Broad missions need focused metrics.
Introduction
Your leadership team thinks in terms of big-picture, high-level goals. Digital teams think in terms of tactical metrics like views and users. The persistent challenge for website managers is how to transform those high-level strategic objectives like "increase engagement" or "widen access" into concrete, measurable metrics that can drive decision-making.
The issue is particularly acute for digital teams in purpose-driven and non-profit organisations. Whilst the commercial sector can relatively easily measure KPIs through purchase paths, mission-driven organisations have more qualitative goals that can be much trickier to measure.
The gap between strategic directives and actionable insights can feel big, but with the right approach to metric mapping and analytics set-up, you can create a measurement framework that demonstrates value and improves your digital performance.
Most public and non-profit organisations share similar high-level objectives, regardless of sector. You're likely trying to drive conversions, whether that's donations (charities), applications (universities), or ticket sales (museums and culture), and generally these can be tracked quite straightforwardly. But you may also have more diffuse goals, like increasing meaningful engagement with your cause or content, showcasing research impact, or influencing a policy debate. These are less amenable to simple metrics and therefore need more thought given to how to track them.
Translating goals into trackable metrics
In our work with charities, universities, museums and public policy institutions , we see recurring patterns in their objectives. This has led us to develop ways of tracking metrics that genuinely reflect their strategic objectives. Below are examples of how to approach conversion tracking and engagement - areas that almost all organisations will seek to track in some form:
Conversion tracking: Whether you're tracking charitable donations or exhibition ticket purchases, treat these like e-commerce events in GA4. Set up custom events to monitor clicks on key CTAs and track e-commerce funnel (begin_checkout, add_shipping_info, add_payment_info, purchase) metrics. This lets you understand where exactly in that funnel users are most likely to drop off. For example, if you have many users beginning a donation, but not completing it, you need to investigate if there is an issue with the donation form itself.
This approach helps identify technical issues blocking conversions and allows you to assign monetary values to events, improving ROI calculations and informing bidding strategies in Google Ads.
Certain conversion events, like university applications, happen on external systems (UCAS), so you can’t track them with GA4’s standard suite of e-commerce events. But you can track the digital journey that leads to that external point of conversion, so set up custom events to monitor clicks on the key CTAs like ‘Apply now’ that lead to that external point of conversion. Whilst this won’t tally up precisely with the final number of applications you receive, it’s an excellent way to understand if elements like course pages are working to drive applications or not.
Measuring meaningful engagement:
Page views are one thing, but often you need to know if your content is really having an impact. The best way to do this is to tie together a series of different data points to track highly engaged users. Track scroll depth to 75%, which indicates a user is likely to be deeply engaging with the content. Combine this with time on page, and content-specific interactions that indicate genuine interest, to create a defined set of criteria for ‘highly engaged users’ you can track.
For organisations focused on thought leadership and influence, we recommend tracking whether the engagement is leading users to take action. Track events like newsletter sign-ups, account creation, and content downloads to understand what content is generating a desire for ongoing engagement.
For more advice on measuring your impact, see our article: What is impact and how do you measure it?
Measuring engagement from specific audiences
Some organisations target broad engagement with the public, but others need to be far more targeted with who they're seeking to influence. For example, a think-tank seeking to influence the policy debate on a particular issue may be producing content primarily with policymakers and politicians in mind. With this objective, all users are not equally valuable.
A report might get 10,000 views, but it still needs to reach those in power to have an impact. When justifying your investment to senior stakeholders, it may be better to be able to show 100 politicians read it than any number of undifferentiated users.
Digital analytics tools can ascertain who's engaging with your content, as well as providing aggregate numbers. Tools like Snitcher Spotter reveal the organisations your visitors work for, letting you see if you're reaching key decision-makers at influential institutions. To take our think tank example, they could see how many people are accessing the report from the House of Commons IP address, or from The Treasury.
