CSL 020 – Using Google Analytics Effectively for Church Websites

Isabelle Faletti (00:00:00):

Hello. Hello and welcome to ChurchSpring. My name is Isabelle and joining me today is digital marketing specialist and guru and master of all things, Peder Aadahl.

Peder Aadahl (00:00:15):

Hey, everyone!

Isabelle Faletti (00:00:15):

Did I say, did I say your last name correctly this time?

Peder Aadahl (00:00:20):

It’s Ah-dahl, but that’s OK.

Isabelle Faletti (00:00:20):

I’ve been practicing, too. Next time. Next time I’ll get that right. Uwhile we are waiting for people to jump into the live event,uif you’re tuning in live, make sure that you go ahead and introduce yourself. Uso add your church name and location in the comments below here. So,uyeah, just click to add a comment, introduce your name, where you’re from your church, so that we can make sure to say a special welcome. So while we wait for those comments and introductions to come in,uI do want to welcome a few new members that we have to the ChurchSpring family.

Isabelle Faletti (00:01:05):

We, yeah, we, I love when we have new new churches sign up for ChurchSpring because it’s another opportunity that we can help serve churches all over the nation. So welcome In His Steps International from Louisiana. We have a church or a ministry near where I’m from in Colorado. The Ministry of Acts from Falcon, Colorado. Welcome if you’re listening, we’re neighbors here. And then Calvary Church of the Nazarene from West Virginia. So always excited to see new members. If you are new to ChurchSpring itself, and you stumbled across this live stream video. Then our mission here at ChurchSpring is very simple and it’s to help churches build intuitive, affordable, and frustration free websites. That’s what gets us up in the morning and why we have celebratory jigs over here when we can, when we have new signups.

Isabelle Faletti (00:02:02):

So welcome. I don’t see any comments yet for introduction. So if you’re just now tuning in, let me know who you are. Comment below, introduce yourself add your church name and location in the comments below so that I can, Peder and I can say hello to you. We would like to see who’s on the other side of the screen here. We are going to be talking about a lot today as always no surprise there, if you’re a frequent listener/watcher ChurchSpring. So don’t feel like you have to take notes feel free to take notes, but you don’t even take a line-by-line notes. We will have the replay available and show notes up atchurchspring.com/CSL020. So I will upload that later this afternoon. So that will be available with the replay in the show notes again churchspring.com/CSL020.

Isabelle Faletti (00:03:02):

One of the great things about a live event is that it’s live. And so Peder and I are as live as you can get. It’s like we’re sitting across from you having one, not some coffee, cause I just have water. And Peder, you have a Coke bottle with water,

Peder Aadahl (00:03:19):

Bottled water, and honestly, a little, little Coke here,

Isabelle Faletti (00:03:22):

A little, Coke, depending if you need some more, some more energy, we’ll be having the soda, but as we continue the live event, make sure to engage, ask questions. If we say something that just blows your mind and is super helpful, let us know in the comments or the opposite. If we say something and you’re confused and you have questions or you want us to dig into something even more, add that question in the comments so that we can have a conversation that is our goal of this. It’s to have a conversation and we can do a pretty good job of that with a live event like this.

Isabelle Faletti (00:04:05):

So if you miss last week, you may be wondering who is this gentleman on the live, on the live stream? Normally I have Rohn co-founder of ChurchSpring. So last week Peder came on with us. He’s going to be on ChurchSpring, live the next couple of weeks, actually through November. And he is going to be talking about all things, Google ads, Facebook ads, digital marketing. He is a digital marketing strategist strategist. And I like to say guru because that is truly what he is. So real quick, before I dive into more of what we’ll be talking about, I wanted to welcome a few members that we have Ken, always excited. Good to see you seeing our frequent frequent listeners, frequent flyers here. Welcome Tom from New York from Pillars of Faith, Tabernacle and Barry from Edwards Road Baptist Church.

Isabelle Faletti (00:05:12):

Awesome. Welcome. If you are just now tuning in, still drop a comment, introduce yourself so that we can know who’s tuning in. So last week we talked about really a Google Analytics part one. So Peder did an amazing job of walking through how to set up your Google Analytics for your church website. So if you did miss that last episode and you do not yet have a Google Analytics account set up, then after this episode, make sure to go back and listen to that. I’ll pop up the link there that you can watch the replay ChurchSpring.com/csl019. That’s kind of part one how to set up your Google Analytics for your church website so that you can pull super important information reports and your Analytics account to understand what are your website visitors even doing, and what do you do with this information? So if you’re a little confused about what now, how do I use Google Analytics now that I have a set up? What does each report mean? That’s why Peder and I are here today. So we are going to kind of unpack the mystery of Google Analytics reports so that you can keep your website, visitors engaged. Cause that’s really what it’s about. So Peder, thank you so much for coming on a ChurchSpring Live today. I’ll go ahead and share your screen so that we can dive in here.

Peder Aadahl (00:06:51):

All right. Awesome. Yes. Well, thanks everybody. Thanks for having me on I’m again, actually I will be on for a while here still, but I’m excited about that and yeah, Isabelle’s point if you, if you’re not, if you’re unfamiliar with Google Analytics, if you go back to last week’s episode, we did walk through everything and it is very straightforward as far as installing it on, on your website. But today, obviously, we want to walk through a couple of different things come up for specific reports of some things that are gonna help, help you understand a little bit. When you look inside the Google Analytics, what you’re looking at, I will admit I’m in this all- all the time. And even I will admit there’s times where I feel a little overwhelmed. Okay. So don’t, this is a common feeling. There’s a lot of people who set up Google Analytics and then never use it.

