Google analytics was launched several months ago, but after some experienced teething problems I avoided it, but now however, there are several wordpress plugins which can be used to utilise the google analytics code
The analytics program from google is free (along with their other webmaster tools) and it allows very detailed analysis of the traffic on your website.
For churches, it makes it easy to see what pages visitors look at first and at what point they leave the website. This could be useful in re-designing pages to be more visitor friendly and avoid pages way visitors get stuck and give up.
What surprised me, was the level of detail that the reports contain, placing visitors to towns, not just countries. If you have not tried it, it is worth looking into.
Note: It is important to use a plugin for your wordpress installation, rather than just copying your code, as the plugins also incorporate the javascript that is needed in outgoing links to determine exit pages. If you just copy the javascript code into the wordpress header or footer, you will not benefit from this. The plugins automatically modify external links to improve the accuracy of the statistics gathered.
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15 February 2007 at 7:15 pm
Steve
Any idea how much page-load time is added on average by using google analytics? I’ve noticed several churches using it and their pages always seem slow to load.
16 February 2007 at 8:32 am
David
That is a good question Steve, thanks.
For any website, it would be a pain to incorporate Google analytics because of the extra coding involved.
Realistically that means, for a small church there needs to be an automated way of incorporating it. That is why a plugin works so well. But to use a plugin you need a content management system like wordpress.
Perhaps it is because the churches use a CMS system that they are slow, not because of google analytics?
Can you give any examples?
6 May 2007 at 6:28 am
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