Church with Highest % of New Visitors to Returning Visitors.

In This Article:

• 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.