1. Skymall Syndrome

2. Ministry Schizophrenia

3. Enough about you, let’s talk about ME

4. The Blind leading the Blind

5. Death by Committees

6. Volunteer Hostage Situation

Read the entire article: 6 Ways Churches Fail with their Website

I’m New! The Study Results

In our church website analytics study of more than 50 church websites, we discovered that the most accessed content on church websites other than the homepage falls into a grouping we are calling “I’m New”. These are pages related to people attending for the first time, those who are looking for service times or locations, those looking for other information about the church and its beliefs and doctrine, or those who have no knowledge of Jesus Christ.

The most important church website content

For our survey respondents, a quarter indicated that I’m New church website content was the most important to them of all the content on their church website. The only content considered more important was Sermon downloads. Other church website content in the study included, media, events, ministry, and group related sections. In our study, visitors to I’m New content view each page on average for one minute, and about half the time, they leave (bounce) immediately.

Ready to Engage Church Website New Visitors

A clear I’m New section sends a signal to the user that this church has thought about and prepared for their needs whether they know or don’t know what they are looking for. This church realizes that the person who clicks on I’m New wants information right then because they want to engage the church on some level. “I need this, where can I find it?” If the process of finding out information is difficult, someone is likely to leave and may end up not engaging that church again. This is something that falls under basic web usability 101.

Church Staff, Locations, Times, and other Visitor Information

A third of our surveyed church members said they accessed church staff, contact, or other visitor information at least once a month, and almost half sought out information about their pastors, elders, and other leadership at least once a month. It makes sense, if you’re looking for a church, or even curious about the church period, you may want to know about who is in charge, and also how to contact them.

Our church website analytics study also indicated that over three-quarters of our respondents access service information such as times, locations, and directions at least once a month. Half of those checked out church service information weekly. Could you imagine trying to find out where a church met, or what time it met, and not being able to easily find that information with one click? This is information people are trying to access all the time, whether members of the church, or not!

Church Website Content: What do you believe? What’s your story?

Almost half of all visitors are browsing through their church’s beliefs/mission/values at least once a month. The same amount looked up information about their church’s history or story at least once a month, and half of those look up this information every couple weeks.

Newcomers want to know about your church before they visit

Having the church’s beliefs, mission, and values readily accessible is critical because newcomers, whether they are saved or not, will want to know not only what that church believes, but also how that church carries out what they believe. Believers who just arrived in town will especially want to know about your beliefs to determine whether they should even visit your church in the first place.

Knowing what they are getting into

Nowadays, when people look for churches, they turn to the Internet to find out as much as they can about a church before committing to getting up earlier, packaging the children into the family minivan, risking getting lost, and walking into a strange, new environment. People want to be comfortable with what they can find about that church before they even enter the parking lot. Imagine the consternation of a family with multiple young children that arrives at a church only to find no nursery care is available!

Helping Newcomers Find What They’re Looking For

Newcomers that visit your website have questions, they want to know about how your church operates and its culture, whether the beliefs of that church seem right, whether they can trust the leadership’s stance, and for the unsaved, whether a conversation is even addressing them in a way they can understand. Let your church be the one that answers the visitor who says “I need help/compassion/someone to talk to”. Of special note, more than 90% of churches in our study did not have an easily accessible and understandable gospel message tailored to an unsaved person. Talk about missed opportunities!

One Final Tip- Make I’m New Content Easy to Find on Your Church Website

Having I’m New information that is not easy to find defeats the purpose of having an I’m New section. Park Community Church (www.parkcommunitychurch.org) does a great job of telling a new visitor clearly that yes, Park knows that the new person is important to them, and they also make it clear where to click so that the newcomer can get more of the answers they’re looking for.

Get Started!

Throughout this article we’ve talked about some of the things that your church communications and leadership team can start thinking about implementing. Creating an I’m New section that is easy to identify, and communicates clearly does not necessarily have to be expensive, the important thing is to get those conversations going on improving the content that is most accessed on your website, and getting your website prepared to answer those unspoken questions that people want answered. With some of these ideas outlined above, we hope your church website will be able to communicate more of what people need to know- before they leave it!

This is the full list of the ten different directory types that churches in our Church Website Analytics and Ministry Survey Study were listed on.  Churches that are listed on directories get more new visitors than churches who do not.  See Get More Visitors to Your Church Website With Directory Referrals. For Free! for an article introduction to this list of directories that churches are signed up for.

