Having a solid site experience and good content is a table stake, but planning beyond that touchpoint is needed.
If you’ve ever watched Moneyball, you’d be familiar with how the Oakland A’s turned baseball into a total numbers game. In the case of your website, it’s much the same.
Evaluating the most common paths from those who complete a donation on your site allows you to see which pages they visited in their journey. Activating and replicating that journey for future visitors is where your progression rate can increase drastically.
Your first equation for fundraising website performance is to know the average value per visitor. Ideally, you want to get to a value per visitor broken out by channel. This then allows you to focus in on channel-specific audiences and invest more time in higher value channels.
Looking at the volume of how many visitors to every page on your site who then progress to a donation form gets you to a number representing a progression value per page. This indicates hotspots in your site where visitors are more likely to proceed to begin the process of making a donation.
Taking your digital fundraising revenue and dividing it by the number of users who visited donation forms gets you to a value per progression. This number tells you if your quality of donation form visitors is at a healthy level or if there’s work to be done to improve conversion rates or quality of visits.
This value is simple. It is the value per donation, broken out by each donation form. This then tells you which messaging formats, layout variations and arrays may influence this value. Constant testing of these components is highly recommended.
You’ve done the hard work to get a user to your site. Now it’s time to influence them to take their next step in the donor journey based on their site behavior.