Ryan Panzer Learning & Leadership Blog

Grace & Gigabytes Blog

Perspectives on leadership, learning, and technology for a time of rapid change

What Every Church Leader Should Know about Google Analytics

Ryan Panzer
Sep 15, 2020
4 min read

This is the latest in an ongoing series on digital marketing for church leaders - be sure to check out the companion post on advertising with Google!

"You can't manage what you can't measure."

-Peter Drucker

If you're a church leader, you've likely grown accustomed to measuring some key numbers in your church. You likely know (approximately) how many attended a worship service, or more recently how many watched an online worship service. You might know how much money you have in your budget, and how much you received in tithes and offerings last Sunday. It's likely that somewhere in your career you were trained to think about the"butts and bucks" numbers as the key performance indicators for your congregation (for more on how to move past "butts and bucks," check out Katie Langston's blog on Faith+Lead).

Doing church online requires a new approach to measurement. What matters in the virtually distributed church is the effectiveness with which your church's digital presence (ie, its website and social media) connects with your community. We can measure this level of connection with free digital tools, the most insightful of which is Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is an application that automatically collects data on website traffic, instantly organizing that data into reports and dashboards. Fully customizable and completely free to use, Analytics is a must-use tool for determining whether digital efforts are achieving the intended results.

When you start using Google Analytics, you'll be able to measure how many visited your website, what they did there, whether they stayed and engaged or quickly "bounced," if they viewed multiple pages or just one, and if they eventually returned. This data helps church leaders to determine when, where, and how communities are coming together on the church website. All of this data, of course, is aggregated and anonymized to protect user privacy. In this post, we'll look at some of the first steps you'll want to take as a church leader during COVID.

To get started, you'll need to sign up for Google Analytics with a Gmail account. Once you've signed up for your website, find and add the Analytics "Tracking Code" to your church website. The code snippet is what sends website data to Google Analytics, enabling you to view important reports on site visits and user activity.

Installing the "Tracking Code" tends to be the most confusing implementation step for new Analytics users, so don't be alarmed if takes you a moment to complete the implementation.

Simply copy the code from Analytics and paste the tracking code beneath the <head> tag of your website.

What's a <head> tag, you might ask? It's the "header" of your website, appended to all pages on your domain. If you can find the HTML for your website, all you'll need to do is paste the code near the top. Google Analytics will do the rest.

Once the tracking code is added to your website, you'll start to see site data in Google Analytics, which will look something like this:

With the code properly installed and site data showing up in your Analytics accounts, it's time to start measuring. While Analytics offers millions of datapoints and segmentations for you to analyze, a beginner Analytics users should focus on users, session duration, and pages/session.

"Users" measures the number of unique visitors to your church website as determined by the date range in the upper-right corner of the Analytics UI. A key question for a church during COVID is the number of users relative to the size of your congregation. If your website is effectively connecting to your community, the number of users in a 30-day window should be similar to your unique monthly attendees. If a church saw an attendance of 350 on a typical pre-COVID Sunday, it should strive for 350 monthly website users.

"Session duration"is the average time spent on your webpages during a single visit to your site. If I visit your homepage for 60 seconds and then leave your website, my session duration is 60 seconds. If I visit five different pages on your website for 10 seconds each, my session duration is also 60 seconds. Since all churches and all websites are different, there isn't a benchmark "session duration" that we ought to strive for. Rather, session duration is a metric of directionality. A key question for today's church leader is whether session duration is trending upward or downward. When church communities find relevant, spiritually-edifying content on a site, session duration increases. As you build out your site and add new types of content like blogs and video pages, see if session duration increases.

"Pages/Session"is the average number of pages a site visitor views per each unique visit to your site. If I visit your site but remain on your homepage, my Pages/Session is 1. If I visit your site and view your Worship page, your blog, and your Contact page, my Pages/Session is 3. Pages/Session is a helpful metric in evaluating whether your website is efficiently funneling traffic to key pages within your site. As a church, you'll likely have a page for worship times/streaming, a blog/videos page, a giving page, and many other pages that are vital to your ministry. Your site should make it easy for a user to switch between pages. A key question for today's church leader is how to maintain a Pages/Session average of 1.5 or more, indicating that the average user connects to more than one resource during their session.

Google Analytics can be overwhelming to those without backgrounds in tech or marketing. If you're feeling like there's too much data and it's hard to know where to get started, take a step back and review some of Google's self-paced learning materials.

Then, identify two or three key performance indicators (KPIs) that you will commit to tracking over the course of four weeks. At the end of four weeks, consider what these numbers might tell you about the quality of your website.

What changes might you make based on this data? That's fundamentally what using Google Analytics is about - not numbers, not graphs, but deriving insight from data. With enough practice and sufficient patience, every church leader can use Google Analytics to strengthen their connections with the community, particularly in an era of disruption.

Book Review - Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

Ryan Panzer
Sep 4, 2020
4 min read

The way we're learning isn't working.

And conventional wisdom about learning is wasting our time.

