Statistics Tell a Story: Do you Listen
Data and graphs - you got to love data :) Most pastors and church leader types want to know. How many people were there on Sunday? Are people getting plugged into small groups? The denomination might send a report asking how many were baptized last year or how many attended the vacation bible school (assuming that every church has VBS) what's up with that?
I like data as well. Just yesterday I was having a look at some of the analytics data for www.bridgechurch.ca and an interesting piece of data stuck out to me. It was the graph showing the visitor trending. The question it answered is, "Are the people coming to your site 1st time guests or returning visitors?" This data is just for the past month and shows that 84% of the visits on our website is 1st time guests visiting our site.
What does this mean?
1. I know that we are sending lots of new traffic because our search engine rankings have improved. Actually in the last 4 months our referrals from Google have more than doubled
2. We are not giving people a reason to come back to our site. It is similar to church. First time guests are awesome but what does it take to get them plugged in and to become regular attenders?
So I'm going to try an put together a plan to begin to bring people back to site by providing resources that people need and are useful. Our site is the front door of the church. With our site we are building a relationship with visitors. If we can provide content that causes visitors to come back then we are successfully building a relationship.
If you have a church website and don't have analytics you are missing out on some important date. Just think about it, when visitors come to your church on Sunday morning and fill out a card don't you ask, "How did you find out about us?" Web stats are providing the same information about visitors to your website. How did you find out about us (our website) and stats also tell what visitors are interested in because you can track a visitors behaviour on the website.
Here is a free place where you can get analytics installed on your site. http://www.google.com/analytics