• Church Association, Denomination Directories – Require churches to ascribe to certain theological and doctrinal stances or association membership.  Some of the largest directories! Think Willow Creek or Southern Baptist Convention.
• Social Local Sites- Ratings, reviews, forums, messaging and feedback mechanisms, and a searchable user-powered database allow users to get a good feel for the listings they are browsing. Yelp.
• Local Search Engines- Google Local or Yahoo Local, will show up in search results.
• Local Metro Directories- Focus on local businesses, institutions, and culture. Nashvillelife.com
• Chambers of Commerce- Local and Nationwide Chambers. Trade Chambers.
• Internet Yellow Pages- Maps, directions, and searchable listings.
• Business Directories- Business listing services. Hotfog.com
• Ministry Partner Sites- Websites that belong to ministries who serve a function in missions or the community. www.angelfoodministries.com
• Local Church Directories- Usually location specific.  Connects people locally with churches.  Example:  www.sandiegochurches.org
• Nationwide Church Directories- Check out www.churchcloud.com.  Church Cloud includes Church contact information, denominations, worship style, attire, service details, leadership, ministries, and an embedded Google Maps function.  As a bonus feature, Church Cloud allows you to upload sermons, and events, to the directory, and even helps you publish these on your own church website.

Get your church website more new visitors by using some of the free church website directory ideas listed above!

Get More Visitors to Your Church Website with Directory Referrals. For Free! explores the three types of church website source traffic, direct traffic, referral traffic, and search traffic.

Get More Church Website New Visitors Through Directory Referrals

The article also discusses how to get more new visitors by getting your church signed up (free!) on varying different types of directories that will be included below.

While the article does not discuss the long term positive effects of directory links on search engine optimization (SEO), future articles released here at Church Website Guide will go into the efficacy and relevancy of SEO for church websites in effective online ministry!

Directories Are Highest Source Of Church Website Referral Traffic

The article also reveals some telling results from our church website analytics and ministry survey study- Directory referrals were the highest source of referral traffic for church websites, higher even than social media outlets like blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. Churches need to get on board with free directory submissions (and the occasional paid directory submission) even as they are making their efforts in social media and search!

List of Directories that were a Source of Referrals for Church Websites in Church Website Analytics and Ministry Survey Study 2009 (Partial)

• Church Association, Denomination Directories – Require churches to ascribe to certain theological and doctrinal stances or association membership.  Some of the largest directories! Think Willow Creek or Southern Baptist Convention.
• Social Local Sites- Ratings, reviews, forums, messaging and feedback mechanisms, and a searchable user-powered database allow users to get a good feel for the listings they are browsing. Yelp.

See the  remaining 8 directory types that were a source of referrals for church websites from Church Website Guide’s Church Website Analytics and Ministry Survey Study 2009 in the Full List Of Directories That Were A Source Of Referrals For Church Websites.

Get your church website more new visitors by using some of the free church website directory ideas listed above!

Your Church Website is Vital for New Visitors

Before you read this article, open your church’s website and take a few moments to examine it. What are the visual and content elements that jump out? For whom are these elements designed? Is it primarily a resource for people who already attend your church? Are the largest elements the recent sermon series, events or ministries to serve? Is your church website a place to welcome new people, or does it appear to be a site for regular attendees? Your church website sends a critical message to visitors and impacts whether they will ever visit your church community.

“When we moved, a church’s website had to be our first filter to find a church. A lot of churches had crummy websites and regardless of how great a church they may be, we passed them by,” stated Ryan Heinese, as his family searched for a church when they moved to a new city. This is part of a growing trend where people no longer chose a church based on its convenient location; often they began their search online, browsing multiple church websites before picking a place to worship. According to our research, (read last month’s column: The Truth about Church Websites and Social Networking article to learn about this church website market research) 16% of all people surveyed said the church website was the first place they learned about their church prior to attending. In fact, when you filter the results for people who have attended their church for less than three months, over 30% said it was where they first learned about the church. The church website is a strategic part of welcoming new people to your community. Just how important is it? When asked, “How important was the website in a person’s decision to attend the church” 77% of people who have attended the church under three months said it was important. Online visitors visit a church website and what they find there impacts their decision as to whether or not they will attend.

Visitors will be influenced by the look and feel of the website

Doctrinal statements, opportunities to connect and visitor information, people are checking out church websites for more information about the church.  In our Church website analytics research, we categorized the content visited into I’m New Information (e.g. location, directions, service times), Media (further broken down to Sermons, Articles and other content), Groups (e.g. specific church ministries), Events, Evangelism and several other categories. We discovered that the top content category people visited online was I’m New Information (excluding the home page). Yet, many websites do a poor job of connecting to new visitors and presenting the information visitors seek. Here is an example of a church that has a visitor-friendly design:

College Park (http://www.yourchurch.com) designed their website with new visitors in mind. Visitors to the home page immediately are presented with a ‘Welcome to College Park’ and a button to select “I’m New” which takes visitors to a page with common questions and desired information such as maps & directions. Visitors will see that College Park considers new visitors important and has spent time preparing the appropriate information for them. College Park is a good example of how to design for new visitors.

