How do you judge digital success? How do you identify realistic targets for your website? Which stats do you use to make the case for digital investment?
We’re excited to announce our new and improved Digital Benchmark, which allows you to do all this and more. We’ve launched an interactive Google Data Studio dashboard which helps charities to evaluate their online performance against their peers.
The dashboard lets you compare your website’s performance across audience, device, traffic source and social media. You can compare against the charity average, or drill down to compare only against charities in your sector or with a similar budget. You can rank your performance across all metrics, see where your competitors might be doing better and where you should be really proud of what you’re achieving. And you can do all this across any timeframe within the last year.
Check out how a sample version of the dashboard works.
How the Digital Benchmark works
Since 2013, more than 40 charities have been collaborating to compare their website’s performance once every quarter, with an Excel spreadsheet assessing how they rank on sessions, pageviews, bounce rate and more. Last year, 91% of participants rated the Benchmark good or excellent value for money.
Now, thanks to extended experimentation with Google’s beta Data Studio platform and the expertise of digital marketing specialists upriseUP, we’re able to provide the same valued service in a much more engaging, self-service dashboard.
The dashboard uses Google Analytics Spreadsheet Add-on to pull new data from each participating charity’s Google Analytics each night, which is then fed into Google’s Data Studio and presented to participants in tables and charts.
Extra insights
On top of the automated dashboard, subscribers also receive regular analysis of the data (with insight from digital expert Bertie Bosrédon) which helps charities to spot new trends, see which channels they might be able to get more out of, and put your performance in context for senior management.
Moreover, our annual Digital Benchmark survey, report and event provide extra insights including how digital teams are structured, what tools and systems charities are using and how online fundraising performs.
The versatility of Data Studio means we’re also keen to start benchmarking even more data in our dashboard. Metrics on the horizon include donation conversion rate and users. As it’s a collaborative project, which relies on the pioneering charities who share their data, we’re naturally open to requests to include other metrics too.
How you can get involved
If you’d like to see how your charity’s online performance stacks up, you can join the Benchmark today.
Participation costs £400+vat per calendar year for CharityComms organisational members, or £1,000+vat for non-members. If you join before 24 March, we can include your data for the final three quarters of 2018 for just £300+vat (or £750+vat for non-members).
All we need from you is access to a Google Analytics view and a commitment to complete our annual survey. In return, you get access to the dashboard, analysis, and an invite to our exclusive annual Digital Benchmark meeting.
More like this
Check out our sample version of the dashboard
Find out more about the Benchmark
See the terms and conditions for participation
Existing participants can access the dashboard here.
Photo by Edho Pratama on Unsplash
