Top 2 Reasons Why Conversion Rates Matter on Your Donation Page
Recently we talked about how to analyze and evaluate your year-end digital campaign data in order to make decisions and grow impact.
In that post, we talked a bit about conversion rates on your donation page, but today I want to dive deeper into why this metric matters so much.
Conversion rates matter because low conversion rates = low number of online donations. (If you need a reminder of how to calculate your conversion rate, scroll to the bottom of this post.)
And the whole purpose of the Spark Digital Journey is to do marketing to drive ROI and grow your impact, so if it's not driving ROI, then we need to evaluate our efforts and adjust.
But you may be asking...
"Why do I need to calculate the conversion rate? Can't I just use the number of online donations as a measuring stick to make decisions?"
Great question.
The conversion rate is an important metric because it represents 2 important numbers:
The number of page views on your donation page
The number of those page views that converted to an online donation
When you look at both of these numbers together, you're able to understand where the dead ends are in your digital journey.
What Decisions Can You Make Based On This Data?
For our purposes today, we'll use the 17% nonprofit industry average for conversion rates on donation pages.
There are a few different implications that your conversion rate can have on your digital marketing efforts:
Traffic: If you have a low conversion rate, it could mean that you're not sending enough traffic to your donation page. The nonprofit industry average for clickthrough rate from social media is between 1-3% or 3-4% for email. If you're not hitting those numbers, then you may need to consider driving more traffic to the donation page. This has implications for how you use channels that drive traffic to your donation page (i.e. social media, email, paid ads).
Donation Page Conversion Rate Optimization: If you're sending enough traffic to the donation page, but your conversion rate is still below the industry average of 17%, it could mean that your donation page isn't optimized to convert. We'll talk more about this in a future post, and what you can do to optimize your donation page for conversions, but in short, your donation page needs to address a couple pain points for donors: 1. Is it clear what a donor is giving to, and the impact their gift will make? 2. Is it easy to make a donation?
What was the conversion rate on your donation page during your year-end campaign?
Sound off in the comments.
(this post was written by a human—me—with fingers typing on a keyboard)
As a reminder…
Conversion Rate Formula
As a reminder, here is the formula to calculate the conversion rate on your donation page:
The number of online donations within a selected timeframe divided by the number of page views on your donation page within that same timeframe multiplied by 100.
So for the sake of simplicity, here is an example:
100 online donations during your year-end campaign
Divided by 2,000 page views on your donation page during your year-end campaign
Multiplied by 100
Equals a 5% conversion rate