Peder Aadahl (00:07:40):

They never log in. Cause it’s just like, I don’t even know what I’m doing here. Right? So we’re going to try to help walk through a couple of things and try to help make some, make things applicable. And as well as we’re actually gonna be looking at actual data here from an actual church website. So this is actually from a client of mind things of that nature that we, that we work with. And so anyway, some of the data here, is it going to be, well, the data is based on that here. So I’m excited to walk through that and yeah, he got, yup. It’s up on the screen here. You can see that. Yeah. All right.

Isabelle Faletti (00:08:12):

I think, real quick before we dive into it I think you said it perfectly, people set up a Google Analytics, Google Analytics account- whoo! Say that five times fast –and then forget about it because it’s overwhelming. When you log in and you see all these numbers and charts and reports and yeah, you can just leave kind of feeling frustrated of what did I get myself into? I don’t get it. I don’t understand. So that’s why we did last week of part one, setting up your Analytics account. And now we’re doing part two of the next steps because we don’t want you to set up your Analytics, Analytics account and forget about it, that that isn’t helping yourself. That’s not helping your church. That’s not helping your visitors, your community. So the goal of this is to really help you leave this live event so that you understand how to confidently log into your Analytics, Analytics account and know what to do so that you, you kind of have a roadmap of all right, I’m in my Analytics account. These are the checkpoints I need to go in my account. So Peder is so good at taking a big concept like this and just breaking it down into very easy, understandable ideas. So Peder, why don’t you go ahead and kind of walk us through Analytics. And first can you share where people can access this if they just set up their Analytics account and they’re not sure how do I get back to that?

Peder Aadahl (00:09:46):

Absolutely. So if we talked about last week, you’re gonna need it. You’re going to need a Google account. Many of you will have a Gmail account, so you’ll log into Gmail. You don’t actually have to do it that way, but it’s going to be the same username and password. And then you’ll go over to Analytics.google.com and then it’ll log you in or you’ll log in using their Gmail, a username and password. So that’s how that will come into play if you’ve already set up your Analytics account previously. So now once you log in– to your point, Isabelle, especially you set it up, kind of not look at it for awhile. You’re going to come in and you’re probably going to be defaulted to a screen like this the Google Analytics homepage. And I’m going to walk through a couple of things on this page, this page, once again, it is meant to be somewhat simplistic, but most people in my log in, they don’t even understand what exactly they’re even looking at to start with.

Peder Aadahl (00:10:42):

And so we’re gonna walk through a couple of things here on this page. There are some things I don’t see, think you have to really look at specifically, but I want also want to walk through some of the terms, cause these things are gonna be very important for you to understand. So just right here at Google Analytics home, just looking at this last seven days view here when Google Analytics says users, think of it as individuals, that’s the best way to say it. Sometimes it’s a unique IP address, internet provider address is what I mean by that. But you can think of this more as like an individual coming to the website. And sessions. This is actually visits. This is another one that’s actually used to be called visits and still they change it to sessions. So if you want to think of it a different way, this view right here would say 363 individuals, or to make it very simplistic devices, IP addresses.

Peder Aadahl (00:11:40):

How do you want to, you want to look at it? I like to think of it as individuals, just to try to make things somewhat simplistic. 363 individuals visited the site 438 times. All right. And then when you see this bounce rate, just to clarify what that means, bounce rate means that you came to the website and then you left. You never went on to another page. So 72% bounce rate in this case for this view right here, and then session duration is 46 seconds. So essentially on average, when people stayed and went to another page, they were on the site for 46 seconds. On average. Now you could have people that are on there for way longer than that. And you’re gonna have people on there for quite a bit less than that, but on average, that’s how that comes into play. So, alright, so that’s that, and hopefully that defined some terms, cause we’re going to come back to some of those, you’re going to see those terms used a lot throughout Google Analytics. And then down here, we’re going to get more into this a little later, but how did you acquire users, traffic channel, think of this as, and I know you’re going to see this again here later too, but these are the sources of traffic that are coming to the website and on this page, when you hover over it, you’ll actually see, and I’ll maybe zoom in here a little bit. Nope. Maybe a little too far there.

Isabelle Faletti (00:13:02):

Yeah. And so when you say sources, that basically means what?

Peder Aadahl (00:13:07):

That means when I’m coming to the website from let’s say Facebook or I’m coming or coming to the website from Google or something of that nature, that sort of example of a sources. And to break this down, what you can see right here is I’ll just walk through this other what other just means is Google is trying to understand it. Doesn’t really exactly know where to put those, that traffic specifically social, this is means anything that’s essentially like a social media platform, like a Facebook, a Twitter, maybe even a LinkedIn and things of that nature. That’s how that would come into play there, organic search. Now, this is another term you’re going to see, you’ll see often within Analytics, that all that means is that somebody went to a search engine like Google, probably probably Google Yahoo, and Bing would be included in that.

Peder Aadahl (00:14:02):

And they searched for something. Maybe they actually searched for your church website name, and that’s how they came to it. That’s what that means. Direct what direct traffic means is that they started to type in, let’s say the name of your church and Google auto-populated the URL. Maybe they came to the website before or Google figures. This is what you’re actually looking for. And so they came to the website without ever coming from somewhere else, like a social media website, or like I said, a Google search and then referral. This actually is when somebody else links to you, links to the website. So maybe a good example of this is if you have a community board website, somewhere in the area, and maybe your church puts things on there, and that links back to your website, that’s a good example of this, where people are clicking on that website and coming over to your website. So hopefully that makes some sense there.

