Understanding and Using Site Analytics

Posted by Mike Robinson on July 07, 2010 in Content Management, Websites tagged with ,

The official definition of Web analytics is, “the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing Web usage.” And this can apply in a number of different ways to websites in general. In this article, we’ll try to focus on at least a few key ways site analytics can benefit your church website and give you the information you need to better serve the members, visitors, and potential visitors of your church.

How Do I Know If Anyone Is Really Accessing the Material I Post?

This is an excellent question, and one that you should probably know the answer to. Just to create an extreme example, if only one person has been to your church’s online photo gallery in the last six months, is it worth all the time and effort involved in compiling the photos, making final selections, renaming the files as necessary, resizing, optimizing and posting those files? What if someone is spending up to 10 hours a month managing this gallery. Is it really worth it for one user? Or, you could ask the question, “why?” Why aren’t more people accessing this resource? Do they not know about it? Is it difficult to get to? Is it difficult to browse? Are they not interested in the events you’re posting photos of?

And keep in mind that there are dozens of different ways to look at traffic on your site. In other words, it’s not just about how many people see your home page. You can look at first-time visitors versus repeat visitors on a page-by-page basis anywhere on your site. You can look at how many people access a particular PDF. You can look at how many people use a link to an external website. And you can also determine at what interval you want to look at this information. Weekly maybe, in between Sundays? Or perhaps monthly? Or, you may even want to monitor the traffic daily or possibly even hourly if you have something time sensitive going on that week. Once you understand what is going on with your site you can look at how effective or ineffective you feel it is in providing usable, meaningful information to your congregation.


Example of site traffic information generated by the Squarespace platform for a Squarespace site showing daily site traffic.

And that brings up another good point. Who is your site really geared toward? The church member, the occasional visitor to your church, or the potential visitor who is checking out your website trying to decide whether or not they want to physically visit the church? I ran into this briefly a few weeks ago in discussing my own church’s website. Organizationally within the church certain programs fall within certain areas with certain people over those areas. So, of course, there’s a degree of logic in organizing content on the church website based on that structure. After all, most people who attend the church know where those things fall because they know who’s in charge of them. But someone with no knowledge of the inner workings of your church wouldn’t necessarily know to look there. It’s not intuitive to them. So, buried or cryptically placed content on your site could lead to a reduced number of page views. If there’s conflict involved in organizing the material the way you, as the webmaster for example, would want to organize it, there may be a third option that could at least help. If a piece of content needs to be placed or buried where it’s hard to find, maybe you could create a featured link to it somewhere on the home page. Or maybe create a redirect, special landing page or special search term(s) to help make sure people get there easily and that it’s sufficiently promoted.

Where Do They All Come From?

Another dimension to site analytics you may want to consider looking into is the idea of IP geolocation, where you can attempt to ascertain the city, region or country of the visitors browsing your site. This would tell you if you have potential church members in the immediate area, or if possibly word of your church has extended beyond the city (to residents in the county, surrounding cities, etc.). Or possibly internationally, especially if you have any international missions activities going on in other countries. This extra bit of information might help you to post content of special interest to interested parties in surrounding areas.


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