You’ll want to use these tools if you’re looking to narrowly target your content on relatively small groups of decision-makers. Always be careful to ensure you implement these tools to comply with the relevant cookie and privacy policies. Snitcher Spotter is GDPR compliant because publicly accessible corporate data is exempt from GDPR, but you’ll need to update your cookie policy if you use it.
Building your tracking infrastructure
Your measurement capability is only as strong as your tracking infrastructure, and this starts with Google Tag Manager (GTM). Everything flows from your GTM set-up – it determines what you can track and how effectively you can measure across different platforms.
Start with your GTM set-up, then ensure you're using GA4 fully. Once those are giving you the data you need, explore any issues they uncover with behavioural analysis tools.
Google Analytics 4: Google’s free analytics platform provides crucial out-of-the-box reporting including acquisition data, page and screen reporting, and basic events tracking. But the real value comes from customisation through custom events – vital for tracking organisation-specific actions.
Set up custom events for your key CTAs and user journeys. These custom events let you build up a better picture of your user behaviour in the areas that really matter to your org. Once you're tracking your user journeys successfully, you can start to understand their weak points and spot issues. Where are people dropping off? What isn't working? These are the areas to investigate further with behavioural analytics tools.
Behavioural analytics tools: When GA4 uncovers problems like high bounce rates on key landing pages, or low conversion rates in donation flows, behavioural tools help you diagnose the causes.
Heat maps reveal where users focus attention, dead click tracking shows when they're trying to interact with non-clickable elements, and anonymised session replays let you see exactly where user journeys break down.
Microsoft Clarity offers solid functionality for free, while paid options like Hotjar, ContentSquare, and Fullstory provide more advanced features. Use these tools to explore issues and get to their root cause, so you can understand what specific fixes will resolve them.
Dashboards to drive decisions
Your work defining metrics and setting up tracking should all lead to the creation of a dashboard. But a dashboard shouldn’t seek to show all the data you have available; it should be a tool for better decision making.
A dashboard is only valuable if it drives action. The best dashboards are built around questions that need answers. Too many organisations fall into the trap of equating comprehensiveness with usefulness.
Start with your core objectives and work backwards. What specific questions do you need to answer? How will you know if you're moving in the right direction? Your dashboard should make these answers immediately obvious. Here are the key elements to consider when setting up dashboards.
Elements of good dashboard design
Elements of good dashboard design
Focus over comprehensiveness
Resist the temptation to include every available metric. A focused dashboard that clearly shows progress against three key goals is infinitely more useful than a dense display of twenty different data points that nobody has time to properly analyse.
What's the question?
Data may be the answer, but what are you asking? Every chart on a dashboard should be designed to help you make decisions by providing clarity on a question. So be explicit and state those questions. This makes it clear what decision that data is meant to support.
Automate
Manual dashboard updates inevitably become irregular and outdated. Connect your dashboards directly to your tracking tools so they update automatically and reflect real-time performance.
Tailored views
Different teams need different perspectives on the same underlying data. Senior leadership might need high-level goal achievement metrics, while your content team requires granular engagement data for individual pages or campaigns. Set up tailored dashboard views to avoid overloading any one group with irrelevant data.
Learn and adapt:
Dashboards can be refined over time. As you learn what information drives the best decisions, you should be able to adjust your dashboard accordingly. Don't see it as fixed, but rather something that should always be evolving to suit your organisation's needs.
People tend to have an additive bias so dashboards tend to get busier over time as new metrics are added. Counteract this with consistent pruning – see what elements are rarely used and remove them to keep the dashboard as simple as it can be.
Putting it into practice
Translating high-level goals into trackable metrics isn't just a technical exercise – it's about creating decision-making tools that genuinely drive better outcomes for your organisation and help it fulfil its mission.
To sum up: start with clear goals, choose metrics that genuinely reflect what matters to your org, set up robust tracking infrastructure, and create dashboards that drive action rather than just display data.
All of these are easier said than done, but our team is here to help. Our performance analysts can put in place the tracking and dashboards you need to make the right decisions to deliver your goals.
