Grace and Truth and Technology » website tracking

Goodbye MyChurchEvents; Hello Google Calendar

Dave Stone — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:20:17 +0000

We’ve used MyChurchEvents for a few years now as our (Bethel’s) online calendar solution. They offer a decent service…minimal downtime, easy enough to train volunteers on how to use. However, they have a few strikes against them:

No ability to track usage (I’ve asked multiple times)
Extremely limited access to calendar data in usable format (e.g., no APIs)
Layout is cluttered
It’s very much a web 1.0 app
It’s slow (relative to Google)
They still charge $60/year

By my count, that’s six strkes against them…that’s enough for two outs. Here’s the out I found…

I’ve been looking for an alternate online calendar solution for over a year now and just recently began testing Google Calendar. We’re planning to move it into production this Fall, but you can take a sneak peak at what it may look like now if you’re interested.

#10 Ranking on Google

Dave Stone — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:52:45 +0000

Search for “Dave Stone” on Google and this blog is the 10th listing…at least it is when searched from my PC. I believe Goole factors in some geographical data, so your mileage may vary if you search for Dave Stone.

Sermon download rate skyrockets

Dave Stone — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:37:33 +0000

So, it took 1 year to reach the 10,000 sermon download mark. Just a little over one week into our second year of tracking, we’re over 11,000 downloads. If we continue at this rate we’ll be over 60,000 downloads in a year. I don’t think we’ll continue at this rate.

Do people really use sermon podcasts?

Dave Stone — Mon, 19 May 2008 17:32:17 +0000

Sometime late Saturday night or early Sunday morning, we reached 10,000 sermon downloads in the last year (since I began tracking usage with RadioTail Ripple). That averages out to about 29 per day, or 1 per hour…that’s a bit crazy to think about. What’s even more crazy is that yesterday was our peak traffic day with 497 downloads.

Are people making use of internet audio? I’d say so. I would like to know how people are listening to it…on their computer? ipod? other?

Google’s ‘Analytics’ website tracking tool

Dave Stone — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 01:10:34 +0000

I just installed Google’s Analytics tracking tool (formerly known as Urchin) on churchitadmin.com. I’ve been using it for about a month on bethel-church.org and I’ve been pleased with the reporting capabilities. I’ll be more excited about a year from now when I can do some more comparisons over time.

For now, though, perhaps the most helpful information gleaned involves the “bounce” percentages. Google defines a bounce as a visitor who visits one page on the site and then exits. Bethel’s home page has a fairly high bounce rate right now (63%)…I assume this is a symptom of many who use bethel-church.org as their start page. I know of several staff who do this. Once the intranet gets going, I can change that for them. On the flip side of the bounce rate is the Women’s Ministry page (bounce rate of 23%)…indicating that the page had content that prompted further browsing.

How do you track your site’s visits?