Tag Archive - analytics

Lesson from the Deputy PM – be careful how you interpret website data

April 15, 2010 in for Churches

(This post was originally published at Sydney Anglicans)

Julia Gillard (Australian Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister) has been quoting the number of visits the My School website and using these visits as the basis of some determined policy decisions. On ABC1′s Insiders on Sunday, she said:

“If we look at the My School website, Barrie, the current statistics are we’ve had around 2.7 million visits. We’ve had 140 million pages of the My School website looked at.”

Ms Gillard then makes the following conclusion:

“Parents have literally voted with their fingertips in extraordinary numbers because they want this information.”

The Deputy Prime Minister has looked at the statistics (2.7 million visits sounds like a lot), and made some conclusions about what Australian parents want. Statistics should be able to help us come to educated conclusions. However, statistics can be interpreted in many different ways, and website statistics need to be considered in context. For example, the following should be considered when looking at the raw data.

Of the 2.7 million visits to the site:

  • how many visits were by Australians?
  • how many visits were by parents?
  • how many of the visits were by the media, or the website developers, or the usability testers, or Education Department officials?
  • how many of the visits were unique (i.e. was it one person visiting the site 2.7 million times?! Obviously not, but what are the actual proportions?)
  • how many of the page views were unique? (i.e. how many different people viewed the 140 million pages?)

This post isn’t political commentary – it’s drawing up some lessons for churches and Christian ministries. And so the lessons here for our websites are simple:

  1. consider statistics in context – raw data means very little on its own.
  2. beware of making conclusions based off one or two website metrics.
  3. set-up filters (to prevent staff traffic from being included in the statistics and muddying the waters).

To learn more about the differences between page views, visits and visitors, check out this 4 minute tutorial.

Resources to learn how to use Google Analytics

April 13, 2010 in for Churches

As far as website analytics goes, Google Analytics is advanced. It’s free, which is great, but just because it’s free doesn’t mean it’s straightforward to use.

When I chat to people about the analytics they are collecting on their website, it’s not uncommon to hear “We’ve got Google Analytics installed, but we don’t really look at it”. Not surprisingly, if you don’t take the time to learn Google Analytics (or any other analytics program you’ve got running on your website), you won’t be able to make the most of it.

If you’re after a less complicated solution, for my money (slightly more than the cost of Google Analytics), Clicky is the winner. It’s simple, easy to use and cheap (but not free). I’ve written about its benefits previously.

However, Google Analytics is the industry standard. ‘27 features that make Google Analytics best of breed‘ might be three years old, but it still applies and then some, with even more features added since.

Here are some resources to learn more about Google Analytics so it can be more than just code you’ve got running in the background of your site!

My first recommendation is to go to ‘Conversion University’ and take lessons in Google Analytics IQ. These short tutorials provide a beginners overview to Google Analytics, what it is, what it does, and how you can set it up. If you’re brave, you can then do the test!

I also recommend checking out the following:

Is your church or ministry using Google Analytics on its website? Do you feel like you are making the most of it?

Tools for ministry: Clicky

March 2, 2010 in for Churches

Here’s some questions for you:

  • how many visitors does your church website receive?
  • is this number increasing or declining?
  • what are the most popular pages on your site?
  • how long do people spend on your site?
  • which page are people most likely to leave your site from?
  • how many people are viewing your site from their mobile phone?
  • what do people search for to find their way to your site?
  • what do people search for when they arrive at your site?

These questions are answered by using an analytics application, and analysing this data assists to continually improve your website to ensure it is useful to those who visit it.

I’ve used a couple of different analytics applications, namely:

There’s a limit to the number of analytics programs you can use because the more you use, the slower your site will be. So I’ve limited my analytics to two applications:

  1. Google Analytics, and
  2. Clicky

Google Analytics is the industry-standard and a no-brainer. However, there’s so much data available and so many ways to view it, it can be a little bit overwhelming. This is where Clicky enters the scene, and provides not only an application that is very easy to use, but one with its own secret weapon.

Clicky’s Interface

First off, the interface. Here’s what the dashboard looks like (click to enlarge):

The data Clicky provides is comprehensive – traffic sources, web browsers, operating systems, countries, cities, searches, downloads, clicks – if you can track it, Click reports on it!

It’s also very easy to view your visitor data on your mobile device (if that’s the kind of thing you like to check out while you’re on the move!):

Clicky’s Secret Weapon

However, here’s the main reason I use Clicky. Clicky has a feature that not even Google Analytics provides. Real-time data. The data that you view in Clicky is real-time – you don’t just see what happened yesterday or three months ago, but you can see what’s happening on your site now. How many people are on your site, what countries they are from, who referred them, what they are looking at. This is known as ‘Spy’ , and it’s a really useful tool. You can:

How Much?

Clicky provides a free version, but the Spy function isn’t included. I use the ‘Blogger’ plan at US$4.99 per month – it’s not free, but it’s close enough! I use this for 98% of my analytics activities, and occasionally pop back into Google Analytics if I’m after some super-complex data (which isn’t very often!).

I highly recommend it.

And if you decide to use it for your church website, can I ask a favour? Click on this link to Clicky (http://getclicky.com/59007) – or any other link that I’ve included in this post. Why? If you click on one of those links I’ll receive a small proportion of your payment for referring you. It’s not much, but if you were going to sign-up anyway this will help me keep Communicate Jesus running. Thanks.