Discover how we transformed Depaul UK’s digital fundraising strategy with enhanced analytics and tracking. Learn how our data-driven solutions boosted donation tracking, improved campaign performance, and increased conversions by 10%.

“Since implementing the new tracking setup, we’ve seen a consistent reduction in our cost per acquisition for donations and a notable uplift in return on ad spend across Meta campaigns. As a charity without in-house technical support, it’s been invaluable to partner with Jason - reliable, proactive, and genuinely invested in our success.”

Carolyn Hardy, Supporter Experience Manager

Client: Depaul UK

Industry: Nonprofit

Services: Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager

Opportunity

Depaul UK is a national charity dedicated to ending homelessness, with a special focus on young people they work to change the lives of those affected. Their goal is to prevent homelessness, offer a safe home to those who are experiencing homeless, and provide opportunities to thrive and a brighter future for young people.

Depaul UK invests significantly in raising awareness for its cause, activating donors, and recruiting volunteers. It recognised that improving the data quality in Google Analytics and tracking key events was crucial for running effective and efficient campaigns, but it needed support to make this happen. That’s where we came in.

Solution

We thoroughly audited their Google Tag Manager container and current Google Analytics setup. Our audit highlighted several deficiencies that held Depaul UK back, including:

  • No e-commerce tracking for donations, preventing campaigns from optimising towards the best quality prospects.

  • Inconsistent event tracking - some set up in Google Tag Manager, others within Google Analytics. This made analysing results confusing and led to a lack of confidence in reporting.

  • Insufficient implementation of a consent management platform (cookie bar), posing a risk to the organisation.

  • Poor event matching in Meta Ads, making it slower and more challenging to optimise and scale campaigns.

Results

We rebuilt Depaul UK’s Google Tag Manager container, ensuring donations were tracked as full e-commerce events, which could be used to optimise activation campaigns.

We also incorporated all tracked events previously set up in Google Analytics. This meant that all tracking was set up and governed within Google Tag Manager, with the added benefit that they could be passed to other systems like Meta.

To ensure as many conversions as possible were tracked and matched in Meta, we agreed with the client to set up Google Tag Manager server-side tracking to launch Meta Conversions API. This provided a meaningful advantage, resulting in a 10% uplift in donations matched within Meta, leading to faster campaign optimisation.

We integrated CookieYes, Depaul UK’s preferred consent management platform, with Google Consent Mode, maximising the volume of events tracked while respecting people’s consent choices.