Knowing how your congregants and community interact with your website helps you understand how people interact with your website’s content so that you can continue to provide and improve on that content. Your website not only provides information to your congregation but also helps you to be found by new visitors. It’s a powerful tool to help push your ministry forward.
The most recent release for Refresh Websites included the ability to view in-depth website stats and determine the frequency of stats emailed to you.
Types of Website Analytics to Help Your Ministry
Page Views vs. Unique Page Views
Page views are the number of times a page was viewed on your website anytime a page on your site is loaded by a browser. For example, if someone visits your church’s website and views one page, then clicks to another page, that counts as two page views. This is important because it helps you understand how popular a page is.
Unique page views, on the other hand, only count the number of times a page was viewed by one person in a single session. This gives you an idea of how many people are viewing the pages on your church’s website.
Knowing which pages are most or least popular can help you create content that links people to pages with valuable information but that have very little views.
Engagement
These stats tell you how many visits and page visits you’ve had to your website. When a person lands on any page on your site, it is considered a visit. If they browse to another page on your site within the same session, each page they visit counts as a page visit.
Understanding engagement for your church’s website helps you learn which pages, including contact forms or any click buttons (email, call us, register here, etc.) are clicked on the most or least. Knowing this information can help you improve the design of your website.
Bounce Rate
The data found in this section tells you the percentage of people who visited your website after viewing a single page and didn’t view any other pages on your site. This also tells you how long a person stayed on a particular page before leaving it. Typically, a bounce rate of 40% or lower is considered good, 40% to 70% is average, and anything above 70% is considered high.
If you’re finding that you have a high bounce rate, consider revising your design or content. Maybe there are links that are broken or the page has a very long loading time.
Traffic Sources
Traffic Sources gives you information about where people who visit your site are coming from. This data will show you the device breakdowns for those visitors. For instance, you’ll see a breakdown of how many people accessed your site from a mobile device vs a web browser. Knowing this will help you as you design and revamp your site so that if the majority of your site visitors are using a mobile device you can ensure to make your site mobile friendly. This data ultimately helps you give your site visitors the best possible experience.
Geolocation
Geolocation shows where site visits originate. This is especially useful if you have an online worship service and may have people watching from all across the country or world. Having this data at your fingertips gives you insightful information about the various locations from which people are visiting your church’s website.
Viewing Your Websites Data
You have the choice of configuring how often you’d like to receive emails with your stats. This is optional. You can always log into your Refresh Websites dashboard and view your stats.
If you’d like to receive emails with your stats:
- Go to the Users page in the Refresh Websites section of the Ministry Hub.
- Edit a user.
- Under Website Statistics Email Subscription, select a frequency or turn off email.
Your website is a representation of your ministry.
Knowing your stats is really important for understanding how well your website is doing. It’ll help your ministry know what things people seek most. When they visit your site and what pages don’t seem to be getting views. Having a well-designed website that includes valuable content can drive traffic that can help you expand your ministry’s reach.
Check out this blog to learn more about building a functional website.
Lily joined the ACST team in 2020. She worked six years at a large church in Atlanta, GA, as the Business Systems Analyst. Lily understands the mission and challenges of the church. She spent her time in ministry utilizing Realm to help solve those challenges. She is passionate about helping our Ministry Partners leverage technology to fulfill their mission and grow their ministry impact.
