Conversion tracking guide for Ad Grants and Blackbaud Luminate

How to track transaction-specific conversions with Blackbaud Luminate fundraising tools

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 Blackbaud Luminate to process donations on your website, this guide will help you install transaction-specific conversion value trackings for each donation 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 Blackbaud Luminate 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 Blackbaud 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 be sure to complete the final step: Copy and paste your Analytics code as the first item into the <HEAD> of every webpage on your website you want to track. Please see step 3 for help with Google Analytics and your campaign pages.
A Blackbaud Luminate account: please contact the Blackbaud Luminate Help Center if you need help with your donation form.

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 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 Blackbaud Luminate Account

You can use one Google Analytics account to track behavior on and between your website and your Blackbaud Luminate donation pages.

Follow the instructions for adding Google Analytics at Blackbaud Luminate support to add Analytics to your Blackbaud Luminate pages.

Step 3: Enable eCommerce tracking in Google Analytics

You can use a feature called eCommerce tracking to track the donations you receive on Blackbaud Luminate forms. First, we’ll need to enable the feature in your analytics account. To do that:

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 Ecommerce Settings.

Set Enable Ecommerce to ON. [There is no need to enable “Enhanced eCommerce.]

Click Next step.
Click Submit.

For more details on this feature, please find help here.

Step 4: Add your Blackbaud Luminate URL to the Referral Exclusion List

When your donor crosses from your primary domain (yournonprofit.org) to your Blackbaud Luminate page (https://secure3.convio.net/...), 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 all any subdomains you may have for donations, special events or merchandise.

Step 5: Enable cross-domain tracking in Google Analytics

]If you’ve embedded your Blackbaud Luminate form 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 recognize the visits that start at your primary domain (yournonprofit.org) and end at your Blackbaud Luminate donation page (https://secure3.convio.net/...), you’ll need to help Google Analytics connect the two. To set up cross-domain tracking, you'll to follow the instructions here, noting that it is not required that you set up reporting views and filters.

Please contact Blackbaud Luminate support for help implementing cross-domain tracking on your donation forms.

Step 6: Enable Conversion Tracking in your Ad Grants Account

Please note, it may take 24-48 hours after enabling Ecommerce 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 in top right corner and select Conversions (under Measurement)
Click the button in the top left corner to add a new Conversion
Select Import

Select the radio button “Google Analytics” and continue
If you have correctly turned on Ecommerce tracking in Analytics, you will see a conversion called “Transactions.” Select this and any other Conversions 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 customize the settings of your transaction conversions, please follow the instructions here.

Step 7 (Optional): Bid over the manual bid limit of $2 by enabling “Maximize 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 Maximize 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 Maximize 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 Maximize 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 the “Maximize Conversions.”
Click Apply.

Was this helpful?

How can we improve it?