Setting Up Church Analytics with Google Analytics- What Not To Do #1

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.