Add Google Analytics To Your Church Website
It’s important to have good analytics on your church website so you can know how many visitors are seeing your site, what pages they’re navigating to, how much time they’re spending, and more. The hard part is getting started and knowing how to take the first steps. It’s actually A LOT easier than you’d think to get started using something like Google Analytics on your church website.
Short note: If you’re using WordPress, you might have found out recently that Jetpack no longer allow their non-commercial (free) version to be used for churches which is quite unfortunate. We’ll cover that in a different article, but we’re happy if you found this article by searching for alternatives as this is probably the quickest, easiest, and free alternative to Jetpack right now.
Getting Started
1. Go to https://analytics.google.com with your Google Account. It’s best to keep a separate account for your church, but at the end of this article we’ll show you how to add other people/emails to this new analytics account which will allow for not only you but others to also have access.
2. Click on the “Admin” button at the bottom left-hand corner:
3. Click “Create” and then “Account”
4. Type in your church name and uncheck the boxes for data sharing.
5. Type in your church name and select your timezone, then click “Next”.
6. You’ll need to select a category. It really doesn’t matter what category you select.
7. Select “Traffic” and “User engagement & retention” from the site options then click “Create”
8. You’ll need to agree to the terms and click “I accept”:
9. Select that you want to choose a “Web” property.
10. Then type in your domain (i.e. mychurch.com) and name it your church name as append “(Website)” at the end of it.
11. Copy and paste the tracking code from the next step to your website. If you’re using WordPress, you can go into WordPress and add the plugin called Site Kit which was made by Google. This will let you connect the Google account you used in the previous steps to automatically connect your website.
As a reminder, Google Analytics comes as a completely FREE integration that we offer to everyone using SolaSites. We handle the setup from start to finish so that you don’t have to go through any of these steps yourself. If your interested in SolaSites handling your website maintenance and support, don’t hesitate to reach out to us or get started today!