Google Analytics is a great, and free, tool for any Christian ministry blog and/or website. With it, you can see:
Having all of this information can help accelerate Christian ministries by increasing their effectiveness as an online resource. For example, knowing which articles from your ministry blog are attracting the most traffic can help you tailor the content of your website to your audience.
So here is one way to get Google Analytics up and running on your your ministry’s self hosted WordPress blog. For this tutorial, I’m assuming that you’re using WordPress version 2.9.
- Use this link to get a Google Analytics account – Google.com/analytics. You can use your Gmail user name and password to log into Analytics if you’ve already got an account set up. Otherwise, you’ll have to create a new Google account.
- Follow Google’s instructions for adding a website profile to your new account. Google allows you to create several website profiles so that you can track multiple websites with a single analytics account.
- Take note of the Account ID for your newly created website profile. It should look something like this: UA-123456-7. You’ll need this unique account ID later.
- Install and activate the Ultimate Google Analytics plugin. If you don’t know how to install a plugin, here’s a tutorial to help you out – WordPress Plugins
- From the Settings menu in your WordPress Dashboard menu, select Ultimate GA
- In the Ultimate GA settings menu, Enter the Google Analytics Account ID for your ministry blog from step 3, and then select Update Options
That’s it. It takes about a day for Google to start tracking your site once everything has been set up. But after that, just log back into your Google Analytics account to view all of the statistics for your site.
What are some ways that analytics have helped your church or ministry site?
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