How should you design a church website for new visitors? We suggest churches use a design process to present the churches vision, impact the visitor toward sharing this vision, and encourage behaviors that the church desires. These behaviors could include:

• Low-Value: Subscribe to RSS, podcast or engage the church Twitter account.
• Medium-Value: Sign-up for an email, join a Facebook group or complete a web form.
• High-Value: Show up to a service, home group or other relational meeting.

The church website strategy should move new visitors into relationships and involvement

Visitors will see the way you have designed for them and the ease with which they can access information. In today’s increasingly online world this is a critical part of any church’s plan to attract new visitors. Interestingly enough, these visitors will be Christians who seek a new church or plan to return to attending a church. In a future article we will write about how church websites are not a place non-Christians visit for the purpose of learning about Christianity. What we do know is that websites are effective in helping Christians find a new church. Ultimately your website should be designed for these new visitors as a strategic part of your mission.

The first article, which has some church website user survey results and church web analytics research, is titled The Truth About Church Websites and Social Networking, and was written by Drew Goodmanson, pastor of Kaleo Church in San Diego, and the CEO of Monk Development, designer of a premier church content management system, Ekklesia360.

An excerpt from this introductory church website and social networking  article published by Christian Computing Magazine is included below.

‘We have all heard about the importance of a church website, the growth of social networking and the need for pastors to blog.  But how effective are these strategies for outreach, making disciples and gathering people?  In spring 2009, Monk Development began a study that over one hundred churches participated in representing 30,000+ members.  This study includes over 1,200 survey responses and nearly fifty years worth of combined Google Analytics data to help us understand what happens on a church website and the experience of online visitors. All of this market research seeks to answer the question, “What are churches doing on the Internet that are best practices for effective online ministry?”’

We are also including an exceprt of an introduction to private church community networks and Christian social networking sites as below:

“Last, we studied the effectiveness of private church community networks and Christian social networking sites for the purpose of building community and discipleship. We are gathering data on usage, experiences, satisfaction, behavior, preferences, perceptions, and demographics. We are going beyond traditional metrics in order determine how these tools promote activities that are central to being Christian and being the church.”

And finally, here is some of the selected Church Website Guide church website survey and web analytics data that was published:
General Internet Use of Respondents
• 88.0% use the Internet daily.
• 32.8% visit social networking sites daily, 18.3% 2-6 times a week and 8.8% weekly.
• 5.6% visit their church website daily.
• 5.9% visit another church or ministry website daily.

Respondents’ Relationship to Church Website
• 17.1% said the website was the first place they learned about their current church prior to attending.
• 12.2% said they found the church website through a search engine.
• 36.1% of respondents said the website played an important role in their decision to attend the church.

Drew Goodmanson, chief executive of Monk Development and co-founder/pastor at Kaleo Church writes an article titled “Website Wisdom:  New Research, Cooperative Reveal Best Practices for Churches“.   Speaking from the research that we’ve started releasing on Church Website Guide this year, Drew discusses best practices for church websites in attracting new visitors, connecting people, and equipping church leaders.

Here is an excerpt:

“Research conducted earlier this year, which surveyed hundreds of churches representing more than 70,000 members combined, attempted to drill deeper into two fundamental questions as the Internet grows in its influence and importance in our culture and beyond:

1) Do church websites strategically help attract new visitors, connect people, and equip leaders?
2) And if so, what are the best practices for a church’s web strategy?

Three significant discoveries, as well as several best practices, emerged from this work. This information can help large churches (congregations such as Willow Creek Community Church participated in the research) as well as small ones (church plants with fewer than 50 people also participated). These practices also are useful for most any situation, regardless of whether a church is using a volunteer, a church website design firm, or a staff member to design its site.”

Read more about this church website research article on Your Church’s website here, read what Drew has to say about it, or download the pdf direct.

• Demographics of Survey Respondents
• Church Participation of Respondents
• General Internet Use of Respondents
• Respondents Relationship to Church Website

Demographics of Survey Respondents

Churches who participated in our analytics study had their congregations complete a survey on their website use.  Who were these people that completed the web survey?  From those who completed the survey it was discovered:

• 52.7% female vs. 47.3% male
• The average person was 40.5 years old.  The youngest person was born in 1996 and the oldest in 1921.
• 52.1% have attended their church for less than 2 years.
• 94.4%  were a Christian prior to attending the church.
• 3.0% have never visited their church website.

