How to Use Website Analytics to Measure the Success of Your Digital Ministry Strategy

When running a church website, you need to ensure a system of checks to determine if your digital ministry strategy is successfully communicating your goals. In order to get a picture of this, you will need to track website analytics. However, knowing what to do with your data can be a challenge for busy church leaders.

What is Analytics?

Analytics involve numbers. It’s all about how people navigate a website, where they click, and what that means. Using web analytics, you can identify trends in what your church members want to see.

Striving for Improvement through Website Analytics

Before ever tracking analytics, a church can make an educated guess about what members will want to see in the church website. After all, you have probably already successfully managed a physical church. But with any church, small or large, there can be a gap between what people need and want, and what you are providing. This is all part of the nature of a church. The communication gap shouldn’t be a setback: churches should continuously strive for improvement and more mature relationships with the congregation members. One way to significantly improve communication is by looking at the numbers.

How to Adjust Your Digital Ministry Strategy

There are endless possibilities for what a church can learn and change by tracking their website. To give you a better understanding of how you can improve your strategy, here are a few examples:

You may find a slow turnover.

This would indicate that your content is not reaching out to many people. You can strive to understand the reason for this lack of reach. If members are unaware that the website exists, seek to create awareness. If the website is not very visible online, work towards giving the site some exposure.

You may uncover a trend you weren’t expecting.

Maybe people aren’t looking at the calendar, but they are looking at the contact information. Finding this type of trend can help you understand your congregation’s interests. Maybe people are using the website to gain in-person contact. Whatever the reason, you have valuable data that will help you tailor your content according to preferences. You may also discover that the reason for trends is the usability and navigability of the site. Make sure the site isn’t confusing your visitors.

Take a look at the timing of visits.

You will realize that there are specific times when users tend to log in. This piece of information is crucial as it helps you with your content scheduling. If most users tend to use the site at midday every Saturday, then prepare your content with such timing in mind. If you put up content when most visitors are offline, nobody will look for the information you put up. Some information is going to be time sensitive, making the timing even more vital. Looking into the timing of use will help guarantee that information will be seen when it’s meant to be seen.

The most important thing is to understand why people do what they do. The analytics steer you. Over time, it will teach you what to highlight.

To gather how much you know about analytics, schedule a no-hassle consultation with one of our digital ministry experts.