Share Your Church

We’re going to spend the next few weeks looking at google products that can help you share your church better. I know, I know Google is one of those companies that you either love or hate, and I’ll be honest with you. I love them. There’s lots of other products, companies, and services out there that may do a better job than google at certain tasks, but over all Google does a wonderful job at bringing it all together. That being said I would like to take a look at a less popular google service called google analytics.

I use google analytics on every site that I make, design, or consult on. This tool is amazing. Here’s what it gives you for free

• visitor/hit/page count
• unique visitor count (based on browser/IP)
• browser info for all visitors
• location of all visitors
• keywords which brought visitors to site
• avg time spent on each page

Did I mention that all of this was FREE? If you’ve read any of my other articles you know how I feel about free. Google really has put together a wonderful tool in their analytics service. Does this mean that google has access to your site? Yes, not like the google crawler wasn’t all over your site before or anything. Google also makes it very easy to implement analytics. Simply sign up for their service and copy a small piece of code into your .html or .php and voila you’re done. So, now for the big question. How does this help you Share Your Church? The information that you can gather from this tool is indispensable. Do you need multi-language support on your site? What is bringing people to your site? Maybe you need to highlight that information. Maybe add more info to the home page, or maybe just make simpler navigation. I’ve made numerous modifications to sites simply based on the information found in google analytics. Is analytics the best tool out there? Probably not, but you’d be hard pressed to find one simpler.