Church Participation of Respondents

• 82.6% attend their church worship service weekly
• 54.5% said they participate in a weekly Bible study or Home Group.

General Internet Use of Respondents

• 88.0% use the Internet daily.
• 32.8% visit social networking sites daily, 18.3% 2-6 times a week and 8.8% weekly.
• 5.6% visit their church website daily.
• 5.9% visit another church or ministry website daily.

Respondents Relationship to Church Website

• 17.1% said the website was the first place they learned about their current church prior to attending.
• 12.2% said they found the church website through a search engine.
• 36.1% of respondents said the website played an important role in their decision to attend the church.

In our results we coupled these survey results with the actual behavior (analytics) to help shape and understand what took place on a church website.

• What Church! at Bethany is doing effectively Directly or Indirectly Online to get a High New Visitor %
• Online Directory Referral Traffic
• Willow Creek Association Membership
• SEO Benefits and Partnering Opportunities

Getting a High New Visitor % Without Heavy Design Influence

In a previous article, we were looking at what a church could do to get a High New Visitors % without having to resort to Design traffic which is not necessarily reliable or targeted to your primary audience.

New Visitors % is how many people are coming to your site each month that have never visited your site before, and growing churches want their number of New Visitors to be continually growing.

As mentioned in a previous article, Design traffic is referrals from websites that are either your website designer, CMS provider, design blogs, or design rating/review sites.  We want to see if it is possible to succeed in the goal of growing  lots of New Visitor traffic without having to rely heavily on design traffic.

Since our last discussion centered primarily around the Twitter activity of Matt Payne, the lead pastor from our example website, Church! at Bethany, today we’ll continue to look at their traffic sources, this time, at their Directory Referral.

Online Directory Referral Traffic

Between 4/20/08-4/20/09 Church! at Bethany averaged 1.85% of their hits per month from directory sources.  The percentage of visitors that was new for that directory traffic was 81.4%, which is part of a study-wide trend indicating that Visitors who come through online directory referrals have a high New Visitor %.

Church websites get more New Visits when the referral source is an online directory.  A future article will discuss the types of directories that are available, the average study-wide percentage of New Visitors  from Directory sources, and which directories may or may not be appropriate for your particular ministry.  But for now, let us take a closer look at Church! at Bethany’s highest Directory Referral Source, Newthing.org.

Newthing.org‘s mission in their own words is “…to be a catalyst for a movement of reproducing churches relentlessly dedicated to helping people find their way back to God.”

What they provide is a  church community network that is focused on training, equipping, mentoring, and providing resources to churches that are planting a church, or are thinking about planting satellite churches.

Church! at Bethany is a part of this network, shown twelfth on the left.  This listing alone generates 1.25% of total Visits every month, and  looking further at Church! at Bethany’s top fifteen referral sources, it gets the 2nd highest Pages Per Visit at 4.45 pages visited, and an incredibly low bounce rate of 30.68%.  This affiliate directory is sending high quality visitors that are more engaged.

Willow Creek Association Membership

Church! at Bethany’s website also gets its second highest new visitor referrals through the church’s membership with the Willow Creek Association.

While Willow Creek does “not oversee the ministry expressions of individual churches, WCA Membership is intended solely for churches that hold an orthodox understanding of biblical Christianity.”  Thus, WCA Member Churches affirm central doctrines of the Bible in the WCA Statement of Faith, which mirrors many of the historic creeds of Christianity.  Being a member is a way of saying, you can trust us to believe at least in these basic foundational doctrines.

Though it is unlikely that an unchurched person would find Church at Bethany through a church directory referral, someone who was previously churched and was familiar with and trusted the Willow Creek Church, or the Willow Creek Association Statement of Faith (perhaps a transplant to the state of Oregon) may find Church! at Bethany through the Find a Church tool.

In fact, searching for just the state of Oregon  without putting a church name  gives the following search results below:

Church! at Bethany is fifth in this alphabetical listing. There are other benefits to becoming part of a large church association whose values you believe in.  For Willow Creek Association in particular, messages, training mp3s, live webinars, discounts on events and published resources, a free book, and monthly subscriptions to Christianity Today’s Leadership Journal and Willow Creek’s audio magazine can be had for $249/year.

SEO Benefits and Partnering Opportunities

Granted, the traffic from this online directory is not targeted to non-believers who may be curious or looking for a church, this linking does help with SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and also provides access to future ministry opportunities.

If someone wants more information or help in planting a church, or if someone wants to partner with a church like Church! at Bethany in their ministry, this listing helps connect supporters and church leaders alike who are of similar task and vision for planting and reproducing churches.  These visits give Church! at Bethany support, as well as giving them a chance to serve other churches.  We believe that connecting online with other like-minded churches through directories is mutually beneficial for all who are a part of the listing or organization, both from a ministry, as well as from a Search Engine Optimization standpoint.

