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A common question from clients: how can we track which donations are coming from which website traffic sources?

This is particularly interesting when an org has decided to invest time and money in a specific campaign – like ads on Meta platforms, or a paid partnership with a specific sponsor.

This week, I share some tips about how to approach this.

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The pain: knowing where donations come from

Nonprofit comms and development teams often wish they had more insight into which website traffic channels are driving donations.

Look at those five brand new, never-given-before donors that arrived in the CRM this month. Where did they come from?

Many smaller nonprofits have no methodology to answer this question.

And it becomes more urgent when your team decides to invest some time and money in a paid campaign, perhaps running ads on another website or newsletter, or investing in ads on Facebook or Instagram. In those situations, you will be under even more pressure to demonstrate the return on investment.

The common DIY solution

The most common solution to this problem is to set up a whole separate landing page and donation form for the specific traffic source you're most interested in tracking.

This can work well for a specific paid campaign – for example, an ad partnership with one specific publisher, or one discrete Facebook ad campaign. Setting up a separate landing page for a specific campaign allows you to tailor the page content and layout to match the ad messaging.

The thinking is that if you create a separate URL and separate donation form, you can clearly separate out the donations from your default donation page.

This is fine once or twice, but it becomes a lot of work if you run multiple campaigns.

And it doesn't solve the original problem at all — if you want to get a better sense of where your general donors are coming from when they give through your default donation page.

Better solutions!

There's a better way! It requires a little bit of up-front work, but it's worth it.

Step 1: Get better at using UTM parameters.

UTM parameters are name/value pairs you can add to a URL to carry additional information about the traffic source. Website analytics platforms will do their best to automatically sort traffic into source buckets like:

• Organic search
• Organic social
• Referral (clicks from another website)

But the analytics platforms can only do so much. If you manually add UTM parameters to inbound links you can enrich this data A TON.

These are the places it's particularly important to add UTM parameters:

• Links in your email campaigns (hopefully your email platform supports this; most do)
• Links in paid social ads (to make sure those clicks are assigned to Paid Social instead of Organic Social)
• Links in paid ads in other digital places, like ads on other websites or in other publishers' email newsletters

If you get better at using UTM parameters AND your donation form sends conversion data to your analytics platform, you're heading in the right direction!

Key point: this won't necessarily attribute specific traffic sources for specific donations. But you'll be able to spot general trends.

Resource: Using UTM Parameters to Measure Nonprofit Marketing Campaigns​

Step 2: Find UTM tracking data in your donation platform

If you're lucky (or made a smart vendor selection), your online giving platform collects UTM source, medium, and campaign data with each donation that arrives!

This is great – it means you can actually examine the traffic source information at the transaction level, and you're not solely reliant on your analytics tool which might not capture all the data due to blocked cookies, etc.

Unfortunately, most donation platforms don't make this data available in their standard reporting. But some do. Let me share a couple of examples.

Shout out to FundraiseUp!

While you can't see UTM parameter data in the dashboard, when you export donation data from FundraiseUp you can turn on the columns for UTM Source, UTM Medium, UTM Campaign and more:

Shout out to Givebutter!

In Givebutter, UTM data is shown in the dashboard at the individual transaction level. And like FundraiseUp, when you run a transactions export, you can choose to include the UTM parameter data fields:

Check your giving platform's documentation to see if they offer a similar feature.

The takeaway message:

If (A) your giving platform captures UTM data per transaction, and (B) you can get up to speed on how to add these parameters to your links, you can access rich data about what sources are bringing donors to your website!

That resource again: Using UTM Parameters to Measure Nonprofit Marketing Campaigns << this guide explains how UTM parameters work and how to get started adding them to your campaign links.

And if you need more advice about choosing an online donation platform check out How to Choose an Online Donation Platform for Your Nonprofit.

Until next time ✨

— Ed Harris (your digital strategy guide)

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