You can measure how much Ad Grants contributes to your fundraising efforts by tracking the unique values of each conversion, such as one-time donations or event ticket purchases. If you use Kindful to process donations on your website, this guide will help you install transaction-specific conversion value trackings for each donation that you receive. This tracking helps you have a more accurate sense of how many donation dollars your Ad Grants account helps you raise.
In the sections below, we'll show you how to track transaction-specific values on your website and Kindful form pages.
Before you begin
Here's what you'll need before you can set up conversion tracking for transaction-specific values on your website and Kindful donation pages:
- An Ad Grants account: Don't have one yet? Follow these steps to set one up.
- A Google Analytics account: it’s at no cost, and if you don’t have one, follow these steps to set one up. Please make sure that you complete the final step: copy and paste your Analytics code as the first item into the <HEAD> of every web page on your website that you want to track. Please see step 3 for help with Google Analytics and your Kindful donation pages.
- A Kindful account. Click here to schedule a demo. If you already have a Kindful account, feel free to get started. You can always contact a team member if you need assistance.
This article goes right to the setup instructions. To learn more about how conversion tracking works and why to use it, read: About conversion tracking.
Step 1: Link your Google Analytics account to your Google Ads account
Your Ad Grants account can use information from your Google Analytics account to help improve the performance of your ads. To link your account, follow these instructions. If you use AdWords Express, the changes that you make to your Google Ads account will carry over to your AdWords Express account. Please proceed as instructed here.
Step 2: Add your Google Analytics account to your Kindful account
You can use one Google Analytics account to track behaviour on and between your website and your Kindful pages.
In Kindful, add your Google Analytics tracking ID on the Settings > General settings page.
Step 3: Enable E-commerce tracking in Google Analytics
You can use a feature called E-commerce tracking to track the donations that you receive on Kindful donation pages. First, we’ll need to enable the feature in your Analytics account. To do this:
- Sign in to Google Analytics.
- Click Admin, and on the far-right side, confirm that the view column corresponds to your fundraising website.
- In the VIEW column, click E-commerce settings.
- Set Enable e-commerce to ON. [There is no need to enable 'Enhanced e-commerce'.]
- Click Next step.
- Click Submit.
It may take up to 24 hours for transactions to appear under the e-commerce section in Google Analytics.
For more details on this feature, please find help here.
Step 4: Add your Kindful URL to the referral exclusion list
When your donor crosses from your primary domain (yournonprofit.org) to your Kindful page (https://SUBDOMAIN.kindful.com/...), Analytics interprets that as the donor having been referred by your primary domain to your secondary domain, and Analytics counts that as separate visits. This doesn’t accurately reflect your donors’ experience, so we recommend setting up an exclusion list.
Please follow the instructions for implementing a referral exclusion list, adding any subdomains that you may have for donations, special events or merchandise.
Step 5: Enable cross-domain tracking in Google Analytics
If you’ve embedded your Kindful donation plug-in into your website page so that your donor stays on your website (yournonprofit.org) throughout the entire transaction, you can skip to Step 7.
In order to recognise the visits that start at your primary domain (yournonprofit.org) and end at your Kindful donation page (https://SUBDOMAIN.kindful.com/...), you’ll need to help Google Analytics connect the two.
Reminder if you have not done so previously. In Kindful, add your Google Analytics tracking ID on the Settings > General settings page.
We recommend using the Google Tag Manager for this. The instructions for setting up cross-domain tracking in Google Tag Manager can be found here.
If you are using Analytics.js, please follow the instructions here. Please note that you are not required to set up reporting views and filters.
You can verify that this is set up correctly by clicking a link on your website that links out to a Kindful donation page. Upon the click of that link, you should now see an extra URL parameter that looks something like this:
&_ga=2.201369361.1847218802.1573680817-977570014.1573241361 (however, with different numbers)
Step 6: Enable conversion tracking in your Ad Grants account
Please note, it may take 24–48 hours after enabling E-commerce tracking in Analytics for your transactions to be available for import into your Ad Grant account.
Enable conversion tracking in Google Ads, with the following steps:
- Click on the tools button
at the top-right corner and select Conversions (under Measurement)
- Click the
button at the top-left corner to add a new conversion
- Select Import
at the top-right corner and select Conversions (under Measurement)
button at the top-left corner to add a new conversion
- Select the radio button 'Google Analytics' and continue
- If you have correctly turned on E-commerce tracking in Analytics, you will see a conversion called 'Transactions'. Select this and any other conversions that you have set up in your nonprofit’s Analytics account
- Select Import and Continue
- Click Done
You will now be able to see which ads, keywords and campaigns are leading to donations, as well as the donation value attributed to each. If you would like to further name and customise the settings of your transaction conversions, please follow the instructions here.
Step 7 (optional): Bid over the manual bid limit of $2 by enabling 'Maximise conversions'
Congratulations! You’ve done the hard part, and now you can benefit by letting Google Ads find more potential donors. This can be done by enabling a Maximise conversions bidding strategy. For most of your campaigns, the maximum bid is $2.00 USD for manual and most automatic bidding types, except the conversion-based bidding strategies of Maximise conversions, target CPA or target ROAS. Now that you’ve enabled conversion tracking, you can enable conversion-based bidding strategies, which will lift the cap on your maximum bid. This can be done by enabling a Maximise conversions bidding strategy.
Here’s how:
- Navigate to the 'Campaigns' section of Google Ads on the left-hand menu, below 'Recommendations' and above 'Ad groups'
- Select one or more campaigns that are aimed at driving donations in the data view.
- In the edit panel, click the Edit link in the 'Change bid strategy' section.
- Select 'Maximise conversions'.
- Click Apply.
Still have some questions?
Feel free to get in touch via this request form for assistance, or you can call the phone number found at the lower left-hand corner of your Kindful admin account to speak to a team member directly.