Next Article: Blogs, Google CPC, Facebook

Our next article will continue to look at Church at Bethany’s High New Visitor % through observing its blog traffic, Google CPC traffic, and Facebook traffic.

• Getting a High New Visitor % Without Heavy Design Influence (Part1)
• Church! at Bethany
• Bethany’s New Visitor %
• 76 Twitter Hits in 17 months?
• Tracking Tweet Sources is Hard Without Google Analytics Campaign URL’s
• Personal Blog: Mattpayneonline.com
• Designing with Referrals in Mind

Getting a High New Visitor % Without Heavy Design Influence (Part 1)

In a previous article, we looked at websites in our study who had the highest New Visitors % coming to their website.  We found that the highest New Visitors % is 79.71%, and the average New Visitors % is 50.88%.  We also saw that the websites with the highest amount of New Visitors percentage-wise had high Referral traffic and high design traffic.

In this article we’ll take a look at a church that is still able to get good traffic in New Visitors% without having an overwhelming majority of traffic coming from Design-oriented websites.

Church! at Bethany

Church! at Bethany is a three year old church plant located in Beaverton, Oregon, with a congregation of about 85 members and pastored by Matt Payne.

A tech-savvy pastor in his own right, Matt can be found speaking and teaching in conference rooms in Oregon and elsewhere across the Pacific Northwest, helping other Christians, both leaders and church members, to grasp and utilize this new thing called Social Media.

Bethany’s New Visitor %

Church! at Bethany’s New Visitor % was the third highest in our sample, at 75.86% with over 439 New Visits/month.

Three quarters of all traffic to www.churchatbethany.com is from people who have never seen the site before.  That’s impressive!  Let’s see what Matt and Church! at Bethany are doing to get such a high percentage of New Visitors to their website!

Twitter

You can follow Matt on Twitter at mlpayne, he’s got nearly 1,300 followers, and around 4,600 updates under his belt.

Utilizing MyTweet16 we can see that the oldest Tweet that Twitter has records of is from August 14, 2008, so Matt’s been tweeting for a while.

We see a trend in our study-wide research showing that for some reason, church engagement in Twitter really took off starting the first 3 months of 2009, so Matt was ahead of the curve. Let’s take a look at the analytics below, and see what kind of impact this pastor was making on visits to Church! at Bethany’s website.

76 Twitter Hits in 17 months.

We are looking at the analytics sources data for www.churchatbethany.com, from January 18, 2008 until June 17, 2009.

On average, Church! at Bethany gets 580 or so hits per month, or about 4 Twitter visits per month.  This seems low as we know that Matt has not only over a thousand followers, but most of those followers are actually real people, not bots.

These tweeps are Christians and non-Christians alike who engage Matt on everything from kids soccer games, to the score from the latest Trailblazer game, to spiritual matters.  Let’s look more recently at Church! at Bethany’s analytics within the last month.

Tracking Tweet Sources is Hard Without Google Analytics Campaign URL’s

We can see that Twitter traffic for Church! at Bethany in the last month of 38 visits is nearly 10 times the 17 month average of 4 Twitter visits per month.  Something really took off in the last month or so.

However, it is hard to track Twitter referrals unless the links are tagged with Google Analytics campaign information.

We will go more in depth into how to actually track where your Twitter referrals are coming from in the future, but for now, we’ll just observe that Church! at Bethany has many Twitter referrals just in this past month, and that these users are contributing significantly  to Church! at Bethany’s New Visits (4.4%).

Let’s see where Matt refers his Twitter followers and readers to on his Twitter profile.

Twitter Traffic to Personal Blog

Here we see that Matt is sending all his Twitter traffic to his personal blog, http://mattpayneonline.com.  In fact, in speaking with him, Matt preferred that his Twitter traffic went to his personal blog, because there was a lot more engagement there for web users than just having visitors stop by his church’s website.

Personal Blog: Mattpayneonline.com

A quick glance at his blog and one can see why Matt chooses to send people to his blog.

Mattpayneonline.com enables people to read about and comment on all sorts of topics, (Women Don’t Look for Porn),or to view posts related to Matt’s technology seminars, his Chamber of Commerce involvement, or content about the new church building they’re thinking about leasing.

A wealth of information including “Using Twitter for Ministry”, and a portal for discussion makes Matt’s weblog a central place for online ministry and engagement for those whether saved or unsaved living in the Beaverton area as well as for users on the web.

