it’s time to add the tracking code to your website. The GA4 system will provide you with a unique Measurement ID (begins with ‘G-‘).

Well, there are 2 ways to install GA4 on your website.

  1. Manual installation by adding GTAG code to the website.
  2. Adding GA4 tracking through GTM – Google Tag Manager (recommended).

Generally, there is a 3rd way, adding GA4 tracking through integration with fundraising platforms; however, having only this type of installation, you risk losing data from the main website and ruining data quality. So, it is best to have this type of setup together with the A or B option. Let’s take a closer look at both implementation options.

Option A: Manually Install the Code

1. Get the GA4 Global Site Tag (gtag.js).

After creating your data stream, you’ll be provided with a Global Site Tag (gtag.js code).

Copy the tracking code provided.

2. Add to Your Website.

If you manage your own website and can access the code, paste the copied GA4 tracking code into the <head> section of every page you want to track.

Example:

<head>

  <script async src=”https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=G-XXXXXXXXXX”></script>

  <script>

    window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];

    function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}

    gtag(‘js’, new Date());

    gtag(‘config’, ‘G-XXXXXXXXXX’);

  </script>

</head>

Option B: Use Google Tag Manager (Simpler Option for Non-Technical Users)

If you prefer not to mess with the code, you can use Google Tag Manager (GTM) to add the tracking code. Here’s how:

  1. Go to Google Tag Manager: Visit tagmanager.google.com and sign in with your Google account.
  2. Create an Account and Container. Here, you can learn how to create a GTM account and container.
  3. Create a New Tag. Now that the account and container have been created let’s move on to setting up GA4 tracking.

Click the ‘New’ tag in the workspace.

Click the ‘Tag Configuration’ area -> Choose Tag Type: Select Google Analytics.

In the opened window, select the Google Tag option.

Enter Measurement ID: Paste your GA4 Measurement ID (found in your GA4 account under Admin > Data Streams).

The next step:

The next step:

The next step:

4. Add Trigger. Set a trigger to fire on All Pages (this will ensure tracking on every page of your website).

5. Save and Publish. Once you’ve configured the tag, save it and click the ‘Submit’ -> ‘Publish’  button in Google Tag Manager to publish the changes.

That’s it! Now Google Analytica will begin to collect a basic data set that can already be used to analyze and monitor information.

Step 5: Verify the GA4 Setup

1. Wait for Data. After setting up the tracking, it may take a few minutes to start seeing data in your GA4 dashboard.

2. Check in Real-Time. Go to the Real-Time report in Google Analytics (found on the left sidebar). Visit your website in another browser tab to see if your visits are being tracked.

Step 6: Set Up Custom Events

GA4 automatically tracks several basic events (like page views and scrolls), but you can and should also set up custom events. Custom events allow you to capture more specific interactions tailored to your website goals, providing deeper insights into user behavior. Whether it’s tracking a button click, form submission, ecommerce interactions like donations, or any unique user action, custom events help you fine-tune your analytics for more meaningful data.

Setting up custom events, however, is a more advanced topic that requires careful planning. For now, we recommend reviewing the guide provided by Google to get started: Google Tag Manager Custom Event Guide.

The Bottom Line

GA4 is an essential tool for nonprofit organizations, enabling them to make data-driven decisions, optimize advertising spend, and ultimately drive greater impact. Incredibly enhances the ability to gather information from a website and analyze the most detailed data that some never even knew they had. With advanced features like cross-platform tracking, audience segmentation, and ecommerce data collection, non-profits can tailor their outreach more effectively while maintaining data privacy and transparency. 

So don’t hesitate! Start gathering valuable data that can boost your advertising efforts right away! Contact us and book a 15-minute call with our data analytics experts. 

 

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