Isabelle Faletti (00:15:02):

Yeah. And, and we’ll dive into this specific report, the source medium, a little in a few more minutes here because there’s even more we can dive into to understand. Okay, well, what does that mean? So if you understand that people were coming from Facebook yeah. What, what do you do with that information? So we’ll, we’ll be diving into that more for anybody who may have specific questions about source medium. If you do, though, if you have any questions, make sure to just add them right now in the comments so that we can make sure to address them.

Peder Aadahl (00:15:35):

Yep, absolutely. All right. Down below here. Once again, you’re gonna see the term users. This just means, think of it as individuals again in this, I would not spend too much time on this at all. I would just say, you can look at it. Pretension just kind of simply means, did they come back later? Like how many of the people came this week actually came back, you know, on week five later or week four later, you know, what type thing this one is probably one that is going to be interesting, especially if you do a live services and you actually embed on your website, are they coming to watch the live during that time? And you can kind of begin to see what times of the day and what days of the week that you’re seeing people come to the website.

Peder Aadahl (00:16:19):

So that’s surprising. I know that this is around the service time on Sunday. Have you seen an increase in traffic to the website then sessions by country? This is actually a good thing to understand sometimes. And I want this as a great example where you’re actually going to see if in this case, there’s actually a fair amount of traffic that’s coming from outside of the U S and sometimes that can mean that you’re, that you’re just having some, some traffic that is coming that could be spam. It actually could be potentially from a mission. Honestly, if you’re doing some things overseas too, there’s always that potential.

Isabelle Faletti (00:16:52):

Yeah. Especially now with the pandemic, people are tuning in to new churches that they may never be able to physically attend.

Peder Aadahl (00:16:59):

Especially if you’re doing podcasts, I’ll just say that much. And you put that out there, do not be surprised that you’re going to have people coming from other countries. And, and probably what specifically is, if they’re going to multiple pages, that means they’re probably came from maybe something else like your podcast. Otherwise there’s some times where maybe you do need to filter some of this date data out. So top devices this is just once again, going through that idea of like, where’s the traffic primarily coming from, this is not going to be surprising to a lot of people, but mobile is definitely the main platform that people are usually coming to a website from across pretty much all industries, even including the church.

Isabelle Faletti (00:17:40):

Yup. Yup.

Peder Aadahl (00:17:43):

Alright. And what pages are, did your, did the users visit? This is good to, and we’ll get more to that later, but that’s just just kind of an overview of this page here.

Isabelle Faletti (00:17:54):

Yeah, that’s good. Yeah. So really, if you’re new to Analytics like Peder mentioned, this is probably the default page.

Peder Aadahl (00:18:33):

I think Isabel’s coming back on here. This is what happens when it’s live every now and then you have some technical difficulties. Just to, just to double check here as we’re alive and things happen. If you just write in the comments here, if you can hear me hear me. Okay. I just want to double check that. Alright. Good. Thanks. Thanks Erica. Thanks Steven. I appreciate it. All right. So while we’re waiting for Isabelle to come on I’ll keep continuing here. Alright, there we go. Isabelle.

Isabelle Faletti (00:19:42):

I’m back! Sorry about that guys – internet just crashed! What do you do?

Peder Aadahl (00:19:42):

Alright. Alright. Well, we’re going to hop over to the audience overview to maybe look at some of the, some of the more some more data here. So when you go outside of the home page here, the next page is probably going to be a big overview page for you literally. And it’s even kind of what it’s called. It’s underneath this audience section here and click overview.

Peder Aadahl (00:20:08):

The reason why I want to bring, bring up this page, because it’s got some of that same terminology here, but what’s more applicable. That was good for you to understand how you can use this is the actual date comparison. You can use this on any of these views, actually down here. Once again, don’t be too overwhelmed, but just understand that when you’re out pretty much in any of these sections here, looking at data, if you go up at the top, right, you can click this drop down, and then you can say compare to the previous period, looks at the century of the previous in this case seven days. And then you can also, if you have, if your Google Analytics data that goes back far enough, you can actually even say previous year compared to the previous year which is sometimes really good to know, especially when maybe going into the holiday seasons for example, this year, and you can also do custom.

Peder Aadahl (00:21:06):

And that just means you can say, all right, instead of looking at the previous seven days, let’s do looking at from September 1st to September 7th, like the first seven days of the previous month and click apply. And then you can see date comparison and see, you know, how traffic is doing in comparison to that time period and whichever you’re comparing it to. So obviously in this case, we can see that we had way more visits. We had many more users, our individuals, we had significant amount of increase in page views. And just to clarify what page views means and you can always kind of hover over it a little bit and they’ll give you some insights. But page views is essentially all the pages on your website. The number of times any page was viewed on your website. That’s what that means. And that will get me get more into that a little later here, but that’s what, that’s what that specifically means. Bounce rate. We talked about that again, average session duration. The time on the website pages per session, the amount of pages visited per visit. That’s what that means. And then the percentage of new sessions just means the number of, if you think of it, the number of visits that were new on the website. So,

Isabelle Faletti (00:22:26):

Yup. Yeah. I love the date comparison. My, my nerd side, which we use as use as a compliment here at ChurchSpring just, yeah, it nerds out over this. I really like to encourage ChurchSpring members if they had their Google Analytics set up on their previous website. So if they had that set up already and then they changed their website to be with ChurchSpring, they have their Analytics set up on their ChurchSpring website. You can do a a date comparison of this time of, let’s say August this year, compared to August last year with your old website to come to compare the difference. Are you having more visitors? Are you having a higher percentage of page views? Is your balance right down basically information that you can see is my website working, are people staying on my website, navigating learning more.