Designing with Referrals in Mind

We’ve noticed that  Mattpayneonline.com recently went through a redesign, cleaning things up, making content more accessible and the design just got more intuitive and easy to navigate.

When we last spoke with Matt, we suggested that if all his traffic from Twitter goes to his blog, then perhaps it would help the impact on his church to have a working and easy to see link to his church be placed clearly on his blog (since the old link was broken/did not show consistently).

The previous design, while functional, did not have the church’s website in a prominent and easily accessible location.  With the revamped new look, Matt incorporated the addition of a link to Church!atBethany.com placed clearly in the upper left-hand corner of his blog.

Next Time, Getting a High New Visitor % Without Heavy Design Influence (Part2)

This article set out to determine what sorts of sources or content can be utilized to get a high New Visitor % without the influence of Design-oriented websites.

We’ve seen so far how Matt Payne’s efforts on Twitter for Church! at Bethany in the most recent month is generating phenomenal 4.4% of its Total Visits from Twitter referrals.  Church! at Bethany is amongst the top 5 websites in our study for visits from Twitter referrals.

In our next article, we will try to determine what else Church! at Bethany is doing effectively either directly or indirectly online to get a high New Visitor %, including their activities on directories, blogs, and Google Cost-Per-Click, and Facebook.

• Churches who get the Highest Performance in New Visitors
• A Parallel Trend: High Referrals and Design Websites
• Highest Referral Traffic is from Design
• Design Referrals, Boon, or Distraction?

The Highest Performing New Visitor % Has High Returning Traffic

In our previous article (New Visits vs. Returning Visits), we discovered that the average New Visitor % amongst all church websites studied was 50%.  In this article we will develop the New Visitor topic some more, and take a look at the website with the highest performance in New Visitor %.

Knoxville Life Church (www.knoxlife.org), in Knoxville, Tennessee, has a congregation of about 100 members, 2 years of Google Analytics data available starting May of 2007 and the sample-wide highest% New Visitors of 79.71%. If we look at Knoxville’s Source traffic data, we might get a glimpse as to why New Visitors so dominates their inbound traffic.

From this graph we can see that Knoxville Life’s Referrals are its primary Source traffic.  In fact, Knoxville Life has the second highest amount of traffic of all churches from Referring Sites, at 59.7%. Drilling down further, our data shows that the majority of Knoxville’s Referral traffic comes from design websites (80%).

As we mentioned earlier, Design referrals may come from sources such as your website designer( i.e. AM Design), your CMS provider (i.e. Ekklesia360), design blogs (i.e. Smashing Magazine) or design idea/rating sites (i.e. Church Beauty).

A Parallel Trend: Referral and Design

It’s interesting to note at this point that Knoxville Life’s Source distribution is remarkably similar to Crosspointe Winterpark Church’s Source distribution, which we saw in the last article.  Do you still remember Crosspointe’s Source traffic distribution?  We’ll compare them side by side below.

You’ll note that in both cases Referring Sites are by far the largest share in both graphs, Direct Traffic is less than half of Referring sites, and Search Engines are half again of Direct Traffic.  These two websites have the highest Referral percentages of our entire study.

Highest Referral Traffic Comes From Design

Looking at Crosspointe Winterpark’s Referral traffic, and drilling down further, we find that the largest source of traffic within Referrals is Design traffic (39.21%). The same pattern occurs in Knoxville Life’s Design traffic (59.7%).  It seems that at least within our sample, the websites with the most Referring traffic are getting them from Design sources.

Design Referral Sources

Design Referrals, Boon, or Distraction?

We know that a high New Visitor% is desirable because it tends to bring people in who are not already regularly attending your church.  We also know that websites which have been designed well by a strong designer tend to get extra traffic through Design referrals.

These visits are not the highly targeted visitors who are looking for directions to your church, or people who are searching for a new church, or people looking for sermon downloads.  They are however, likely giving you a nice SEO (Search Engine Optimization) bonus through links and referrals.

In our study, most of the churches surveyed have either not really considered what they want to do with this design community traffic, or they make a strategic decision to not engage the design community at this time.  What is your church’s stance on these peripheral visitors?  Are these extra visits merely a distraction, or could they be a secondary or tertiary ministry opportunity?

Next Article:  Non-Design Heavy New Visitors %

So far as we’ve looked at websites in our study we’ve seen that the highest New Visitors % is 79.71%, and the average New Visitors %  is 50.88%.  We found that the websites with the highest amount of New Visitors percentage-wise had high Referral traffic and high Design traffic.  But what if your homepage does not reside on a perfectly designed, award winning, high Design-referral website?  Can you still get good traffic in New Visitors, and can those visitors be relevant and targeted to your message?  Our next article will highlight a church that is trying to accomplish that, Church! at Bethany, in Beaverton, Oregon.

