In a comment on my post below ("Dean Peters on Search Engine Optimization For Churches,” a post which is actually a trackback to a post on Dean’s site), Dean Peters referred to an aspect of church website design which I believe is very important, but which I suspect many church web teams do not employ on a regular basis:

.... my metrics (yeah, I got numbers) show one is better off aiming at people new to town or are looking for a switch or are rekindling a once apostate state with queries that include “denomination/brand + church + location” ... e.g. “baptist church rockville maryland”.

Metrics! For those who don’t know what Dean means, he’s talking about looking at website visitor statistics - unique visits, page views, hits (in decreasing order of importance), etc., etc. But Dean obviously takes his analysis to a deeper level than just looking at the basic stats and thinking, “Wow! Our website had 1,000 unique visits last month. That’s really great!”

Dean obviously knows that website statistics at that simple level can be: 1) meaningless; 2) deceiving; and/or 3) not actionable. How do I know Dean knows that? Because he appears to be looking at the stats in relation to different page titles and to how searchers respond to those page titles when they appear in search engine listings. Kudos to Dean!

Reading Dean’s comment made me ask myself how deeply we look at our website statistics. For example, in my day job (as an internet strategist), I am nowhere near as concerned with how many people visit a website as a result of a particular search engine listing or advertisement as I am with how many dollars people spend as a result of finding the website in a search engine.

In the business world (at least in the segment I am in), profit is king when it comes to search engine listings (we do most of our testing based on pay-per-click advertisements which is a bit easier to get a handle on than organic / natural listings, although monitoring the effectiveness of organic listings is certainly not impossible). We want to know how much profit we have made (from both web and phone orders) as a result of a particular headline in a paid advertisement, for example. We may test several headlines to see which headline brings in the most profit. We perform the same sort of testing with regard to ad text, landing pages, offers, etc.

From time to time over the past several months, I’ve let my mind wander a bit to thinking of how a church might perform similar testing. Hopefully, this won’t sound too crass. I’m wondering if it makes sense for a church to monitor how people who have recently come to Christ first found out about the church.

Actually, I’m a bit double-minded on this issue. I know that there are churches which ask this sort of question ("How did you hear about us?") on visitor cards, attendance registers, etc. While that perhaps makes for easy tabulation of statistics, I think it also reduces the newborn brother or sister in Christ to a statistic, which really rubs me the wrong way.

I guess I’m trying to think of a way to get at least some anecdotal reports of how effective a church’s web promotion might be in terms of attracting / intriguing people who eventually come to Christ (obviously, through other means - I wouldn’t expect someone to do a search on Google, find a church’s listing, and come to Christ without visiting the church’s website, meeting people within the church, etc., etc.).

Sometimes I long to find a church which would be willing to take a leap of faith, develop a website exclusively targeted at seekers, and then be willing to aggressively monitor the effectiveness of that website. Not only through website statistics which are honed down to the level of search engine listings (both organic and paid), banner ads, email blasts, newspaper advertisements, etc., etc., but also through frank conversations with those who have come to Christ. Sitting down with every new believer and asking them if they had seen the church’s website prior to visiting, and then for those who did see the church’s website, how did they find the website, were they looking for a church at the time, what was their feeling about Christianity in general, what intrigued them about the website, had they heard of the church prior to seeing the website, did they visit the church as a result of seeing the website, who they met when they visited the church, how they eventually came to Christ, etc., etc.

Obviously, anecdotal data such as this is not easily quantified, and the results might be vague in many cases, but I still believe the exercise would be helpful, even on an ongoing basis.

Thoughts? I know I’m rambling a bit here, but hopefully, it will spark further thought and discussion.