Top Tips for Demographic Grant Reporting Using Google Analytics

By Katherine Warren

 

As a grant-funded agency, your to-do list includes how you report on the success of your education and outreach to your grantors. Today, we’re going to focus on how you report on the demographics you need to reach through your grant using Google Analytics. Using the reporting on Google Analytics, how do you show your grantor that you’re hitting those target people who you’re looking to educate? We can get all that information through Google Analytics, whether that’s age, gender, ethnicity, language spoken, or location.

 

Today we will dive in, with the caveat that this is base level Google Analytics reporting. There are people who go to classes and get certified in this. There are all types of details you can get through Google Analytics, but to get that base level reporting for your grant tour, it’s not hard.

 

Age and gender

First, let’s talk about age and gender. These are two key pieces to a lot of grant reporting. What ages are you trying to reach? What genders are you trying to reach? You can get both of these pieces of information through Google Analytics. The tricky part, though, is you have to set it up first.

 

When you’re in Google Analytics and you click on the demographics menu option, it won’t automatically pull this information without you giving permission to do so. Step one is to click that permission button and say, “Yes, I want to gather this information.” In about a week, you’ll start to see those results come through and you’ll see what age ranges and which genders are visiting your website the most.

 

There are a couple things to note, though. Google does not track people under the age of 18. You’ll have to rely on the method by which you’re getting traffic to your website to report on ages under 18, whether that’s through social media or digital advertising.

 

The other important thing to note is Google does not collect this information about everyone who visits your website. It’s a sampling of your website visitors’ ages and genders, but it is still enough to communicate to your grantor that you are reaching the people you’re hoping to reach with your information. That is a key piece of grant reporting. You’ll probably get about 10-20 percent of your website visitors, but that is enough to show you’re using this targeting to get the right people to your website.

 

Language

In Google Analytics, you can choose a menu option that shows you which languages people who are visiting your website speak. This will allow you to show on your grant reporting if you are reaching Spanish-speaking individuals, Mandarin-speaking individuals, or any other language you’re targeting.

 

Note that Google uses its own vernacular when it comes to the acronyms used to tell you what language your website visitors speak. You will have to do a little research to find this information, but it’s pretty easy to find. For example, the EN code means English. Google Analytics reports in these codes that equate to each of the languages.

 

We want to make sure our websites are welcoming those individuals who speak other languages. This is why you may want to have translation services running on your website as well. Google Analytics can then back up that the folks who speak those languages are finding value in the content you’re providing.

 

Location

We can also track location. Most grants are funded based on an area of the country, so you want to ensure you’re reaching as many people in that targeted area as possible. You can use Google Analytics to report on this location.

 

There will always be people outside of your targeted location who visit your website, but that is just a piece of the puzzle. What you want to make sure is that the percentage is higher in the locations you’re looking to reach than in other locations.

 

The percentage of people in your location is just a sampling. It won’t be 100 percent of the people who visit your website. People can change privacy settings on their computer that do not allow Google to access their location information.

 

Also, locations aren’t always accurate. Google might be tracking the computer’s address. It might be tracking a Google account that was set up when someone lived in another location. If people have moved around, they could be reporting that they still live in another state, when in actuality, they live in the state your grant is targeting. But with enough information, this data can provide your grantor a nice idea—a snapshot—of where your website visitors are coming from, knowing that the information isn’t fully accurate. Again, you are hoping that that percentage in your targeted area is as high as it can be.

 

These are the most important demographics tips for using Google Analytics to report on the success of your grant. In future Marketing Mondays (where we’re talking community well-being), we’ll get into some other cool features that Google Analytics offers to make grant reporting very easy.

 

I’m also going to add one more little bonus tip here, which is the one unfortunate piece about Google Analytics. It makes it very easy to get this tracking information, however it’s not very easy to download that information and provide it on a report. What I do for my clients here at KidGlov is I screenshot each of the pages and put them in a document to provide for the grantor. That makes it easy, and you get the nice-looking graphics and grids on Google Analytics without getting into any complicated downloading software. Just screenshot the pages, put them in a Word document or a PowerPoint and send them on their way.

 

I hope you found this helpful. I hope it checked off a little bit more of your to-do list for the day. And I look forward to sharing lots more grant reporting information that will help you report on the success of your initiatives to your grantor.

 

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source https://kidglov.com/grant-reporting-using-google-analytics/