I recently was speaking to a client who uses Blackbaud/Convio Luminate about their Google Analytics install and the topic of Google’s new Universal Analytics came up.    Do you need to upgrade to UA?  Will you have to?  How will it affect your installation and cross-domain tracking, and if you’re using the Google Analytics code that’s generated by the Luminate product, is that “Universal Analytics” compatible?

What is Universal Analytics?

Universal Analytics is Google’s next iteration of analytics tracking in the Google Analytics product.  It is a giant improvement in how tracking is done.  It allows you to track a participant across multiple devices and multiple screens, and lets you create all sorts of custom dimensions so you can track the behavior of different classes of visitors.  A simple example of this would be a custom dimension that let you track visitors who were members vs. those who were not.

It is not optional in the long run.  Eventually everyone will have to use UA and as the Dr. Who Cybermen say, “You will be upgraded.”

What is cross-domain tracking?

Because almost all Luminate clients have their donation forms on a different domain name (secure*.convio.net) than their website (www.awesomenonprofit.org), when someone goes to donate they jump domains.  This is typically not a big deal, as the web pages look the same even though the address bar shows a different domain name in the URL.   However analytics tracking is based on cookies, and cookies most definitely are not allowed to belong to more than one domain.  The upshot of this is that you lose all that juicy analytics data when the donor clicks on the Convio-hosted donation form and jumps domains.

This is a problem because you often want to work backwards from a completed donation to figure out which one of your 37 marketing efforts drove that person to give.  Was it your media coverage of something you did?  Was it Facebook posting?  Was it from Twitter?   Did someone watch your YouTube video and then, motivated to give, come and give you money?  Any time you jump across domains you lose all that juicy tracking info because the user gets a new cookie.  

People have to create a slightly altered installation of Google Analytics in order to track users as they jump domains and not lose that valuable tracking information.

Does Universal Analytics make cross-domain tracking easier?

Oh yes.  Here’s a snippet of code that would go on your main nonprofit website:

ga(‘create’, ‘UA-XXXXXXXXX’, ‘auto’);

ga(‘send’, ‘pageview’);

//Load the autolinker plugin

ga(‘require’, ‘linker’);

//define autolinking domains

ga(‘linker:autoLink’, ['secureX.convio.net']);

And here’s a snippet that would go in the pagewrappers of your donation forms on secure*.convio.net:

ga(‘create’, ‘UA-XXXXXXXXXX’, { ‘allowLinker’: true });

ga(‘send’, ‘pageview’);

Along with the main Javascript function that includes the analytics.js snippet, that’s all there is to it.  Suddenly I’m happily out of a job implementing cross-domain tracking.  However, Luminate does not yet speak Universal Analytics. and since all domains have to be using Universal Analytics code together, you can’t really use this yet if you use Luminate’s Google Analytics integration on your donation pages.

What is Luminate’s Google Analytics integration and do I really need it?

Luminate has some special hooks that allow you to capture donations and purchases in their product and feed them into Google Analytics E-Commerce reporting.  To recreate this tracking, you’d have to spend hours re-integrating Luminate’s transaction processing system into Google Analytics’ E-Commerce Transaction tracking system.  The benefit you get is that you can run reports in GA and have it tell you how many dollars from how many donors came in and through what path and from what traffic sources.

In theory any talented analytics engineer could do this integration.  In practice I’ve discouraged every single client from taking the plunge because Luminate had it built in.  I just recommended they turn it on and be done with it.

I  just checked and I can find no evidence that Luminate talks to Universal Analytics, which means that you can’t use their feature in Site Options to turn on Google Analytics tracking if you want to use Universal Analytics.  You’ll just have to deploy Google’s Universal Analytics yourself.

But do I really need Luminate’s Google Analytics support?

Probably not.  You can already use existing features of GA to mark your donation-thank-you pages as conversion events and study those results for insights.  You can then use GA reporting to identify referral sources and campaigns and associate them with donations.  You’re not going to get that much more insight from knowing the size of the donations in question.  Knowing a particular marketing-effort generated a donation is probably enough, you don’t need to know the size of the donation.

More importantly, if you aren’t already going in and looking at a weekly Google Analytics E-Commerce report today, then you’re not even using the benefits that Luminate’s donation-integration provide.  Losing it isn’t going to cost you much.

Beware the trap of fiddling with analytics tools instead of doing analysis.

This is something I encounter frequently.  Often organizations spend more time on configuring their analytics tools and perfecting their data collection than they do actually studying their data.  Every analytics data store has dirty data.  Anyone who claims different hasn’t looked at their own data.  But it’s a lot easier to spend time and money configuring and playing with GA than it is to do the analysis and change the behavior internally that is driven by studying the results.

I always recommend working backwards from the analysis needs into the data collection needs, not the other way around.  Figure out the question you want to answer and then set forth to collect the data to answer it.

So what should I do?

For most nonprofits using Luminate, the most important thing you can do is to ensure that you have GA setup on your website and donation forms and you’ve addressed the cross-domain issues so that you can track people coming through your website on their way to your donation forms.  Should you migrate to Universal Analytics?   Probably.  If you can get away with doing it now it’s better than waiting until you’re forced to.

Someday when Blackbaud upgrades their Google Analytics code to understand Universal Analytics you can pull out your implementation and replace it with theirs, but that’s probably not necessary.  You can live with your own GA deployment for a long time without suffering any consequences.