Isabelle Faletti (00:23:30):

So if you, even if you have let’s say a quarterly event or a yearly event, like Peder mentioned with Christmas coming up you could do a comparison of this year. We really pushed and notified everybody about our Christmas event on our Facebook and blog and email newsletter. And we were telling everybody go to our website to learn more about Christmas. How did we do compared to last year? This is, these are the numbers that you can the report that you can pull to really find the answer to that question.

Peder Aadahl (00:24:08):

Yeah. Yeah. I would just even say, just for, I know in 2020 here, a lot of churches had to, you know, go online more specifically things of that nature. This is just a good way to, you can compare online activity compared to the previous year, if you, if you, if your date data goes back that far.

Isabelle Faletti (00:24:28):

Yeah. And if you just now added a Google Analytics to your website, then that’s okay, this is what you will, you will have access to next year next month and upcoming times. So if you’re thinking, Aww, man, I just now added this. I, I can’t go back and look at that historical data. That’s okay. You took the first step to set up Analytics on your website. And this is a reason why you went to, so yeah, you can see it in the year of the pandemic. How many extra visitors you, you got on your website?

Isabelle Faletti (00:25:03):

Before we go into our third report here I just want to do a quick check-in for all of our listeners. I know that like, like we’ve said, Analytics can be a bit overwhelming. So I would love to know how are you doing over there and the land of Facebook live drop a comment and let us know what, how you’re feeling right now about Analytics. Are you still feeling a little confused? Do you feel like there’s hope in navigating Google Analytics? Yeah. Leave a comment right now so that Peder and I can kind of yeah -get a feel for how you’re doing with in, in person discussions like this. We can, you know, we can see your, your head nodding and things like that, but unfortunately with livestream, we don’t have that. So yeah. Drop a comment for anybody who’s listening, let us know where you’re at right now with Analytics, how you’re feeling about it. And again, we will answer questions at the end, Ken, I know Ken Gordon, I know that you had a really good question about different devices. So we may dive into that more. But we’ll make sure to talk about that specifically at the end here, Ken. So make sure to hang on for that. Barry says Analytics are helpful, but thanks for making things clear. Yes. That’s our goal to make things clear. Yep. We don’t want any confusion in this. Thanks, Barry, for sharing.

Peder Aadahl (00:26:35):

All right. Well, with that being said let’s, let’s hop over to kind of the third report we want to take a look at. And we, there was a little bit of a view on that, on the, on the homepage there, but underneath behavior here, this is where you start to begin to see, you know, I mean, literally what it means is what is the activity of the people on, on the website. And the one that most people are going to be very interested in right out the gate is what are the top pages viewed? I’m going to leave my date comparison date comparison on up here on the, on the top. Right. But let me click this all pages. Okay. And you can see then when I leave my date comparison and it’s actually going to showcase to me, it’s going to prioritize my top range here October 1st to seventh, and then my comparison range down below. So in other words, for example, the homepage here slash by the way, just a slash just means the homepage of your way.

Isabelle Faletti (00:27:38):

Good. I’m glad that you clarified that.

Peder Aadahl (00:27:42):

I think to note- that’s what that means. And then you can see that, okay. We had an increase in the 71% of visits to the home page during that time there’s some other pages here, like the sermons page, you guys are probably gonna recognize things like that, a connection. This is where we’re trying to reach out to other people, things of that nature. We saw a 15% increase, and then I’m trying to think if we can show it, here we go, the staff page, okay. The staff page, we actually can see that we had a decrease. So it showcases that as well. Like I said, it prioritizes the, the first data range that you’re trying to look at to begin with before you comparison. But if I just take that off, cause you can just come up here, uncheck that click apply and Analytics is going to refresh.

Peder Aadahl (00:28:31):

And then you can see just in a better clearer view here, the top 10 pages. Now, a little trick for everyone. Down here, you can click this over and you can view the next 10 pages if you want. But for some of you, you might just be like, I just want to see all of it. In one view, you can actually click this show rows here. And this goes for any report in Analytics and you can just click however long, how many, however many pages you want to look at. So I’ll do the 25 here and there we go. I can see the top 25 pages now. Yeah.

Isabelle Faletti (00:29:09):

Oh, so I was just going to say, so it looks like obviously the top visited page is your homepage, which I’m sure is that I’m assuming it was not common. That is extremely common. Yeah. Okay. Yep. Extremely common. And then it looks like for the second page there, is that a special event?

Peder Aadahl (00:29:29):

Yes. So actually this is actually a Monday night childcare. This is actually a ministry opportunity that is promoted to the community that people come there and take advantage of. And it brings people into the church. So yeah, cause we could spend more time with that sometimes, but that’s, that’s what that is. Sermons make sense, going back and listen, listen, you know, listening to previous episodes or previous sermons I should say. Yeah.

Isabelle Faletti (00:29:56):

Right. Yeah. If, if you’re uploading your sermons to your website, which you should be then I would argue that your sermons page should be in the top five most visited pages on your website because you want to be directing traffic. You want to be directing people to go to your sermons page to be listening to your sermons. So that is awesome to see that just highlighted right here in Analytics.

Peder Aadahl (00:30:21):

Yes. I’ll just point out a couple of different things here. We’re just going to quick spend some time on, I just want to make sure you understand the definition of this. You’ll see. Page views. We talked about that essentially. This is all the pages visited over all the sessions, all the visits, I should say during that time unique page views. So you can think of it this way. A unique page view is, is let’s say I came to the homepage and then I went to the sermons page and then I went back to the homepage. A unique page view is just basically stating, you know, I visited, I visited the homepage essentially. There’s only one individual during that visit that visited that page, even though I came back to it multiple times over and over and over again. It’s only gonna register as one underneath unique.

