Analytics & Conversions for Associations

Analytics are key to maximizing your site’s capabilities. In order for your association’s website to be successful, it’s critical to determine patterns in data and track goals. Learning how to process data that is collected is the most challenging step in this process and often underutilized. WDG has created custom-built dashboards, designed to help clients find the truth in their analytics. It’s simple to pull thousands of metrics from your website; the challenge is visualizing this data. WDG has found a solution to this challenge which is our new custom client dashboards.

We found that Google Analytics can be confusing and ineffective for many of our clients. We designed a dashboard that can be tailored to each client by pulling data from different resources into one user-friendly screen. Data can be pulled into a dashboard from social media, websites, email campaigns, plugins and other mediums with tracking capabilities.

Determining What to Track

As an association, the core objective of analytics is to help gain insight into the community in order to understand their needs. To determine which data to collect, we begin by finding the common traits of the most engaged users. On the dashboard, we build custom segments that include the users we care about and exclude the traffic that will warp results.

The next step is to evaluate annual and quarterly objectives. Some examples of what to track are as follows:

• Email Newsletter Subscribers
• New Member Subscriptions
• Product Sales
• Cart Abandonment
• Event Registrations
• Resource Downloads (Whitepapers, member and non-member materials)
• Social Media Subscribers
• Engagement with the Website
• Various Conversions Determined by KPI’s That Are Important to Your Association.

Every association is different, making it important to analyze what is valuable to you. We recommend setting a performance baseline target using the previous period and determining performance goals moving forward. After this is accomplished you can begin selecting and migrating data points into a dashboard.

Improving Your Bottom Line

The time you spend analyzing website analytics is directly related to your financial success. For example, a 10% increase in traffic will result in an increase in revenue; and increasing your site’s conversion rates from 5% to 15% will result in an increase in revenue. If you don’t believe this statement and are not seeing these results, then it may be time to redesign your website around your key performance indicators. Although redesigning a website with a top-tier digital agency can be a time-consuming effort, it’s worth the effort to increase new memberships, revenue, and engagement with current members.

The future of analytics is very promising as more data continues to be incorporated into our future. Analytic search queries have quadrupled in the past 8 years. WDGs investment in data visualization has paid off as it gives us the ability to predict things before they even happen. A direct correlation between online visibility to our annual revenue is evident. We now have the ability to be strategic about the future and we want to share these capabilities with our clients.

WDG is Here to Help

Websites are a necessary tool that enables associations to accomplish their goals. WDG provides powerful thought leadership options for associations. We create dashboards for our clients centered around their conversion goals. We help our clients understand how their users are moving through the engagement funnel and we set up benchmarks and alerts to let them know when a metric is underperforming.

These dashboards enable us and our clients to be proactive about responding to long-term benchmarks. We are able to provide our clients the value of not just showing performance benchmarks, but we are able to change those numbers when they start to trend off course by using our expert strategy team and developers.

Contact us if you’d like to learn more about how these dashboards can help your association. If you’re still looking for ways to improve your association’s site, read more to find out if you should be migrating your association to WordPress.