As an amateur webmaster of my church’s website - and a self confessed stats geek, I thought I’d check out the stats on our website. I know, it’s boring but what else do I have to do while stuck in a hotel in Sydney while on a sales training course right?
CityWest Church is a small church plant in Melton, Melbourne, Australia (map). Currently we have about 70 - 75 people attending each week. By God’s grace, this number seems to be increasing recently. We have a website, a Facebook page and a podcast. But in reality, I wanted to see what kind of reach we have to the rest of the world.
And this exercise proved to be very encouraging to myself as I tend to spend hours each week just keeping the thing updated to a minimum level. There are heaps of things I would like to add to it, but just simply don’t have the time. So it’s pretty humbling to see how far and wide we’ve spread throughout the world and it gives me the encouragement to keep on keeping on.
I use Google Analytics to monitor our traffic flow. Our data begins on 15 June, 2008 to today, 12 November, 2008 - exactly 150 days. Here are the stats:
Unique visitors: 891
Total visits: 2356
Page views: 7900
Ok so where do these 891 people come from? Our mission at CityWest is to reach out to the people of Melton, but also to the world at large. Have we acheived this in our 150 days?
Number of countries: 49
We’ve had visits from people from Sri Lanka to Qatar, Iran to Jamaica and Sweden to Saudi Arabia. But the top 5 countries are:
1. Australia
2. USA
3. Canada
4. UK
5. Turkey
A break down of the top 5 countries show:
Australia
- Visitors from all 8 states and territories
- Including all the major cities
USA
- Visits from 39 out of 51 states
- Top states are Texas, California, Kansas, Florida and Georgia
Canada
- Visits from 19 cities
UK
- Visits from 13 cities
Turkey
- Visits from 5 cities
So what have poeple been checking out? Here are the top five pages from our website:
- CityWest Church - our home page
- Welcome to CityWest Church - a welcome letter from our Pastor
- Kingdome Come - our expository sermon series on the Sermon On The Mount found in Matthew
- CityWest News - our weekly news (video bulletins currently on hold)
- Location, Times & Calendar - a snapshot of what’s going on at church
Like I said, doing this exercise has pumped me to continue doing what I do. And if you’re in the same boat as me, I’d encourage you to do the same exercise just to see what’s happening with your website. I know our stats aren’t huge - but neither is our church. But it’s an awesome feeling to know that our message of Jesus has now been pumped out to 891 people in 49 countries all around the world. And in some small way, it helps fulfill the great commission given by our King:
“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Mat 28:18-20
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