Whether we're a student, a business professional, or a lifelong learner, we likely aren't succeeding at the type of intentional skill development that will lead to lasting impact, at school, in the workplace, or in our personal lives. Cramming for a test might make us feel as though we've mastered something. Attending an expert presentation at a conference might help us to feel more adept at a career-related skill. Even reading a book may lead us to feel more intelligent in a particular domain. These sentiments are common, but they are illusory. We feel like we are learning, but in actuality, we are wasting our time. New advances in neuroscience and psychology, the subject of "Make it Stick," reveal that true learning requires a different tact from what is commonly practiced in our schools, workplaces, and organizations.

In "Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning," Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel dispel the most pervasive "learning myths" of our time. Seeking to disprove the patently false assertions that we have come to believe, Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel tactfully deconstruct learning myths so that we might become more wiser, more skilled, more adept at the art of learning.

The book begins with a blistering attack on the notion that learning ought to be "easy." Citing numerous peer-reviewed studies alongside compelling anecdotes from real-life learners, Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel establish that all learning is effortful. Through science and story, the authors describe how most information only makes it into our short-term memory. When learning is easy, the brain doesn't encode information into longterm memory for future retrieval and application. When learning doesn't include "desirable difficulty," it is quickly forgotten. Easy learning, though desirable to some learners, is in fact not learning at all.

After deconstructing "easy" learning, Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel proceed to establish a framework for learning with "desirable difficulty," the level of challenge needed to transfer information in short-term memory to long-term intelligence. While the book introduces several strategies that are specific to schools, organizations, and life-long learners, their framework consists of three insights that scale to any learning exercise: quizzing, spacing, and reflection.

Of the three, quizzing (a.k.a. self-testing) is perhaps viewed as the least favorable in today's learning communities. Still, the authors convincingly argue that recalling information in response to a topical question is the surest way to encode information in long-term memory. While corporate trainers (myself included) tend to view quizzing at times as somewhat juvenile, the research data proves that no method is so effective at cementing skills for future application. Today's instructors have an obligation to quiz their learners and to quiz them frequently, but the authors don't leave the burden for learning with the instructor. They argue instead that learners ought to take responsibility for their own learning, committing to self-quizzing after readings, lectures, conferences, and meetings if they want time spent learning to turn to be time well-invested.

The spacing of learning material, specifically the spacing of quizzes and effortful recall activities, is also critical to crystallizing our knowledge as intelligence. When we effectively space learning materials, we repeatedly return to review important subject matter. The authors contend that learning is never a one-time event. If we want to teach a skill in a college lecture or a corporate classroom, it ought not to be a one-time event. We need to follow-up on the event with micro-learnings and quizzes so as to eliminate the "forgetting curve." Similarly, today's learner is most efficient when they study multiple subjects simultaneously, so as to "interleave" study materials. When we explore multiple topics at the same time we naturally space out our study, and we remember more of what we sought to learn. For example, if we want to teach computer programming, we would do well not to teach programming languages in bulk, but to trade-off between content areas. Rather than teaching all of HTML before teaching CSS, we would teach some HTML, then some CSS, then quiz on and learn more HTML, before returning to CSS and beginning the cycle anew.

Of the ideas in the book, I found their thoughts on reflection to be the most compelling, particularly for adult learners. Reflection is a process of elaborating on experience that asks us to remember what happened, evaluate what happened, and plan for improvement during subsequent experiences. While reflection is important to all learners, it may be especially critical to busy workplace professionals, who likely need fewer lectures and conferences and more opportunities to debrief and discuss.

The book isn't perfectly applicable to life in 2020. It avoids the subject of equity in education. If quizzes and test are so important in our schools, the authors should have suggested how to use them in a way that does not disadvantage those with less frequent access to technology or study materials. The book also describes a case study in which police learn to use lethal force to stop perpetrators, a passage that comes off as callous and upsetting after a summer of racial injustice. Future editions of the book would do well to omit this example, focusing instead on how we can learn to make our organizations more inclusive and equitable.

Still, the book offers an approachable, science-based framework for learning more effectively. Whether we are a student or someone who makes their living teaching others, we would do well to read "Make It Stick" closely and carefully. We would do even better to quiz ourself on its subject matter, read it alongside other books on learning, and reflect on how we might transfer its contents to our daily practice.

What Every Church Leader Should Know About Facebook Ads

Ryan Panzer
Sep 2, 2020
5 min read

This is the latest in an ongoing series on digital marketing for church leaders - be sure to check out the companion post on advertising with Google!

In the first post, we looked at why and how church leaders should advertise on Google. But Google Ads are only one-side of the digital advertising coin. Google provides the ability to advertise to those looking for a church right here, right now.

But Facebook provides the tools to advertise to those looking for a church before they know they even know they are looking for a church! Google helps advertisers to meet the demand of customers seeking a specific product or service. That's helpful when the service you offer, whether it is facemasks or virtual school support, is growing in search interest. It's only somewhat useful to churches, where search interest has stagnated and even declined in the last five years. As a church leader, you should be advertising on Facebook because you're called to bring the Gospel story to your community even if they're not specifically looking for it.