Peder Aadahl (00:31:15):

I think of it as kind of almost like unique sessions are individuals coming to the website? I don’t want to get too, too confusing on that, but essentially you can think of is 29 visits in a way over the 29 visits, there were 33 views on what, on this page. So.

Isabelle Faletti (00:31:36):

Yep, that’s good.

Peder Aadahl (00:31:37):

All right. And then entrances, a good example of that. What that just simply means is like that’s people coming directly. That’s, that’s the page they started on, which isn’t surprising that the homepage would also be the highest on that. So, but let me break that down a little bit more is you can actually go down here to the, on the left hand side, you can see landing pages. This is another report tied into the page visits. It’s actually good to know. And this is basically going through all the pages, the top pages that are people come to to begin with. And for any period of time in this case, of course is the last seven days of the month. But this is where you can see, you know, let’s say for example, six people came directly to the sermons page. 12 people came directly to the connection page. I also understand that that’s because there’s a specific link that gets sent out for new people to on the live stream to come to that page. So we can see that on page 29 childcare. Oh, hopefully that makes some sense there in that capacity. Yeah.

Isabelle Faletti (00:32:40):

Yeah. And along with that we had a good question from Wade and he asks, is there a way to tell how long people listen to the sermons?

Peder Aadahl (00:32:51):

Hmm.

Isabelle Faletti (00:32:54):

So I would say yes and no. If you want to see how long someone is listening to the actual audio or video sermon, that information would be available on your video platform. So if you upload your video to Facebook or to YouTube, and then you’re placing that onto your church website, then your video platform, again, Facebook or YouTube, they actually hold a lot of helpful Analytics information about how long people listen that the average when people are dropping off. So if you’re talking wait, if you’re talking about the specific actual content video media then go to that source, Facebook, Vimeo YouTube to, to dig into that more. But Peder, how, how could people find out specific information about a specific sermons page?

Peder Aadahl (00:33:59):

No, yeah, that’s a, that’s a great question. So when you go to that sermons page let’s say you, you want to take the last sermon that you did that last sermon for the church, going to the website to begin with. I’ll just a good example is you, you click, you go to that page and then you look at that page pages URL up at the, up at the top. And it, you know, I’ll, I’ll just try to give an example here. You can follow with me the overarching view of all the sermons is going to be, for example, the sermons page, but you might have sermons/October 4th or something like that. I can’t remember today was Sunday for example, recently, but it’s sermon/October 4th and then a way that you could do that. And that’s a great question. Let’s go back to all pages for that is you could come up here to this little search area because what it’s doing is it’s going to look at all the different words inside of the URL here. And it’s going to, it’s going to pull that up. So in this case, I’m actually going to do just for example, so you can kind of see how this works. I’m actually just gonna type sermon cause we could see that and you can see you know, well, this one pulls up, for example, the sermon page specifically and then there’s some other tags here and so on and so forth with this website, but, but that’s, that’s what this is all about is you can actually look up specific pages.

Isabelle Faletti (00:35:33):

Yes. You could really see which sermon is the most visited yup. Based on searching sermons. Yep. And it will pull up all of the pages that have that main word.

Peder Aadahl (00:35:48):

Yep, exactly.

Isabelle Faletti (00:35:53):

Wade, does that answer your question? Let us know. If not, we can wrap back at the end here and dig into that a little more,

Peder Aadahl (00:36:03):

But overall that’s just a good thing to note that if you’re ever trying to look at a certain page on your website, you can just come to this all pages section, essentially type the URL that after the slash in this little box here, click search, and you can see if that page is visited during that time or the inter interaction on that page specifically.

Isabelle Faletti (00:36:25):

I love that. Yeah. That’s, that’s easier than I would expect.

Peder Aadahl (00:36:31):

Yes. And maybe just one quick thing if you ever are looking at this and you’re like, okay, cause this is a cumulative view right here. Right. If I just click into, let’s say the sermons page here, it’s actually going to just show me the data for that specifically only that page. And then I can just click back and go back to the main view there. So alright. Yes.

Isabelle Faletti (00:36:57):

Good. Yeah. And Wade said yes, that does answer his question. Okay. Perfect. Good. I’m glad that we’re able to, to answer that question for you, Wade. Okay. So let’s dig into our last report that we recommend for those who are starting out into Google Analytics. I, I love all these reports. I know I keep saying that, but understanding what’s going on your website is so important. And this last report is the source medium. And that again is what we had already talked about on that main homepage overview. So how are people coming to your website? Are they coming on from Facebook, from Google or a search engine or are they coming directly? You can also tell and Peder, we’ll dig into this here. Using the source medium, you can actually track specific marketing or communication campaigns. So for example if you have a Christmas Eve service coming up, that you are including the signup link in your email and your Facebook and Instagram, you have an on everything out there, you maybe even a Facebook ad you are directing traffic to this Christmas Eve service.

Isabelle Faletti (00:38:30):

Well you want to know, is it working? Are we actually getting people to sign up? Which one of our sources, email, Facebook, Instagram, a Google ad, which one did best to have a high number of page visits. So these are all the questions of a communication campaign or marketing campaign. So Peder you’re, you’re the pro here. I’ll let you explain it, but how, so if you can just show us the source medium report here and then walk us through how we can specifically track campaigns using, using this report.

