Knowing your AdWords marketing conversion funnel can help you forecast new volunteers or donations for your charitable organization. It can also help you identify if there are any issues along the funnel that you can focus on and fix. Doing so is a fairly simple equation, but first you need to know each step in your conversion funnel.

Conversion Funnel Stage Definitions

1. Impressions – the number of times your ad showed to a user searching on Google
2. Clicks – the number of times your ad the user clicked to arrive on your website (not exactly the same as a visit, but close enough for big picture)
3. Engagements – the number of times a user completed a goal on the website. This depends on what you are tracking in your Google Analytics, but could be anything from visiting the donation page to clicking through to learn more.
4. Conversions – the end goal. In this and many cases, that represents a successfully completed donation through the website.

Here is an example of a real conversion funnel from a client last month. Obviously, your ads will not get clicked every time they are shown. Google AdWords will report this for your account, or for specific campaigns and ads – even down to the keyword level. Compliance regulations dictate that you must maintain at least a 5% click-through ratio (CTR) for participation in the Google Grants program. Likewise, every time as user clicks your ad, they won’t necessarily engage with the website. You can also monitor Bounce Rate in your Google Analytics to see what percentage of users leave the site immediately after the page loads. Finally, not every visitor who engages with your site will ultimately leave a donation. You can pull the numbers for each step from Adwords and/or Google Analytics and calculate the percentage of users that proceed through each level of the funnel.

How to use funnel data

You can use this information to estimate how many donations you are likely to receive based on the top of the funnel. With these conversion numbers, you would not mathematically expect a single donation until at least 3556 impressions had been earned. Even with 100,000 impressions, the number of donations would only calculate out to 14.

You can also monitor the conversion rates between each rung of the funnel.

• Unusually low percentage of clicks – investigate your ad copy, keyword sets, and targeting options.
• Very low level of engagement – redesign landing pages and evaluate body copy.
• Low conversion rate – test your user experience to be sure there is no friction discouraging donations.

If everything looks healthy, you can put all of your efforts into growing your total number of impressions. The more you put into the top of the funnel, the more you can expect to get out! Need some your conversion funnel analyzed and optimized? Call us today!