The importance of audience-based advertising

Facebook Ads succeed because they put your message in front of users whose online interests align to the goals of an organization. They work for churches because they introduce your ministry to like-minded community members who are unfamiliar with the work of your Christian community. Within your context, there are more Facebook users interested in faith, spirituality, and social justice than there are Google searches for those specifically looking for a new church home.

Over one-third of American Millennials identify within the "spiritual but not religious" category. This audience of approximately twenty-four million Americans may not have a church home, but they believe in God, pray, and read scripture at a rate that is nearly identical to church-affiliated Christians.

The spiritual but not religious group also uses Facebook extensively (despite the rumors you might have heard, Facebook remains by far world's most popular social network). 77% of Millennials use Facebook daily. This group shares countless affinities with the work of your ministry, their spiritual practices are similar, their hunger for justice is near identical, they even share many of the core theological convictions that define your ministry. They just lack an invitation to involvement, an opportunity to hear the story of what God is up to with your ministry. That's why it's so important to combine Facebook's powerful audience-based advertising with Google's search engine marketing.

Facebook Ads share in common many of the same advertising settings as their competitor, Google Ads. There's still an opportunity to target ads to a specific community, focusing on a tight radius around your church building. There's still an ability to pay only for clicks that drive new traffic to your website. And there's still the reality of these clicks costing mere cents on the dollar, a fraction of the cost of marketing in print, within publications, or on television or radio. I suggested in my post on Google Ads that a church could generate hundreds of new site visitors for less than the cost of a pastor's mileage reimbursement. With Facebook Ads, a church could generate hundreds of visits from community members who have never heard of the congregation, for less than the cost of coffee and donuts during pre-Covid coffee hours.

Set up for success

As with Google Ads, there are some settings you'll want to get right from the start of your advertising test. I'll list a few of them here, but you'll want to consult two other resources before you activate your campaigns. First, Tithe.ly offers an approachable and free startup guide to any church leader who is trying Facebook Ads for the first time. Facebook also offers a free online course to any first-time advertiser.

There are two settings you'll want to get right from the start. The first is your ad "copy." You don't need to be Don Draper to write good ad copy for Facebook. Just write a compelling call to action. It can be as simple as "Experience grace and restoration - join for online worship Sunday at 9!" Be clear about how, where, and when post viewers can connect with your ministry. And don't forget a high-resolution image. Image-based ads are viewed more, clicked more, and noticed more!

The second setting you'll want to get right is your ad targeting. Facebook builds its advertising campaigns around location and other audience characteristics. As with Google Ads, you'll want to set a target radius around your congregation. But don't stop there. Narrow your ads so that they display for those who have a demonstrated interest in faith and spirituality. This is done through Facebook's Detailed Targeting settings. In the following screenshot, you'll see example settings for a Madison, WI, Millennial-focused ad campaign targeting ads to those who are interested in faith, prayer, social justice, or Lutheranism.

Once you set your targeting criteria, Facebook will ask you whether you want to run the ad continuously or for a set timeframe. For most churches, I suggest running a 30-day test with a $5/day investment.

Ethics and privacy concerns

It's no secret that Facebook has been scrutinized over its handling of user data. Their business model bundles and anonymizes user data, then sells that data to advertisers in the form of ad targeting. This should raise ethical questions for the church leader. But the keywords here are bundling and anonymity. You'll never be able to target ads to specific users. You'll never even have access to data on specific users, or even on specific groups of Facebook users (want to see how Facebook characterizes your interests? Check out this page). And as a Facebook advertiser, you are not given any special access to protected information about consumers.

Still, some will question whether it is ethical to advertise on a platform that makes its money targeting ads based on user internet behavior. I would advise church leaders working through this quandary to perform a simple ethical calculation. Weigh the opportunities from bringing the Gospel message to unchurched and unheard audiences against any concerns you might have about Facebook's ad targeting. Does the good of engaging new segments of your community in God's graceful and restorative work in the world outweigh the misgivings you may have about how Facebook makes its money?

For more on the ethics of Facebook advertising, check out this blog post from Rebel Interactive.

Facebook Ads for churches during COVID

Some church leaders may hesitate to advertise on Facebook, due to the uncertainty of being a church navigating a global pandemic. While it may be true that we don't know when our buildings will reopen and when in-person gatherings will resume, we do know that 2020 has been hard on us all. We also know that social media sites have become the most contentious platforms on the web. Those using social media are wandering through a landscape defined by cancel culture, mudslinging, hyperpartisanship, and trolling. They need an oasis of grace. They need an escape to Sabbath rest and togetherness. Your ministry offers this oasis, it provides this escape, even if your worship service is held on YouTube or Zoom or Facebook Live. Your church may have left the building, but it still provides exactly what our world needs: a restorative word for a divided team, a word of healing in an era of pandemic illness, a word of rest during a year that has shocked and exhausted us all.

The world needs to hear from you. Facebook will help you get the word out. Please don't hesitate.