How does Online Express integrate with Google Analytics?

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We want to be able to track multiple sources of where Donors are coming from before they arrive at our online donation form.
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  • Matthew Garbarino
    Matthew Garbarino Blackbaud Employee
    Tenth Anniversary 500 Comments 100 Likes Photogenic
    Hi Ginger. Remember that Online Express provides the forms and your CMS provides the pages. GA lives on your pages, so it will continue to work just fine on any page that also has an Online Express form placed on it.
  • Yes, we can track so far as to the page in which the form renders, however we cannot track the full conversion funnel to see if someone who lands on that page actually completes the form.



    I’m looking to track the submit button with GA to see if a first-time visitor completes from our campaign (i.e. Facebook ad > landing page > donation). We can’t do that with return visitors coming straight from our homepage. Trying to correlate form submission with GA is also difficult, as we cannot add custom radio buttons (.I.e. How did you hear about this campaign?) into the form.
  • Hi Ginger,



    You can add a custom dropdown to donation forms to find out where donors are coming from:







    To get something like this on your form, you just need to create a gift attribute of type "Table" in RE which includes all of the sources you want to track (i.e. Facebook, Email, etc.). Then, just add the gift attribute to your form on Step 2 (Extras) of the donation form editor.



    Does that help?
  • Matthew Garbarino
    Matthew Garbarino Blackbaud Employee
    Tenth Anniversary 500 Comments 100 Likes Photogenic
    Ginger tmp:
    Yes, we can track so far as to the page in which the form renders, however we cannot track the full conversion funnel to see if someone who lands on that page actually completes the form.



    I’m looking to track the submit button with GA to see if a first-time visitor completes from our campaign (i.e. Facebook ad > landing page > donation). We can’t do that with return visitors coming straight from our homepage. Trying to correlate form submission with GA is also difficult, as we cannot add custom radio buttons (.I.e. How did you hear about this campaign?) into the form.
    Hi Ginger. Since the form does not redirect to a separate page when a transaction is completed, GA doesn't have a way to identify the event. This is something we would like to look into and improve in the future.



    Another option that may be worth considering however is targeted links URL parameters. For example, if you have an ad campaign you could append your URL only for that campaign like so: "www.orgname.org/donate?source=ad".



    The extra querystring parameter won't impact anything, but it will let you track actions to that URL from withing Online Express. The other benefit of doing something like this is that you don't need to make the form longer (and reduce your conversion rate) by asking something like "How did you hear about us?".
  • Hi Matt,



    I am not sure you are understanding the question.  Your suggestions do not seem to properly address the issue which is that e-commerce tracking requires the funnel to be filled out.  Simply asking somewhere where they came from, or using basic URL parameters does not in fact tell anyone if the transaction was completed (mearly that they landed on that page).  



    There must be a solution to this issue, any and all organizations use Google Analytics to track their spending, and return on investment (not to mention a host of other demographics) of people who actually donate. 



     
  • Matt Garbarino:

    Ginger tmp:

    Yes, we can track so far as to the page in which the form renders, however we cannot track the full conversion funnel to see if someone who lands on that page actually completes the form.



    I’m looking to track the submit button with GA to see if a first-time visitor completes from our campaign (i.e. Facebook ad > landing page > donation). We can’t do that with return visitors coming straight from our homepage. Trying to correlate form submission with GA is also difficult, as we cannot add custom radio buttons (.I.e. How did you hear about this campaign?) into the form.

    Hi Ginger. Since the form does not redirect to a separate page when a transaction is completed, GA doesn't have a way to identify the event. This is something we would like to look into and improve in the future.



    Another option that may be worth considering however is targeted links URL parameters. For example, if you have an ad campaign you could append your URL only for that campaign like so: "www.orgname.org/donate?source=ad".



    The extra querystring parameter won't impact anything, but it will let you track actions to that URL from withing Online Express. The other benefit of doing something like this is that you don't need to make the form longer (and reduce your conversion rate) by asking something like "How did you hear about us?".

     

    Is there an ETA for when we will be able to track conversions on our Online Express pages?

  • Just jumping on to say that I would love improved conversion tracking data as well!
  • Amen to that!



    We do some promotion via Facebook and Twitter, and I have no way of knowing how many donors gave as a result.
  • Has anyone figured out a work-around to track ecommerce transactions with Google Analytics? 
  • Response copied from this thread:


    It's correct that Online Express doesn't currently expose a "transaction completion event" that Google Analytics can detect and report on. Making that happen today would require you to add some custom javascript logic to your page that detects when a transaction is successful and then passes the relevant info to GA for tracking purposes.


    This capability is something we're looking to include as part of our next generation of donation (and other) forms that we're working on.
  • Chris Martin:

    Response copied from this thread:


    It's correct that Online Express doesn't currently expose a "transaction completion event" that Google Analytics can detect and report on. Making that happen today would require you to add some custom javascript logic to your page that detects when a transaction is successful and then passes the relevant info to GA for tracking purposes.


    This capability is something we're looking to include as part of our next generation of donation (and other) forms that we're working on.

    Any timeline on this Chris?

  • Hi Carley...no we aren't quite to a point where we can offer timing that we're confident in. I'm hopeful that first version of these next gen giving forms will be shipped in some form or another late this year. But these forms will power more than just Online Express so OLX might not be the very first product where you see these new forms. We hope by BBCON (late October) to be able to share more specific timing.
  • Any news about how to be able to track multiple sources of where Donors are coming from? I am very interested to be able to track where our donors are coming from. We use different sources adwords, adrolls and it is getting complicated to track them.

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