GA4 is Your Kitchen—Let’s Bake with Data

One of the most common questions arts administrators are tasked with answering centers on how users move through a purchase path and where they drop off. Said another way: how can I get more people to complete this transaction?!

Website data captured in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) allows you to answer this question and identify critical points in the purchase path. With that data, you can start to iterate and make changes to the website aimed at addressing those moments in the user journey.

Before we dive in, let’s make it even more fun (as if analyzing data isn’t fun enough on its own, am I right?). As a data analyst and foodie, I can tell you that assessing, analyzing, testing, and refining your data is a lot like baking—each goal or treat has its own needs, but there are recipes and steps to guide you. Grab your digital aprons and whisks—we’re going to whip up some GA4 strategy.

YOUR RECIPE FOR ITERATIVE IMPROVEMENT

All website analysis will follow the same basic recipe: defining your question, gathering your data, analyzing your results, and developing a hypothesis for iteration and testing.  

Let’s take a real-life example from a mid-size symphony. This organization wants to understand and improve its online giving process. We’ll focus on the path to donate here, but this process is one that you can—and should—use for any type of conversion path from single tickets to newsletter sign-ups. Let’s dive in.

Requirements:

The analysis described here can be accomplished with a basic GA4 implementation and doesn’t rely on any custom event tracking; however it does require GA4 be configured across the purchase path, which may span multiple domains or systems. One example: your primary site is on WordPress (myorg.com) and your ticketing path is on TNEW/Tessitura (tickets.myorg.com). 

Step 1: Gather your ingredients (Define your research question)

For this organization, we wanted to understand the path from entering the site to making a donation. When we are considering steps users take and want to understand completion rates and abandonment of each step, this is called a funnel. 

To define our funnel, we need to understand what that path looks like in detail. We started by going through the website and making note of the URLs of each page viewed in the path to purchase. In doing that, we found there were 7 key steps:

Notes:

• We did not take into account the additional steps that would be required to create an account if the user did not already have one or to reset a password.
• This organization’s purchase path has a different URL structure for donations vs. tickets, which made this analysis much simpler. For other ecommerce platforms, this may not be the case and other, more custom tracking may be necessary to distinguish the products in the cart.
• In some instances, you’ll want to incorporate more types of behavior than just page views. You may want to know if someone clicks a specific call-to-action video, or if they watch a video in their path to purchase. In this case, additional custom tracking may be required. CI can help!

Step 2: Add all ingredients to the bowl (Pull your data)

Once we know the steps, we can build a funnel using GA4’s Funnel Exploration to visualize the steps your users take and understand what share of these users complete each step.

Here is what the funnel exploration showed us for our example organization:

Step 3: Bake your cake (Analyze your findings)

Once we have the data, we can start to dig deeper and analyze our results. 

In our example analysis, we saw there were three key phases of decision-making:

• 1. Getting site visitors to explore support and donation options
• The data show the biggest challenge is getting users to explore the donation options in the first place: in this case, 99% of site visitors do not view any donation or support pages. 
• 2. Getting users who are actively exploring donation options to add a donation to the cart
• Only 4.3% of users who viewed any support or donate page actually added a donation to the cart.
• 3. Completing the transaction from cart to order confirmation. 
• 33% of users who add a donation to the cart would complete the transaction. Additionally, 53% abandoned their cart at the account login stage, and about 21% of users abandoned their cart at the payment detail stage.

Step 4: Eat! (Hypothesize and test)

How might we apply these findings for this organization?

The first step—getting users to view donation content—has the potential to make the largest impact: that’s where we see the biggest user drop-off. We want a larger share of this organization’s audience to consider making a gift and exploring online donation options. This is likely a broader and longer-term strategy, involving initiatives beyond the website itself and raising awareness for the impact and benefits of giving across all channels. 

Alternatively, moving from cart to confirmation seems like low-hanging fruit. These are people who have already taken the first step to donate for this organization! But there are at least 5 steps between adding to cart to checkout–more if the user doesn’t already have an account or doesn’t remember their login. That’s a lot, especially given how streamlined many online transactions have become. However, the levers and ability to optimize these steps may be limited by ecommerce platforms. Additionally, removing one of the biggest barriers, where 53% of users who add to the cart drop off (login), can be problematic. Allowing people to make a gift disconnected from an account can be a recipe for CRM mayhem. Before simply removing the login barrier,  consider what’s needed for database integrity. This could be an opportunity to test: measure how conversion rates improve without the login step and weigh that against the lift required to keep the database clean.

For this symphony, improving the rate of users adding a donation to their cart from viewing support and donation pages is one of the biggest opportunities. It’s the second most significant drop-off for this organization and free from some of the potential limitations of the cart-to-confirmation step. 

Questions to ask for this hypothesis:

• How could we iterate on the way we communicate the benefits or impact of donations on the primary support pages? 
• Would including a video, changing the call-to-action design or location, or more information on impact improve these conversion rates? 

The Takeaway: slow is strategic

Don’t try to test every hypothesis at once. The website iterations that could move the needle will entirely depend on your current website design, so start with one hypothesis. Maybe it’s as simple as changing the location of your call-to-action button. 

The most important part of any analysis will be to measure the impact of any changes you make. Make the change on your site, allow the data to collect, and repeat these analyses. Is there any noticeable change in results? Try to make one change at a time so it’s easier to understand its impact. Keep in mind any other changes in promotions or seasonality that could also impact overall trends. 

GET AN ANALYTICS AND IMPACT PARTNER

The great thing about website analytics is that, as long as you have an effective setup, you have data. The even greater thing: you also have an analytics partner just a form submission away. We know that analyzing data in GA4 isn’t always an easy task, and finding the most effective takeaways from your user data quickly is critical for your digital strategy. 

No matter whether you want to optimize your donation path like this symphony or focus on another priority—understanding how to improve site navigation, how your site performs on different devices, improving e-commerce, etc—we can help (and honestly, we’d really love to—data is kind of our thing). If you don’t know what your site needs, that’s OK too! Every site can be optimized. It just starts with a click.