Measuring Whether Your Church Website Is Actually Working

What you'll learn

• How to define what "working" means for a church website
• The 4 metrics every church should track in analytics
• How to identify which pages are driving visitors away
• Setting realistic goals based on your church size and season
• How to use data to make confident decisions about your site

Notes

• A church website is more than an online brochure. Expect nothing and you get nothing.
• Stay faithful and leave the results to God, but still set goals and measure how things are going.
• Use SMART goals: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound.
• A goal has a plan behind it. A huge jump with no action steps is just a wish.
• Possible goals: new visitors, returning visitors, traffic from social media, and plan-your-visit form completions.
• Google Analytics is free. Start with total users and new users on the audience overview screen.
• Use the compare feature to measure against your own past month, not against other churches.
• Set up tracked links by campaign and source so you can see what actually brings people in.
• Pick just one to three goals, then get Analytics installed by pasting the tracking code into your website settings.

Companion article

Notes and resources that go with this session