Peder Aadahl (00:39:18):

All right. So we’ll switch screens here a little bit at one point in time, but going back to this data view here, just kinda to showcase where you’re going to end up looking looking at past data for source medium you’re actually gonna go to acquisition. Okay. All traffic and then there it is. Source / medium. Yup. And when I click on that, of course, it’s going to do a similar thing. We’re just going to pull up the top 10 views here of sources of traffic and Facebook, by the way, Facebook, when it comes to source, medium is going to have a lot of different views on it. It means different things. For example, Facebook means something like mobile, mobile, Facebook, or things of that nature. That’s all, that’s what all that means. But you can see the traffic that’s coming over, that’s directing, or excuse me, the sources that are directing traffic here, going back to here, you can see that Google slash organic once again, going back to what term organic means, that means somebody was searching online and that’s how they came to the website.

Peder Aadahl (00:40:25):

That’s what that means. Similar, you can see down here being organic Yahoo, organic, once again, they were searching on those platforms, not until they came here. So that’s what this view is. And this is what you can reference and go back up here and look at certain timeframes to see the data down below, to see how much traffic number sessions means, visits, how many visits came. And then new users actually does mean kind of new individuals that came to the website that were not there before. So that’s another thing we can look at as well. So when we kind of talked about these things already, but to your point is about, it’s one of those things of, okay, I want to do a, maybe like a Facebook ad, something of that nature, and you want to direct traffic to the website to promote something. It could be a ministry, it could be an event, whatever it may be. There’s a page on the website you’re going to push people to, or you just want to push people to the website overall. I mean, there’s a couple of ways you could look at that. He, let me here, let me pull up the different screen here, right?

Isabelle Faletti (00:41:33):

Yeah. And I know so right now Peder will show you what’s called a campaign URL builder. I will link this up in the show notes. So once again, you don’t have to be taking all of these notes. So don’t panic if you’re, you’re not quite tracking exactly everything. So I’ll, I’ll include this in the show notes. The, the URL will be churched spring.com/csl020. So Peder, I’ll share your screen here.

Peder Aadahl (00:42:06):

All right. So essentially when we’re looking at Analytics and this actually has comes from the Analytics from last week you can see my church website there’s not going to be a ton of traffic to this cause this is kind of the test website we do use here at ChurchSpring. But we’ll go back to this source medium page. Yeah.

Isabelle Faletti (00:42:31):

People aren’t finding your, your demo test website, Peder, what’s going on.

Peder Aadahl (00:42:37):

But we’ll take a look here at the overview the real time overview. Cause you’re going to see how this comes into play here in a second, but let’s go back to building out a URL or making sure that you can track this track traffic from another source specifically that you’re maybe advertising on or let’s even say you put, I go back to that idea that you put this on a community forum or something of that nature. You want to see what’s the traffic coming from the community community website. There, there is some things that maybe you can just say, okay, what’s the name of that website? And maybe track it overall that way. But many times you might want to get a little more specific to make sure that that traffic that’s coming over is tagged appropriately and you can see it within Analytics more clearly.

Peder Aadahl (00:43:27):

So that’s what building out as a tracking URL. That’s why I should say, that’s why we want to build a tracking URL. Now, what you can do is you can go into Google here and you can search for Google UTM builder. This, this UTM is just essentially the pieces within the URL that help with help with tracking. So you can just go to Google and search for Google UTM builder. And we’ll walk through this here. I’m going to click on this and I’m using the Google Analytics, actual dev site for building this out. And you can see down here and we’ll walk through this, the website URL. So in my case, I’m going to load up my ChurchSpring website, right? And then you’re going to see there’s some fields here with asterisks that are specific that you do need to put in there in some capacity. So campaign source. So for this example, I am going to use the fact that maybe we are running a Facebook ad. Oh, I know we’ll be talking about that in future future ChurchSpring Lives here, but I’m going to type in facebook.com. Okay.

Peder Aadahl (00:44:43):

And then under medium, I’m going to type I like to label advertising on Facebook as social-ad, or you could do it many different ways. Let’s say you had, you can see here, there’s email there’s CPC. That just means cost per click there’s banner. So if you ever had, like I said, going back to the idea, maybe there’s a another website out there that you put a little picture on of maybe an upcoming event. This is, that’s a good example where you would probably label this medium as a banner and then campaign name let’s let’s say this let’s say we call it Christmas Eve Christmas Eve service. All right. So this is the name of the campaign. Oop. Wow. I really what’s your, we got it right there. Okay. Christmas Eve service. I didn’t spell that. Right. Didn’t I, yeah,

Isabelle Faletti (00:45:54):

I’m a little far out. So it looks good from here.

Peder Aadahl (00:45:58):

Zoom in a little closer. So down here at the bottom is it’s dynamically updating things. As you can see down here as I type and what you’re going to end up doing is you’re going to copy this URL and this goes back. So, and you want to test it to make sure that this is going to come over correctly, but essentially once you verify this is correct, this is the URL that you give, maybe the third party website or this is the URL you utilize inside of an, of an ad campaign, like on Facebook or something of that nature, or quite frankly, maybe even just a Facebook post, if you really want it to even get more specific that way too. So I’m going to copy this URL. And once again, I’m trying to direct people over to my website my ChurchSpring website. So I’m going to paste this in the browser here.

Peder Aadahl (00:46:51):

All right. And they’re my, they’re my website loads for ChurchSpring. And then hopefully there we go. We got, we got kind of, there’s my little piece of traffic. Okay. Fired it. And hopefully, hopefully this is gonna come over appropriately. We’ll find out here everything is live. So you never know, but you can see my source was facebook.com. My medium was social ad. And I’m tracking that appropriately. So anybody who clicks on that link, let’s say from a Facebook ad in this case would be tracked appropriately. And I could see the amount of traffic that came to the website. So, yeah.

