Operating in over 50 countries and influencing the lives of millions each year, Population Services International (PSI) is a global health organization focusing on improving health and opportunities for people in the developing world. Forum One worked with PSI to develop a holistic measurement strategy across multiple business units, web properties, and platforms.

Through a series of collaborative workshops, we worked with PSI to go beyond the traditional pageview and bounce rate metrics. Together we mapped communications goals to sophisticated site performance metrics, allowing PSI to segment their audiences and clearly measure success.

“the right data needs to be collected accurately and consistently across all sites.”

First Things First: the Audit

Our analytics team began its work with PSI with a thorough audit and evaluation of the existing analytics implementation, from which we recommended improvements in account configuration, data collection, and reporting.

Forum One was able From the audit we were able to focus on an important goal: that the right data needs to be collected accurately and consistently across all sites. To achieve this, we implemented the Google Tag Manager, which in turn allowed PSI to take advantage of key features within Google Analytics, including:

1. Enhanced e-commerce to provide key insights into users within the donation funnel.  PSI can now go beyond just monitoring the dollar value of donations to get insights into the behaviors that lead up to a donation occurring.
2. Custom Dimensions to capture user’s interest areas by topic. This allows PSI to identify opportunities for cross-promoting topical content and build a stronger relationship across multiple issues with their users.
3. Campaign tracking to monitor to impact of social media and email outreach. This goes beyond clicks to monitor on-site engagement and eventual donations.

“Expanded data collection is only as valuable as the insights it provides.”

Key Takeaways

To fully leverage the expanded data, we worked closely with PSI to to develop reporting templates and dashboards. Expanded data collection is only as valuable as the insights it provides, and our goal was to automate as much reporting as possible so that PSI could focus on analysis and insights rather than hunting through Google Analytics to find data. The culmination of this work was a branded reporting template that wove together dynamically-generated charts of performance metrics with the priorities for the time period with related data.

What’s Next?

Knowledge sharing and capacity building within PSI’s digital team have been key in making this partnership a long term success. Our team provides ongoing, quarterly analytics health check-ups to review how the site is performing, discuss key insights, review what initiatives are coming up, and support the digital team in optimizing their reporting. The performance data collected informs discussions and website adjustments to account for any shifts in PSI’s priorities and goals, and trains and empowers PSI’s team to make data-driven decisions and shape our ongoing web metrics strategy, reporting, and optimization work together.