Chris Arnold, digital marketing officer, CABA Visit the CharityComms website to view slides from past events, see what events we have coming up and to check out what else we do: www.charitycomms.org.uk

1. Digital engagement
evaluation model
Chris Arnold

2. The problem…
• How do we justify / demonstrate the quality of
campaigns and activity beyond quantitative
metrics such as donations?
• How do we compare campaign to campaign
using deeper metrics than just clicks? How do
we measure engagement?
• How do you report the engagement so that all
teams (including the exec/trustees/board) can
relate to and understand?

3. Digital analytics – lots to measure
External websites
Read multiple pages

4. What do you end up with?
• Metric overload
• Metrics that mean different
things to different teams
• Metrics that you can’t act upon for future
improvement
• …so you focus on a small number of metrics
that don’t give a balanced view of engagement
(eg clicks or visits!)

5. Examples of click activity
(Grumpy visitor) Low activity, low engagement
– Sees social media message “How to get better
sleep”. Clicks the link but leaves the website
without feeling like they gained any benefit
(Researcher) High activity, medium engagement
– Opens an email on mental health campaign. They
read two self-help articles, watch a video,
download a PDF on mental health, browse three
“about us” pages
(Ideal visitor) Low activity, high engagement
– A website visitor opens an email as part of a
careers campaign. They read a self-help article,
share it on social media and register their details

6. Click rate
• Each of those examples is reported on as a
‘click’, open, visit or session…which doesn’t help
us highlight how engaged they are
? ? ?

7. A way to measure engagement
• Google analytics can track when someone visits
a specific page (URL) on your website, such as:
– /how-we-help/emotional-support
– /contact-form-thank-you.html
– /nutrition-webinar-watch.html
– /help-and-guides/how-to-give-difficult-feedback-at-
work.html
– /benefits-calculator/results.html
– [external clicks] www.facebook.com/share

8. …and give it a score
Using the Google Analytics Goals feature, you can
assign scores to each of these page visits
• Lower levels of engagement:
– Looking at the “About us” page
– Looking at your social media accounts
• Higher levels of engagement;
– Booking onto an event
– Contacting you for support

9. Where do we start?
1. Identify possible activities and engagements
(and URL)
2. Assign activities an engagement score
3. Use Goals in Google Analytics with these
engagement scores
– Measured in monetary currency £,$,€,¥

10. Model structure
Non-engaged traffic
Bounce traffic (unless on key
pages)
Engaged traffic
Multiple page views
High value goals
Contact / donate / book event /
social share
$100
Value per activity
Medium value goals
Self-help articles / view support
/ online tools
$25
Value per activity
Low value goals
General pages / social media
account view
$1
Value per activity

11. Engagement evaluation
Values of all the goals are added together to
represent the quality (as well as quantity) of
engagements:
– Total engagement value of all activity
• eg $10,500
– Engagement ratio (total engagement value ÷ total
number of engagements) to allow campaigns of
differing sizes to be compared
• eg $4.50 vs $6.25

12. The benefits
• Clearer picture of overall online engagement
health
– drops in traffic ≠ drops in engagement
• Compare different campaigns of the same topic
• Compare different topics per audience segment

13. The result:

14. Where to start
1. Source support with Google Analytics
– Campaign tracking
– Goal setting
– Reporting
2. Map all your online activities (goals)
3. Group and score all the online activities with
organisation stakeholders to get buy-in
4. Build and test in Google Analytics
5. Report, evaluate and compare all campaigns
and activity using engagement score

15. Thank you

16. Visit the CharityComms
website to view slides from
past events, see what events
we have coming up and to
check out what else we do:
www.charitycomms.org.uk

17. Midlands Networking Group
6 October 2016
Birmingham
#ccmidlands
Demonstrating
the value of
communications