Isabelle Faletti (00:47:36):

Yeah. So that, that could be a good way to track email newsletter links to see how many people came directly from your email newsletter. And again, what did they do once they clicked on that email newsletter? So I know that for many of our listeners, this idea of a Google UTM builder or link tracking, it can be completely new to you. So if you’re sitting over there kind of still scratching her head thinking I don’t quite get it, or I still have some questions. Well, first off, ask us, so added comment right now with your question. And it’s okay if you’re still feeling a bit I’m just new to this because Google Analytics itself, it’s a lot of repetition. So logging back into Google Analytics every day, every week to really get comfortable with Analytics and with the next steps that you can take to truly track your website, your communication, your marketing pieces, such as this. So Peder, you did a fabulous job of walking through the UTM builder. And again, this will, we have a rev replay. So go back and listen to this as that can sometimes be a part of that, that repetition piece.

Peder Aadahl (00:49:11):

Absolutely,

Isabelle Faletti (00:49:12):

Yeah. I would love to take a few questions that we have. I know that we have a few questions. Can, it looks like you added a few. So if anybody else has questions, definitely ask, ask them right now, put them in the comments. Peder, again, he is the Google Analytics just pro on this. And if you don’t know how to ask a question, I’m also really good at deciphering. So just put it on in there and we can answer I will stop the screen share here so they can see your faces more. There we go. So can ask a really good question about what is the difference between the M dot Facebook and L dot Facebook?

Peder Aadahl (00:49:58):

Yeah. Ken that, that, that is a good question. What I would tell you is you need to think of it. That is, it is still Facebook just overall. Okay. when M dot Facebook, L dot Facebook a good example for M dot Facebook a good example that would be like mobile mobile version of Facebook. So I know this is going to sound strange cause we all go to facebook.com. That’s exactly what we experience. We use the app, different things of that nature, but the thing is that there are multiple platforms that Facebook is on. And that sometimes that will cause the these different sources to come in. So, you know, for example, facebook.com will that make sense to me? And then all of a sudden you see M dot Facebook, well, how did, how did that happen? You know, or, or L dot Facebook, just think of it as these are different platforms, it’s still Facebook. And that’s, what’s driving the traffic over. Yup. That’s a great question though.

Isabelle Faletti (00:51:00):

Yeah. And was that on the behavior report?

Peder Aadahl (00:51:06):

That would be on the source medium, .

Isabelle Faletti (00:51:10):

Right. Okay. Yep. Yeah. When you’re looking at where people are coming from, which, which platform they’re coming from. Yes. Yeah. Okay, great. And then he had another really good question of does Analytics show different device connections, so such as Android, et cetera, et cetera.

Peder Aadahl (00:51:26):

Yes. and maybe why don’t so yeah,

Isabelle Faletti (00:51:31):

I can share your screen here again, and then you can pull that up.

Peder Aadahl (00:51:36):

Let me make sure I get the right view here again. Okay. I think this is the right view. Okay. So if you want to see different devices or, you know, kind of dig, dig more into yeah. The devices people are using you can go down and do some very specific things kind of this area here technology, browser, and operating system

Isabelle Faletti (00:52:05):

Fun.

Peder Aadahl (00:52:08):

See, okay. Oh, what do you know, Chrome and Android web, you are the top two views here, Safari that’s that’s that’s the web that’s Apple’s browser Safari in app. So that means Safari load inside it inside of the app. Anyways, there’s different things or even drove some traffic here, you know? I’m pretty, I have a pretty good idea that’s because is that, you know, but that’s think of it as a some of these platforms for live streaming that are out there, like Boxcast or something like that. Playstation four actually has apps for those and things of that nature. And you can do things that way. All right. Otherwise the one that is probably going to be more specific to your question can, is these two right here, this goes back to the idea of mobile desktop tablet the different, the amount of visits that came from those sources. And then if I click on devices, this is actually going to get even more specific of, okay. The iPhone, the pixel all these different things that would be driving traffic to the site. Yeah. And broken that down. A good question that some people may run into, is -this not set.

Peder Aadahl (00:53:36):

Think of it. Think of it as basically Google saying, I don’t know,

Isabelle Faletti (00:53:40):

Google doesn’t know something, what

Peder Aadahl (00:53:43):

Yes, it doesn’t know everything- as much, as we’d like to think it is all knowing. It’s not God, we know that much. So indifferent reports that are going to be out there, you’re going to come across this is not set. And basically that just means there wasn’t enough data to know what, what that was or things of that nature. It was blocked in some capacity, whatever it may be. That’s what that comes into play. Yeah.

Isabelle Faletti (00:54:09):

And one of the amazing things that I love about Analytics is, I mean, the page that you’re on right now, it just shows the different devices. So mobile and desktop, you can see that it is primarily mobile, which is mobile is your phone. So it’s a smart smartphone typically, right? Yeah. That’s what it means. And desktop, those are the top two sources that people are getting to your website. And that is why it’s so important that your website is what we call it’s optimized. So it looks good. It automatically looks good on every device that someone is visiting, whether it’s a tablet, you can see their desktop. So a computer or a laptop, or a smartphone, people are coming to your website on all kinds of different devices. As, I mean, we saw right there on different Samsung phones on different types of tablets.

