A Case Study of Rapid Growth

Davis Phinney Foundation knew that search was important to its mission: nearly half its website visitors came from paid and organic search. As their focus broadened to how to help people internationally, we suggested they also broaden their search campaigns. First, we built a proof-of-concept search advertising campaign in Google Adwords to demonstrate interest and traffic in a single international country. Next, we won a coveted Google GrantPro, which funded the Foundation with $500,000 of search advertising dollars for use worldwide. This enabled us to expand the reach of their programs to six countries–vastly increasing the amount of engagement and interest in the Foundation. As their online presence grew, the Foundation also needed a better way to communicate website value to key internal stakeholders and demonstrate to funders the website’s impact. Moving away from just “traffic” as the primary success metric was challenging. The interactive capabilities of the website (downloads, videos, donations) were handled by third-party systems that did not allow tracking. We came up with an elegant solution to combine what’s important to the Foundation with the mountains of details being tracked. We started with an exhaustive review of the links and traffic recorded in Google Analytics to hundreds of external resources, and then collaborated with the Foundation team to narrow in on the 15 distinct conversion goals which indicate engagement. We then automated the process of goal collection and categorization in Google Analytics so it was easy for the Foundation’s team to identify the value the website was generating every day. We were able to go from “traffic” to reports detailing the relative interest in instructional downloads, donations, email signups, event registrations, and others.