Improving fundraising sign-ups
Howard Lake | 25 October 2010 | Blogs
Allowing up to 50% of visitors to leave your web pages less than 10 seconds of arriving is an enormous waste of your fundraising effort. Even a small increase in the number who stick around can make a huge improvement in donations and signups for charity sites.
For your event or cause you have done some great marketing no doubt at considerable cost and taking a lot of effort. However many web pages dedicated to fundraising, including Registration Pages, have Bounce Rates ( defined as people who arrive and leave on the same page and usually leave immediately) of 50% and above. Get more people, who after all were interested enough to come to your page in the first place, to achieve the goal of the page such as a sign up and you can have a significant impact on the profitability of your event. You want to get the right people to the right pages and then have them complete the relevant actions.
The first thing we need to do is identify the pages with the biggest problem. The quickest way is to go to the Content tab on the right hand side of your Google Analytics account. Select `Content by Title` and then sort by `%Exit`. You will now see a little piece of computer magic called `Weighted Sort`. Tick the box and you will now be shown the pages with a high number of visits that have a high Bounce Rate. Google has automatically identified these pages for your account.
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From the image you can see that pages 1, 2 and 3 have quite a lot of Page Views and a high Bounce Rate.
Next we need to look at how the majority of visitors arrived on each page. Typically they will have come as a result of 1) typing in a search query eg in Google 2) clicking on an ad 3) clicking on a link in FB, Twitter or some other Referring Source.
If most visitors are coming to the selected page via Organic then examining the keywords they used to reach the page will show which ones are `good` and which are `not good`. ie either not Converting ( completing the action that you have designed the page for) and/or have a high Bounce Rate. For example `xyz event Manchester` might be a keyword used to find a page but if the Bounce Rate of visitors who have used this keyword is high then clearly they are not finding the page useful. It may be that the page is a general one not specific to Manchester. Perhaps a new page optimised for Manchester and dedicated to this query (and similar queries say relating to Manchester) will get better results. Examining other sources of visitors will similarly show what is working and what is not. Now you have information that allows you to make useful changes.
Once you have got a selection of keywords that you are happy with and Sources that deliver what should be `good` visitors you may still have a high Bounce Rate. Now the problem is that you have the right visitors but they are not engaging with your content. Why this is happening is not always easy to determine.
There are two simple, no cost tests that you can do with the bonus you do not need to bother the web dev team either. One thing to keep in mind are the results of Jacob Nielsen’s survey that most people do not read a page they scan it – reading around 20% of the content. Keeping this in mind you can do a quick usability test at: fivesecondtest.com/ Feedback from even a very few people will show you if users quickly understand what the purpose of your page. (Incidentally try the test on the fivesecondtest.com site where you are shown a random web page for 5 seconds and then asked a simple question about it such as `what do we do ? `- scary how even for what appear to be well designed pages it is really easy to miss what should be obvious). This test may show you have a problem with a page but does not give any clues as to what elements on the page should you change.
Heatmaps that show how users behave on a page can help with this. Two that are very popular are Crazy Egg and ClickTale. Both are easy to use and cheap. But if you have zero budget and no tech support to put even one line of javascript on your web page there is a free heatmap generator at attentionwizard.com. You send them a JPEG of your page and from this they generate a heat map, created by a computer algorithm, that simulates users behaviour.
With the info gained from these tests you should now know what web pages on your site are not performing and have some useful ideas on how to improve visitor engagement.
I have collected 10 sites with info plus useful resources (generally cheap and easy to use) on tools for improving the performance of your pages. You can see them at: www.delicious.com/Find50Marketing/usability (feel free to join the Find50 network on Delicious)
For many years Seamus Morley worked in corporate sales and marketing, eventually starting his own successful software marketing business. Now he consulst on emarketing strategy with all the acronyms: search engine marketing (SEM and AdWords PPC ), search engine optimization (SEO) and social media optimization (SMO) mainly for UK charities.
Charity sites that he has done work for include: RNIB, Breast Cancer Care, YouthNet, Scope, Action for Blind People and Cass Business School KnowHowNonProfit.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.