The challenge
Internet Matters is a UK not-for-profit, founded in 2014, that helps parents, carers and professionals keep children safe online. Its website publishes practical guidance on social media, screen time, cyberbullying and parental controls, alongside research and work with industry partners.
For an organisation like this, the website is the service. Knowing which guidance families actually engage with — and where those visitors come from — shapes what gets written next and how impact is reported to partners and supporters.
The problem was the effort behind the numbers. Pulling figures together from different sources, cleaning them and turning them into consistent reports took weeks of manual work across the year. Every report meant the same consolidation again, and by the time it was finished the data was already old.
What we did
We developed all of Internet Matters’ analytics services, from the way data is collected to the reports people read.
Measurement setup
- a measurement plan defining what counts as meaningful engagement on a guidance-led website
- tracking configured so that page views, interactions and audience segments are captured consistently
- clear definitions, so that “engagement” means the same thing in every report and every year
Automated reporting with real-time data
We replaced the manual reporting cycle with fully automated reports fed by live data. Nobody has to export, paste or reconcile figures any more: the reports refresh on their own and are ready whenever the team needs them.
Engagement benchmarks for global and UK audiences
Internet Matters reaches people well beyond the UK, yet its core audience is British. The reporting therefore tracks:
- weekly engagement for global and UK audiences
- a “high-quality engagement” benchmark, separating visitors who genuinely use the guidance from passing traffic
- week-on-week comparisons against those benchmarks, so a change in behaviour is visible immediately
Retention and acquisition reporting
- retention reporting showing how many visitors come back to the guidance
- acquisition reporting by source/medium, so the team can see which channels — search, social, partners, referrals — bring the most engaged audiences
The results
The most important change is time. Consolidating the numbers used to take weeks of manual work across the year; it is now automatic.
- reports are built from real-time data, not from exports that are out of date on arrival
- the team works from one consistent set of definitions for engagement, retention and acquisition
- global and UK audiences can be compared side by side, every week
- staff time that went into assembling spreadsheets now goes into the charity’s actual work
For a charity, that is the point of automated reporting: fewer hours spent proving impact, and better evidence when it is needed. When a partner, a funder or the board asks how the guidance is performing, the answer is already there — current, consistent and comparable with every previous week.
If your organisation spends weeks assembling its own numbers, see our work in Google Analytics and Tag Manager and for charities and non-profits — then get in touch to start now.