Isabelle Faletti (00:55:08):

And so that’s why, yeah, it’s just, it’s super important that your website is automatically optimized. So it’ll change image, sizes, tech sizes to fit with them, whatever screen that viewer is, viewing your website on. So yeah. And Analytics just highlights that, that need perfectly, I think. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we have time for a last question here. So if anybody is still listening and still have a question and you’ve been shy, go ahead and put in your comment. As, as a question otherwise you can always contact us with any Analytics questions that you have. Peder, this is, this is what he does. He helps churches understand Analytics, understand Facebook. He uses Facebook ads and Google, Google ads to drive traffic, to drive guests to churches. And he does an amazing job at that. So if you are interested in reaching out to Peder to see how he can work with your church, one-on-one go ahead and check out his website. He’s actually very kindly put together three different packages for ChurchSpring members with a crazy good discount and deal. So go ahead and check that out at digitaloutreach.church/CS and again, I will include his contact information in our show notes. So make sure to, to be looking for that. “Can You say hooray for ChurchSpring?” Thanks, Ken. We love you.

Isabelle Faletti (00:56:55):

Yes. this is the time that we love to have some commitments. It’s super important that you are listening to this live event. You understand a bit more how to use Google Analytics. But to be honest, it doesn’t mean anything. If you’re not putting this into practice you have to be committed. How can we get 1% better as we like to say here at ChurchSpring? I think we see that pretty much every single live event. We will probably continue to say that during every single ChurchSpring. So what is one thing that you can do with Google Analytics? So what is one, just one report that you can commit to, to going into your Analytics, Analytics account and looking into it and the next seven days until the next ChurchSpring Live? So I would love for some of you brave souls to leave a comment in the comment section and let us know what is just one report that we covered. So home, audience, overview, behavior, and the source. So what are one of those reports that you are committing to over the next seven days that you will go in and just browse around, get comfortable, click you can’t it’s, it’s pretty hard to mess anything up. I want to see if you can…

Peder Aadahl (00:58:22):

I was just going to say that –click around, honestly, just look at stuff, play with it because the data’s already in there. It’s not like you’re going to go in there and delete it. As a matter of fact, we haven’t even shown you how you can delete it. That’s what difficult it is. Like it’s even, I’m not even exactly sure how you can go in and really delete all the dates. So I know it’s possible, but, but needless to say, it’s yeah, go around and, and, and, and just play with the data literally and look at it and you can use that comparison, especially for,

Isabelle Faletti (00:58:56):

Right. Yeah. And if you have questions, when you’re looking in, pull up another tab, google.com and literally search, what does this term that you’re, you have questions about? What does this mean in Google Analytics and Google wants you to use their platform, so they will help you. They have a ton of helpful resources, or again, reach out to Peder. He’s, he’s a master at this and he can kind of debunk any, any confusion that you may have. So yeah, so I see Tom, awesome. Love this. You’re committing to looking at your behavior report. Yes, congrats. Next week, Tom, I will love to hear on ChurchSpring Live. I would love to hear how that went and you can drop a comment. So thank you, Tom, for committing to that for sharing. If you are not yet a ChurchSpring member, and so you, you came here and you kind of like what you see.

Isabelle Faletti (00:59:55):

I would love to invite you to a demo webinar. Our co-founders, Mike and Ron, they walk through the ChurchSpring platform and just give you a really cool behind-the-scenesview of what ChurchSpring is, how you can easily set up your website. So if you have any questions about ChurchSpring, make sure to go attend that, that webinar it is free. So we are all about the free things here. So I go ahead, sign up churchspring.Com/Demo. or maybe you’re thinking I don’t need a demo. I’ve I’ve already done my research. I just want to try it out myself. You can also sign up for a free seven day trial. It’s that ChurchSpring.com/trial free trial, no cost. You can cancel any time you have full access to what your ChurchSpring website would be full access to the support team.

Isabelle Faletti (01:00:56):

Again, seven days free trial, no commitment there. So go ahead, try that out. Churchspring.Com/Trial. and if you have questions again about ChurchSpring, about Google Analytics, make sure to reach out. We will have our show notes and replay at churchspring.com/CSL020. So go ahead and, and yeah, look, look at all that. I’ll have some, some fun action items and the reporting show notes that we talked about today and at that link. So next week, we are going to be shifting from Google Analytics to one of my favorite topics.

Isabelle Faletti (01:01:42):

I’m such a millennial, of course I would love a social media platform. Mmm. Next Thursday at 10:00 AM, central October 15th. That is a Thursday. We are going to really dive into how churches can use Facebook ads. So if you’ve always kind of wondered, can churches use Facebook ads? What does that even look like? How, how do I start into this new realm? You definitely make sure to attend this event, Peder, again, he will be our co-pilot here digging into Facebook ads. So we were actually going to share the top four things that you need to know about Facebook advertising to really give you the confidence and knowledge to use Facebook, to grow your church. I mean I was doing some research yesterday and it said 80% of Americans are on Facebook. So your community they’re using Facebook. And especially right now with our current situation with the pandemic, people are on line.

Isabelle Faletti (01:02:54):

And this is an amazing opportunity that you can reach your community in a, in a special kind of way. So next Thursday, October 15th at 10:00 AM, make sure to tune into ChurchSpring Live episode 21. Peder myself will be here sharing about, about Facebook ads. So if you have questions about that already, that excites you- Awesome. Can’t wait. And yeah, make sure to put it on your calendar so that we can help guide you in the next kind of realm of our digital advertising marketing series that we have going on here. So thank you so much for everybody for tuning in today. This was a blast. I absolutely love hanging out with everybody every Thursday. Peder, thank you for coming along again. Second weekend. You’re going to be a regular here at ChurchSpring Live. I can already tell. All right. Thank you everybody for attending. God bless. And we’ll see you next week.

Peder Aadahl (01:03:57):

See ya!