Unique visitors

Unique visitors is really unique devices. It measures when a person uses a device to access your website, this could be a mobile phone, a tablet (like and iPad) or a computer. Websites4Christians puts a cookie onto the device to allow us to track when and how many times a person visits.

Unique visitors is interesting because it tells you how many people are coming to your website. It reduces people who come back multiple times to one person and so it makes it clearer how well your site is doing at attracting visitors.

If your unique visitor numbers are low you can look at a number of things. Firstly you should look at the detailed analytics to figure out if there are days when more visitors arrive. For example perhaps your church members visit on Saturday night prior to the service on Sunday. They might be checking on the rotas or wanting to know who is speaking etc. So if you have a high number on Saturday perhaps this is the reason. The same might apply for midweek house or home groups.

You are likely to find that some days are lower than others. When this is the case then you need to think about how you are trying to attract visitors to your site. Why would they come to visit? What is the reason for them coming to your site? You need to think in their terms, search engine, directed visitors and members all have different reasons for visiting so you need to figure out for each what you are expecting.

Your core visitors are likely to come from your church. So ensuring that your church information is up to date is the first plank of your content building. But once that’s done you should move onto your directed visitors. A good starting point for directed visitors is your programme of events. Are you reaching out once a week, once a month, once a quarter, once every six month or … What is your approach to letting new people know about your church.

Assuming you’ve got a programme have you worked out how your website will back the programme? Have you designed your web pages for the various events? If not perhaps they are still an afterthought and that’s why your unique visitors are low. Like all things with church and websites it’s always going to be a compromise. All we can hope at Websites4Christians is that we can encourage you to think about website pages more often.