Are Your Ads Actually Producing Revenue?

Overview

Palmer Land Conservancy is a nonprofit land trust protecting land and water across southern Colorado. Like many nonprofits, they had been steadily growing their investment in Google Ads and Meta Ads to drive event registrations and donations. The problem: the only thing they could measure was clicks. They knew how many people clicked on an ad, but had no way to know whether any of those clicks turned into actual revenue by completing an event registration or making a donation.

Without that connection, they couldn't tell a high-performing ad from a waste of budget. That made it nearly impossible to run meaningful A/B tests, cut ads that weren't producing results, or use real performance data to inform new creative.

Skvare helped them close that gap by connecting their ad campaigns directly to completed registrations and donations so they can make smarter decisions about where to spend.

The Challenge

Palmer's website and their online forms live in two different places. Their main site is at palmerland.org. Their event registration and donation forms are hosted on Neon CRM, a donor management platform that runs on a separate web address from the main site.

That gap was causing a real problem for their ad tracking. When someone clicked an ad, landed on the Palmer website, and then clicked through to a registration or donation form, Google Analytics lost the trail. It had no way to connect that completed donation back to the ad that started the journey. From a reporting standpoint, it looked like those conversions came from nowhere.

The result: Palmer was spending money on ads without being able to measure what those ads were actually producing.

What We Did

Skvare connected the dots between Palmer's website and their registration and donation forms, so that a single visitor's journey — from ad click to completed registration or donation — is tracked as one continuous path.

We set up conversion tracking so that Google Analytics now knows exactly when someone completes an event registration or makes a donation. Those completions are reported back to Google Ads and Meta Ads as the meaningful actions they are — not just page views or clicks.

We also made sure that the right information travels with each conversion. When a registration is completed, the tracking captures which event it was for. When a donation is completed, it captures the amount and whether it was a one-time or recurring gift.

Both ad platforms now receive a clear signal when a conversion happens — and they can use that signal to show ads to more people who are likely to register or donate.

What This Makes Possible

• See which campaigns, ads, and channels are driving real registrations and donations — not just clicks
• Compare the cost of an ad to the value of the action it produced
• Let Google and Meta's algorithms optimize toward actual conversions instead of traffic
• Build audiences of people who have registered or donated for future campaign targeting
• Make budget decisions based on what's actually working

The Bottom Line

Palmer Land Conservancy's ad spend no longer goes into a black box. Every completed registration and every donation is now connected back to the campaign that drove it. That makes every future marketing decision more informed and every dollar spent more accountable.

If you run ads to drive registrations or donations and aren't sure what's actually working, we can help. Let us know if you want support with something similar.

For the technical details on how this was built, read the blog post.