Getting Started in Church Web Analytics

As previously discussed, a church’s web presence is no longer a luxury, but rather, a necessity. More people are looking to interact with a church online than ever before, and it is our responsibility to make sure that their needs can be met. The best way to make sure a website is meeting its goals is through web analytics. By studying a website’s various trends, areas needing improvement can be determined and adjusted to enhance a visitor’s experience. What are two important statistics for churches to track and evaluate at the beginning of their venture into web analytics?

Total Traffic

Consider this to be your starting point, regardless of whether you’re a seasoned veteran in analytics or a relative newcomer. Without any added fluff, this will let you know how many people are visiting your website. There are two different metrics to consider. The first is total visits. This number is “an interaction with a website by an individual consisting of one or more requests for a page.” Each request will add to your total count. The second is unique visitors. This is the number of individual people that visited a site within a defined reporting timeframe.

As one might guess, the more general your statistics are, the more general your information and insight will be. At the 30,000 foot view, these numbers will let your church know whether or not people are even coming to your website. This is especially important if you’ve launched any sort of promotional campaign aimed to increase traffic. If there is a failure to connect with your audience or properly direct them to the website, the lack of visitors will certainly be a key indication. Perhaps people are having a hard time finding your website as well. It may be time to look into better search engine optimization. Also, double check that your web address makes sense.

New Versus Returning Visitors

We’ve determined overall traffic, but as we discussed in the last post, the church is a people and not a place. Finding a community is great, but for it to be meaningful, one must engage that community. A church’s website needs to also engage people looking to take their next steps through serving, small groups, or other resources. This means there are two groups visiting your website: new visitors looking for basic information about your church, and church members/returning visitors looking for additional information that will allow them to get involved in a larger capacity than weekend attendance alone.

New and returning visitors are usually tracked with cookies placed on a visitor’s computer by the analytic system monitoring a website. If a visitor doesn’t have this cookie on his or her computer, then he or she is considered to be a new visitor. If they do, then he or she is considered a returning visitor. A word of caution: if for some reason a computer doesn’t accept a cookie or the user deleted it off his or her computer, your stats are going to be affected. It’s important to keep this in mind when making decisions off of this data.

If your website is garnishing a lot of new visitors and not many returning visitors, perhaps your promotional campaign(s) is/are working well, but your church members aren’t finding it to be as useful once they settle in. This merits further investigation. There may be opportunity to develop additional content that allows for users to determine their next steps and take action. If the opposite is true and there are more returning visitors than new, a promotional campaign may be needed to increase traffic. There are opportunities within Facebook advertising, Twitter advertising, search engine optimization, and even services like Google AdWords to build your new visitor count.

Web analytics can feel very foreign to many people, but once you start learning the basics, it all begins to come together. There are many other important metrics worth studying for churches, but these two areas should get you started! Once you can better dial in who is coming to your website and why, you can then better strategize how to provide the best visitor experience possible.