Learning from Website Analytics
Hopefully, your website developer included an analytics tool with your website. Many sites use the free Google Analytics tool. You do have to have a Gmail account to get it, but that is free also. You can sign up your website (property is what Google calls it) for the tool when you are logged into your Gmail account at https://analytics.google.com. When you sign-up Google gives you a “code” which needs to be inserted in your website code and that allows the data collection. Google provides directions.
Log into Google Analytics using your Gmail account to access real time and historic statistics about your website. They can be viewed in graphs or charts and you can filter that data in a variety of ways, including the change in data over a week, a month or a year. i.e. Are your visitors increasing or decreasing?
There is much more data provided than I find necessary for my ministry. However, I find a good deal of data that is helpful. Here is what I look for:
- How many users (their term)/visitors (my term) does the site have?
- How do they come to the site? (Search engines, Direct url, social media)?
- What are the top pages visited? For the parishes that I work with, these tend to be Bulletins, Mass Times, Staff, Contact Us, Sacraments and Special Events.
- Is there a time of day or day of the week, when a larger number of visitors come or are visits spread over the week and during the day equally?
- Are there days or times of the year when visits spike? Ash Wednesday, for example, is one of those days where visits spike quite a bit. Holy Days of Obligation Mass times get more traffic. And in this area of the country Parish Lenten Fish Frys also draw more visitors to the website.
The answers to the questions above convince me that the website is truly a service and needs to be maintained at a high level. Therefore, I want to:
- Provide the information or a link to the most sought after information on the Home Page.
- Post information in a timely manner so that it is there when visitors come looking for it.
- Use every means available including social media to drive people to the website.
- Make sure the website is up to date and has its most welcoming appearance especially when larger numbers of visitors are expected.
Do you look at your website’s analytics? What have you learned from doing so?