• New Visitors % + Returning Visitors % = 100%
• Growing Churches want to Increase their New Visitors %
• New Visitor % and Public/Private Networks
• The Study-wide Mean New Visitor % Benchmark
• Crosspointe Winterpark, an Average Example
• Crosspointe’s Referral Sources

New Visitor % + Returning Visitor % =100 %

Google Analytics has a metric in the Visitors section called New vs. Returning.  Very briefly, a New Visitor is someone who has never visited the website in the past, and a Returning Visitor is someone who has visited the website at least once before, irrespective of how long ago that was.

It could be last week, or two years ago, Google can track that Returning Visitor.  Together, New Visitors and Returning Visitors should add up to 100%.

In the example to the top right, from Crosspointe Winterpark in Winterpark, Florida, you see that the sum of their visiting percentages is: 53.1%+46.9%= 100%.  It makes sense.  If you’re visiting for the very first time, then you may be someone who has never visited in the past.  (Note: This stat is not perfect but more a general indicator.)

Growing Churches Want to Increase their New Visitors %

We primarily will be looking at the New Visitor data from our analytics study, because not only is Returning Visitors the inverse of New Visitors, most churches are probably more interested in getting their message out to more new people (the unchurched or those who are looking for a church).

Conversely you might expect a higher Returning Visitors count if you are running a successful community network off your main site.

New Visitor % and Sites with Public Login Functionality

One of the public websites we’ve seen with a member login on the site is CityReformed.org.  Churches that include a members login area on the website will probably skew toward more  Returning Visitors.  Many of the features included on CityReformed.org are geared toward their existing community.

New Visitor % and Sites with Private Login Functionality

In contrast to websites with a Public Member Functionality, we also have sites that choose to set their users up on more of a Private Member Website.

An advantage of a Private Website is that analytics software like Google will not be skewed by this primarily community-centered activity, nor require extra analytics hacks to get GA (or any other analytics software) to ignore all traffic related to the community network.One example of a Private Community web app is Cobblestone Community Network.

Cobblestone is a Private Community web app that is designed to move people deeper into real relationships, inviting users to connect online for sharing, encouragement, and prayer, with the goal of building relationships that move into the real world.

Some of the functionality designed into this application include automatic home group member sorting, event management, a prayer module, and volunteer and service opportunity coordination.

A recommendation may be to evaluate what your  website goals are and to offer two websites, one for members and another to communicate the vision of your church to the public.

The Study-wide Mean New Visitor %

The mean New Visitor % for all church websites studied is 50.88%. That means that on average, half of a church’s visits are from New Visitors, and the other half of a church’s visits are from Returning Visitors.  Let’s take a look at one church that is cruising right at the study-wide average of 50.88%, Crosspointe Winterpark, in Winterpark, Florida (www.crosspointewinterpark.com).

Crosspointe Winterpark, an Average Example

50.11% of Crosspointe Winterpark‘s visitors are New Visitors, which is nearly identical to the sample-wide church average of 50.88%.  We will release a case study in the future about more of what Crosspointe is doing, but just in the meantime, we will take a look at a few of the things that Crosspointe is  doing that might be indicative of a church which has an “average” New Visitors %.

Crosspointe Winterpark is a church of 80 members located in Winterpark, Florida,  and has three months of Google Analytics available starting from February of 2009.  All websites have one of three sources.  Search, Direct, and Referral.

Crosspointe gets 5.56% of its traffic from Search (This is pretty low, and a future article will discuss appropriate Search traffic percentages), and 12.33% of its traffic from Direct input of the website’s URL into a browser address bar.

These Direct hits are most likely from people who are familiar with the website’s URL already, and a significant portion of whom are likely church members.

Crosspointe’s Referral Sources

With 5.56% of all traffic from Search, and another 12.33% of traffic from Direct, it is astounding to reveal that 82.11% of Crosspointe Winterpark’s visits comes from Referral traffic.  The largest portion of those 989 hits per month within Referral traffic came from Design-oriented websites.

Design sites will be covered in an article later as well, but for now, we’ll just say that being teamed up with a good web designer, and being set up on a great Church Content Management System (CMS), can lead to getting linked on design-oriented blogs, and design idea/rating sites, which are able to impact the Referral traffic bottom line.

There are many ways to get inbound referrals and the design route probably not the most effective way to attract high amounts of relevant traffic.  Churches should consider if they receive a lot of this traffic how they want to present the gospel to hundreds if not thousands of visitors who come to view the website design.

In our study, there were a lot of churches who received considerable design-gallery traffic.

