Faith and Web

One of the Best Things You Can Do For Your Church’s Website

If you have any responsibility for your congregation’s website, chances are you need Google Analytics — the analysis tool for website statistics. I don’t say that about many things, so what’s so special about Analytics? It’s the fast track to understanding how and why people are finding your site, what they are doing there, what pages interest them, and what set-up they use. In other words, it’s very revealing – and it’s free, unlike most other good website number crunchers.

Here’s a sampling of things I can tell from Analytics about my church’s site:

• Many visitors (as opposed to church members) find us from our Association’s site and vice versa.
• Aside from the home page, our most visited pages are “About Us: An Invitation to Visitors,” “Meet the Minister,” the sermon archives and the calendar.
• 69% use Internet Explorer and 19% use Firefox, usually with a screen resolution of 1024 x 768 or higher, although 8% are still at 800 x 600. Only 4% use dial-up.
• Wednesdays are the most popular day, and Saturdays the least.

One note: Google Analytics isn’t perfect. It can’t count pages unless they include its script in their code. For example, on my church’s site, it overlooks our current newsletter. That’s a page I know is viewed frequently, but it’s in PDF, so it can’t have the Analytics script embedded in it.

Given how much Analytics does reveal, and the likelihood that you don’t have access to a better tool, missing some pages seems a minor issue. However, if Analytics does have a shadow, it’s that it’s intimidating for the mere mortal (as opposed to an analytics geek). To get out of this shadow, it’s just five steps – four that are easy, and one that might or might not be.

How to Start Using Google Analytics

Step 1: Get a Google Account

In case you don’t already have an account, it’s easy. Here are some directions.

Step 2: Get the “tracking” code

Go to the Analytics home page, sign in and “Create a New Website Profile.” Once you fill in the required fields, the form will give you six lines of code. Hang on to that code. It’s your key to the kingdom.

Step 3: Copy This Code Into the Site

Paste the code near the end every page you want Analytics to count. This is the one step that can be problematic. If you have easy access to your site’s code and host, and use include files, it’s a breeze. You just copy and paste it into your footer include and upload that file. Even if you don’t use includes, though, chances are it’s worth the extra effort.

Step 4: View the Reports

In a few days, check back to see if things are starting to happen. Go to your Analytics page. When you first sign on, you don’t go right to the statistics. There’s an intermediary page, in case you track multiple sites. The important link to click on is “View Reports” (right now “View Reports - New Beta”) — near the bottom, next to your site’s URL. Once you’re starting to get some results, then sit back and wait for at least a month.

Step 5: Explore

After you’ve got some real data, the main thing is to just explore and enjoy. Don’t get overwhelmed or off-put by the odd numbers and charts. There’s a lot to this data. But you don’t have to be an expert or even close to it to find lots of great information. For now, the thing to do is look around and see what you find which makes sense to you. Be sure to explore the links in the left navigation (Dashboard, Visitors, etc). And be sure to tell others in the congregation who might be interested, which brings me to….

One Tip

From the Dashboard page, click the “Email” button near the top. You can create a PDF of your site’s data to send to others. You’ll be amazed how much interest this can provoke in the site. There’s a good chance most of the church staff will enjoy seeing it at least once, and some may want to get a report routinely, which is equally simple to set up. In fact, it’s just this kind of thing that makes Analytics well worth the effort.

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One of my very favorite bloggers (Philocrites) recently requested average rates of daily traffic. He specifically is wondering about Unitarian Universalist blogs, but this takes me down a parallel path: statistics for church websites.

If you’re like me, you think of analyzing web statistics in the same breath as visiting the dentist. Actually, that’s not quite fair. I like my dentist a lot. Nonetheless, I wish I didn’t have to go so often. So like visiting the dentist, gathering web statistics boils down to figuring out how to do it as painlessly and efficiently as possible.

But let me back up. The first question is, if it’s that bad, why bother at all? I actually have a few sites where I don’t care about the statistics and make little-to-no effort to gather them. Heretofore, this very site has been one of those. It’s so new. But Philocrites has asked, so I’d best get moving.

