Getting a High New Visitor % to your Church Website (Part 1)

In This Article:

• 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.