Introduction to Church Google Analytics
Church Google Analytics are a vital part of every church marketing campaign. We have already covered a number of campaigns that you can implement, such as Google Search, Google Display Network, and Church Facebook Campaigns. Implementing a campaign that incorporates these platforms will set you well on your way to growing your church, but how do you know exactly what kind of impact they will have?
As the old saying goes, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it” You can measure your offline church growth by simply monitoring how many people are at each service or event, but to measure your online growth you will need to implement Church Google Analytics on your site. Google Analytics are an excellent tool that allow you to track and monitor all the activity on your website. At a glance you can tell how many people visit your site, where they come from and how long they stay on your church’s website.
How to Set Up Church Google Analytics
Setting up Church Google Analytics can be a little tricky if you are not experienced with the platform, so it is best to take care, or to leave it to the professionals. If you choose to, you can follow these steps to implement analytics on your site yourself.
The first thing you have to do is get your Tracking ID and Code Snippet. To do this you:
- Sign in to your Analytics account.
- Click Admin.
- Select an account from the menu in the ACCOUNT column.
- Select a property from the menu in the PROPERTY column.
- Under PROPERTY, click Tracking Info -> Tracking Code.
Your Tracking ID and Property Number will be displayed at the top of the page. The tracking-code snippet for your website is displayed under Website tracking.
Now that you have your tracking ID, property number and code snippet, it is time to deploy them into your dynamic website. A dynamic website is one for which the HTML is generated using a programming language like Python, Ruby, or PHP. You can use an ‘include statement’ or template to push the tracking code dynamically to each page. To do this:
- Find the Javascript tracking-code snippet for your property, and then copy the entire snippet. Don’t make any changes to the snippet.
- Paste the entire snippet into its own include file, then add the include statement to your page header so that the snippet appears before the closing </head>tag.
Google Analytics should now be tracking on your site. If your site is running on WordPress, you can skip the above and simply install the Google Analytics plugin, and enter your tracking number there.
Verify that your Tracking Code is Working
Once you have successfully installed the Analytics tracking code, it can take up to 24 hours for data such as traffic-referral information, user characteristics, and browsing information to appear in your reports. However, you can check your web-tracking setup immediately.
If you make an error, or the plugin isn’t working, you could be tracking your traffic incorrectly, which is worse than not tracking them at all. It could be weeks or months before you realize your error, by which time you will have missed out on valuable data. Our team at Missional Marketing are highly experienced in deploying Google Analytics on a wide range of platforms, so you are in good hands with us taking care of this process for you.
How to Monitor Church Google Analytics
Now that you have installed your tracking code across your site, it is time for you to start tracking your data. There are are hundreds of different elements that you can track using Google Analytics, but to get you started we suggest you just focus on the main elements for now.
When you log into Google Analytics, you will see a number of options in the left sidebar. These are the five main groups that we will be focusing on. They are Real Time, Audience, Acquisition, Bahavior and Conversions.
Real-Time Overview
The Real-Time Overview allows you to see who is viewing your site at any given moment. It shows you on a map where your users are, what device they are using, and where they are coming from. This is quite useful, as you can get a good idea of where your visitors most frequently come from, and also what time of day they are most likely to visit. With this information, you can optimize you website and social media campaigns to overlap with these statistics.
Audience Overview
This section is the Audience Overview. This is probably the most useful section for getting a general overview of the traffic for your site. As you can see from the Overview above, you are delivered data such as:
- How many sessions on your site
- How many users have visited
- Average Session Duration
- How many pageviews
- How many pages a visitor visited per session
- Bounce Rate (You can read a recent post of ours on Bounce Rates here.)
- New Sessions vs Returning Sessions
All this information is visible from the dashboard, but you can delve through the menu in here to bring up even more detailed stats on your users. You can find out where they are from, their age and gender, and what device and operating system they are using. This allows you to paint a picture of your users, and optimize your site accordingly.
Acquisition Overview
Acquisition Overview is another really useful part of Church Google Analytics. Here you can see where all the visitors of your site are coming from. As you can see from the image above, you can tell if the majority of your traffic is coming from:
- Organic Search (Google)
- Paid Search (Google Adwords)
- Social Media
- Referrals (Other sites linking to yours)
This is great to see which channels are performing well and which ones are under-performing. You can also compare your stats to the previous week/month/year, to see if any are improving, or getting worse. Without Google Analytics you would simply be left guessing, but Google Analytics allows you to take action as soon as you see anything slipping.
Behavior Overview
Behavior Overview allows you to see how people engage with your site once they have landed there. Here you can find out details such as:
- 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. Try our new Free Church Website SEO Audit tool to analyse your website, and also to get improvement suggestions.
Conversions Overview
Conversions are most frequently used by eCommerce sites to track when a user makes a purchase on the site. However, you can also use it on non-eCommerce sites to track certain events that you want your users to make. For example, you could set it up so that when a visitor comes to your site and signs up for your mailing list, this is counted as a goal conversion. You can then get conversion rate statistics on what percentage of your visitors end up signing up to your list.
To Get Started with Church Google Analytics
Missional Marketing is a dedicated Christian communications firm working with Christian Churches and Organizations across the country, and we are also a Top 5% Certified Google Partner. So get in touch today, and we can get started on your Church’s Google Analytics set up.
Contact Jason Hamrock or Kevin Peck, or use the Contact Us button.
Jason Hamrock – Phone: 480-773-9115 | Email: jhamrock@missionalmarketing.com
Kevin Peck – Phone: 602-481-2991 | Email: kpeck@missionalmarketing.com