Monitoring Your Church Online

May 5, 2009 by

Remember a long, long time ago, when you were first thinking about church marketing? You had that argument with someone about whether stats mattered and whether churches should even keep track of the numbers. What do numbers really matter? It’s not about that anyways.

Well, unless your church is the Russian Orthodox Church, you probably ended up keeping some sort of statistics. You know how many people are at a service, Sunday school, etc.

So why don’t churches seem to care about the Internet? Too many times, we don’t notice when people share experiences about our churches online, and we don’t know how well we’re doing in using the Internet to reach out. But it’s not such a hard task.

Here are four quick and dirty ways to keep up with your church online:

  • Keep up with your web stats. Perhaps your server provides this or maybe you need to install a tool like Google Analytics. But set some goals and see how you’re meeting them. If you aren’t, rethink what you can do to meet those goals.
  • See if people are chatting on Twitter. Check out search.twitter.com and enter “Your Church’s Name.” See if people are mentioning you and what they’re saying.
  • Search blogs. Google’s Blog Search or Technorati are good tools here.
  • Get your Google on. You probably can’t hire someone to optimize your site for search engines, but it’s vastly-documented online. If you aren’t getting high up in search results, look it up online. Providing great content that stays up-to-date will pay great dividends.
Post By:

Joshua Cody


Josh Cody served as our associate editor for several years before moving on to bigger things. Like Texas. These days he lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, and you can find him online or on Twitter when he's not wrestling code.
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2 Responses to “Monitoring Your Church Online”

  • Google news alerts may seem outdated now with search.twitter, but it provides me an email account of what’s being said. still a good tool for non-Tweeters.
    http://www.google.com/alerts


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  • Church Web Site Designs
    December 11, 2009

    The point of using a website is to reach as many people as you can. We like to say it is not about the number. Remember He left the 99 to find the one sheep. We forget that He had every one of them counted! How do you know if one goes missing if you don’t know how many you reach?


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