Next Article: The Highest Performing Website in New Visitor %.

Our next article will take a closer look at churches who are getting the highest performance in New Visitors vs. Returning Visitors, and what they are doing to acquire and maintain those positions.

]]> http://www.churchwebsiteguide.com/church-websites/new-visits-vs-returning-visits/feed/ 0 http://www.churchwebsiteguide.com/church-websites/setting-up-church-analytics-with-google-analytics-what-not-to-do-1/ http://www.churchwebsiteguide.com/church-websites/setting-up-church-analytics-with-google-analytics-what-not-to-do-1/#comments Wed, 17 Jun 2009 23:33:19 +0000 admin http://churchwebsiteguide.com/?p=329 In This Article:

• Analytics that Look Good (at first), Study Average Visits and Average Unique Visits
• Study Average Time On Site and Average Bounce Rate
• Bounce Rates according to Google, Study Bounce Rate Range
• Give web pages a meaningful name
• SEO naming conventions

Analytics that Look Good (at first), Visits and Unique Visits

For all intents and purposes, the site we’re looking at over to the right seems to be doing pretty well, they have a lot of good traffic.  The study-wide average for Visits per month is 2,745 Visits, and the study-wide average for Absolute Unique Visitors is 1482 Absolute Uniques.

In fact, at over 8400 Visits and over 4000 Uniques, this church is getting 3 times as many Visits, and 2.7 times as many Absolute Unique Visitors per month, a significant accomplishment!

Average Time On Site, Average Bounce Rate, and Bounce Rate Range

This website is also pretty close to the survey-wide mean Average Time On Site of 2.88 minutes, and compared to the the other churches in the study with over 500 members where the average Bounce Rate is 44.38%, this church has a higher than average Bounce Rate of about 54.73%.   While this website is not at the top of the heap, its pretty good considering the size of the website and church membership of 900.  Recall that the lower a Bounce Rate is, the better your website is performing.

Bounce Rates According to Google, Study Bounce Rate Range

It may be a good idea to point that not all Bounce Rates are calculated the same in different analytics engines.  For the most part, Bounces tend to be measured by those who stayed on the website for only five or ten seconds.

However, Bounce Rate, according to Google Analytics (and the way we measure Bounces in our study) is simply the percentage of Visitors who only visit one page, or put another way, the number of Visits in which the user left your site from the landing (entrance) page. Bounce Rates in our study range between 23.81% and 66.12%.

Looks Good on the Outside

Let’s take a look at a church website which gets a good amount of traffic.  We have lots of good analytics data here, this church has data back to May of 2008, so we can go back up to a year from today to track trends and see where they have been improving and, and not improving.

In one month, it:

• Gets nearly 16,000 Unique Pageviews
• Has an Average Time On Site lower than the survey-wide mean Average Time On Site of 2.88 minutes
• Has a decent Bounce Rate of about 58%, which while not stellar, is pretty good considering the size of the website and the church’s membership of 900.

However, there’s just one problem as we look closer at Top Content, below.

Garbled Analytics

When we look to see what content is being most accessed by visitors, we are met with strange page names like:

/cgi/bin/menul.pl?churchid=church1%page  id=1c

and

/cgi-bin/profile  new.pl

If you look at the circled section in the illustration above, next to each URL you will find an icon with a two boxes and an arrow.  What these little links do is pop up the URL’s in a new browser so you can see what that page looks like.

While its possible to find out what each page’s content is by clicking through, it will be a time consuming, laborious, and slightly frustrating process to have to open each page up and analyze each link.  Ideally, a page should have names that make sense so that the reports can be easily analyzed.

If You Can’t Read It, You’re Probably Not Analyzing It

If you have a report that is hard to analyze, you will not want to analyze your results.

The website’s administrator is probably not actively using the Google Analytics to track his website beyond its most basic functions.  Every website owner should know what content is being accessed, and how often.  In the example’s case, the website admin would be wasting too much time trying to follow each link through to do any real content analysis.

Now, in our experience, for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) purposes, page URL’s that were named well perform better on search. In order of SEO nomenclature from most optimal on down, we have:

• /This-Is-My-Most-SEO-Friendly-URL/
• /This_Is_My_Next_Most_SEO_Friendly_URL/
• /This.Is.My.Next.Next.Most.SEO.Friendly.URL/

Create SEO-Friendly Page Names

Give yourself and your analytics team a break, make those reports more usable, and name those individual pages something that makes sense!

Here’s an example of good naming convention:

In the end, creating an SEO-friendly naming convention will not only allow you to more effectively analyze your analytics, it will help search engines crawl terms on your website, and help you climb higher in search rankings.