For the sites I maintain professionally, statistics are a must, but in my opinion, they aren’t as crucial for the average church website. Don’t get me wrong. The figures can be incredibly useful, and there are likely to be times when they are really needed.

So When Are Statistics Needed?

In my experience, you’re going to need to know your congregation’s website numbers if:

• A major stakeholder (e.g. the minister) asks you for them.
• You are about to do redesign and need to know what browsers to code for or what parts of the site are most used.
• You enjoy puttering around with this kind of thing. Some people do. I do when I have time. Similarly you might be curious and have the time.
• Your site is large.
• Your church wants to grow in a big way.

You don’t need two of these reasons. Any one of them is enough in and of itself.

What Are the Options?

Digging a bit deeper, it’s helpful to understand the basics of how web numbers are crunched. Actually, the more formal term for this is “web analytics,” which can be broken into two basic methods.

Logfile Analysis. The first, more traditional method is to use software that analyzes the “log files” on the server. Anytime someone or something visits your site, a very particular set of data is automatically recorded in a set of lines in a log file on the server. Typically it’s the IP of the user, the date and time, the files they accessed, where they came from and their browser and platform.

On any given day, a site with moderate traffic will have thousands of these entries. They can be parsed quite easily by software and number-crunched. The catch is your server administrator or host has to give you some kind of access to the log files. Some do; some don’t. Also the log files mount up over time and can have a huge impact on the server. They’re a bit like kudzu. Server administrators have to prune them, so you may only have access to a limited time’s worth of data that’s less meaningful.

Page tagging. The other approach is to include a kind of bean counter (typically JavaScript) that’s embedded in the pages you want to track. Webmasters have more control over their pages’ code than their servers, which often makes this method more viable. In addition, the range of statistics gathered can be broader. However, you can’t append this code to all files, so you’re likely to miss some of the important data.

But What Are Your Best Options?

In practical terms, this means that your best bet is to first check out the logfile analysis your host provides. If you can’t find it, check the host’s documentation or ask customer service. What particular analyzer they provide to do the number crunching varies a great deal. Mine uses Analog, but alas, I find Analog close to useless. Analog is venerable — one of the first and in its time one of the best — but, in my opinion no longer so. AWStats (which I find easier to interpret) is another common analyzer used by hosts. Of course your host may use something else entirely.

If your host’s analytics don’t meet your needs, then it’s time to consider page tagging. Google Analytics and StatCounter are among the most popular in this category. I’ve used both professionally, and have been amazed at how helpful they can be. About a month ago I added Google Analytics to my church’s code, and plan to report back soon on how I did that and how it’s working.

One side note: blogs, because of the unusual ways they are accessed, are a somewhat different beast. FeedBurner is generally considered to have the best statistics for blogs. But that’s beyond the scope of this post, since church sites aren’t usually blogs – even mine where we use WordPress.

Once You Have the Statistics, What Do You Do with Them?

In the wealth of numbers, charts and graphs generated by analytics, the items webmasters tend to look for most often are:

• Unique visitors. This tells you roughly how many people are coming to your site, which can be a particularly helpful statistic over time.
• Page views. This is not quite as useful in my opinion, though again, it can be a helpful over time. These are the number of pages or files each unique visitor accessed. So if 5 unique visitors each looked at 10 pages, that would be 50 page views.
• Most accessed pages. This can be quite useful in figuring out where to put the most energy into the site. For example, my church discovered to our horror that our calendar was one of the most visited pages. It was in terrible shape, so we made it a priority to improve.
• Search terms. How are people finding you? From this you can learn things like keywords to feature.
• Browser and platform. This can have an impact on redesign in particular. For example, no one is using Netscape 4 to access our site any more, so I no longer have to code for that bear.

So that’s a crash course in web analytics. Over time I plan to cover related topics in more depth, but until then, here are some….

Further Resources

• Web analytics (Wikipedia)
• Lies, Damned Lies and Web Statistics: includes how statistics are gathered (with great graphics), as well as why the numbers themselves can be deceiving.
• 5 More Great Tools For Evaluating Your Website: the second in a series of brief reviews of metrics tools.
• 2007 Web Analytics Shootout - Interim Report: for those in search of really substantial information.
• Web Analytics Association: for the pro’s.

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