Mashable did a great post highlighting 27 features of Google Analytics. If you aren’t already using some sort of analytic tool, Google Analytics is great because it’s not only free, but it’s also easy to use.
With it, you can measure the traffic going to your ministry blog or website, and see how people are spending their time there. That information is incredibly valuable for helping you customize your site to be more useful for your audience. For example, you can tailor your blog posts around topics people you’re ministering to connect with, or know which features on your site are actually being used. Ultimately, seeing how people are using your ministry site will help you get the most return on the time and resources you invest into your site.
Here are a few of the features that I find the most helpful:
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Site Overlay
With the site overlay, you’ll actually see how many visitors are clicking on the various parts of your ministry website. This can a really easy way to understand all of the analytics info. For example, you might see that the features getting the most attention on your website are towards the top, while objects at the bottom of the page are being ignored. With this information in hand, if there’s something you really want to call attention, you can try placing it at the top of your site.
On one college ministry website we were working on, the site overlay showed us that nobody was using the links menu in the sidebar of the front page. Since that link menu was taking up valuable space on the front page, we got rid of it and replaced it with something people actually were clicking on.
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Bounce Rate
The bounce rate measures how many people are landing on a particular page within your ministry website, and then leave from that same page without ever clicking through to another section of your website. What a high bounce rate means for you is that people are landing on a particular section of your site, but they aren’t sticking around to see what else your site has to offer.
If one of your pages has a high bounce rate, you might want to adjust it to get people to explore the rest of your site. Similarly, if a page has a high bounce rate and a low landing rate, it might not hurt to stop investing time into that page, or possibly axing it.
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Compare Date Ranges
Google Analytics lets you easily compare data from two different date ranges. This can be really helpful to your ministry by allowing you to measure the effectiveness of different marketing campaigns and outreaches your ministry does. You’ll be able to easily see which ones worked and which ones didn’t based on the web traffic they generated within certain windows of time.
Be sure to check out our tutorial if you need help – Installing Google Analytics on your ministry blog.
What are some ways you’re using Google Analytics?
Related Article: How Google Keyword Tool Makes Your Ministry Website Findable
Photo courtesy of aussiegall CC BY 2.0
