What Analytics Should I be Tracking From My Church Website

Google Analytics is an incredible free tool that can help you track the effectiveness and reach of your church website. It’s one thing to have a church website, it’s a whole other thing to track which pages attract the most visitors, how are people finding your website, or how many people are signing up for a small group through your website.

To ensure your website is as effective as possible, you will first need to set up the connection between google analytics and your website. Got that done? Great!

Now what?

There are hundreds of different metrics, reports, and overviews you can be utilizing in Google Analytics. We know, however, that can be a little overwhelming. For starters, we will look at 5 main categories you can focus your church website analytics.

Real-Time Overview

The real-time overview allows you to view who is visiting your site at any given moment. It will pinpoint locations from which they are viewing on a map and what type of device they are using. This overview gives you a good idea of what time of day users are most likely to visit your site as well as where most of your users are coming from.

This information can be used to optimize websites, social media, and email campaigns according to the statistics found here. 

Audience Overview

The audience overview is the most useful section when it comes to getting to know who is visiting your church website and the general traffic of your site. This overview will deliver you the following data:

  • Sessions- a period of time a user is active on your website
  • Users- an individual who visits your website
  • Average Session duration- The average amount of time a user spends on your site
  • Pageviews- Total number of views on each page of your website
  • Page per session- The average number of pages viewed per session
  • Bounce Rate- The percentage of users who left your site after only viewing one page
  • New users vs. returning users

As you grow more comfortable with using Google Analytics you can dive deeper into your audience by also tracking where they are from, their age and gender, and what device and operating system they are using.

Acquisition Overview

Acquisition Overview is all about how users got to your church website. This will help you track where your website traffic is coming from. It may include Organic search (google search), Paid Search (google ad) Social Media, referrals (other sites linking to yours), or email. 

This can help you track which marketing strategies are most effective in leading people to your website. 

Behavior Overview

Behavior overview lets you track how people engage with your website once they have found it. In this overview you will be able to view:

  • What pages are most popular overall
  • What are the most popular landing or exit pages
  • How your site performs on different browsers

Once again, this is all really relevant information. The more data you have on the users of your website, the more you can improve it and also tailor it to them.  

Conversions Overview 

Conversions are often equated to sales in eCommerce websites but they can also be extremely helpful in non-ecommerce websites as well. Conversions overview will help you track certain events you want your users to take action in. For example, you can track how many visitors sign up for your mailing list, or how many people join a small group on your website.

The Importance of a Church Website

Once you start tracking these analytics on your church website, you may notice some flaws in your site. Maybe the page you thought was super important for users, is getting no traffic. Or maybe you realize you are getting very few visitors from your email campaigns.

Tracking analytics will help you assess and make necessary changes to make your church website better and more effective to accomplish the mission of your church. For Church website design help, Torch is a team of website developers who are passionate about equipping the church and would love to help you make the most of your church website.  

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