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Check out NickOvalle.com!

February 10, 2013 — Leave a comment

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I’m so excited to share with you NickOvalle.com!  I have the privilege of serving alongside Nick at Community Bible Church where Nick is our WebMedia Manager.  He has one of those unique skill sets where he’s a super creative, that is also very organized and detailed in his work.  Nick can do everything from code websites, graphic design, and video production to project management and copy editing.  I’m so excited to see what he will be putting out on his new blog and think you will want to check it out as well.  Head over to NickOvalle.com now and make sure to subscribe to his RSS feed!

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Google Analytics – Content Engagement

January 18, 2013 — Leave a comment

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Have you ever wondered what people are engaging with on your site?  Through the Content feature on Google Analytics you can see what pages people are going to, how long they are saying, where they are leaving from, and so much more!  Let’s take a look at some of the core features of Google Anaylytics Content feature.

When you first open the page you will see a graph that will look much like the Google Analytics Home screen, but the graph displays total page views rather than overall site views.  This means that if someone goes to 5 different pages on your site they will be counted 5 times on this page, but only once on the overall site views.

Below the graph you will see a bolded list of numbers.  These are the key statistics that you will want to monitor on this page.  Let’s review this list and what each of these numbers mean:

Pageviews: this is the total number of pages viewed. Repeated views of a single page are counted.

Unique Pageviews: this is the number of visits during which the specified page was viewed at least once. A unique pageview is counted for each page URL + page Title combination.

Avg. Time on Page: this is the average amount of time visitors spent viewing a specified page or set of pages.

Bounce Rate: this is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page).

% Exit: this is the percentage of site exits that occurred from a specified page or set of pages.

Generally when people visit your site you will want to engage them beyond the home page and these analytics help you to really understand how well you are doing this.  You can see how many and which pages they visit, how long they stay on these pages, and which ones they typically exit your site from.

Below the primary list of Analytics you will see the title “Page” with a list of your pages underneath.  This will list you site pages in order of popularity giving you the pageviews and % of site views.  You can actually click on each of these pages for another full page of analytics on each of these pages, but I won’t get into that detail in this blog post.  Check it out though, I think you will also find this information to be interesting and valuable.

This information can tell you a great deal about the content on the site and potential adjustments that you might need to make.  One page might get more views just because of the location of the link on the home page or it could be the appeal of the graphic or the wording of the link.  I encourage you to take this information and experiment with various changes trying different locations, graphics, etc. to better understand the behavior of your audience to your site.

Whatever you do though, don’t get comfortable!  Never stop trying new things!

 

 

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Getting Started with Google Analytics

January 4, 2013 — Leave a comment

As I’ve shared before, I love to count things and tracking analytics is honestly a lot of fun for me.  In a previous post post I shared my use of both StatCounter and Google Analytics to track web traffic on my blog, but Google Analytics has been my go to when it comes to all of the sites that I track.  It is important to understand the platform, what you can track, why you should track, and how you should track the traffic on your website or blog.  Before I get into the how to of Google Analytics, let me answer a few FAQs about the platform first:

What can you track?

You can track how many total visitors are visiting your site, how long they are on the site, how many pages they look at, where they live (city not address), how they got to your site, what device they are using, and much much more that I will get to later.

Why should you track?

It is important to know who your audience is, what content they’re engaging with, what drives your traffic, etc.  Without this understanding you can waste a lot of time creating content that no one engages with or in promotional efforts that are ineffective.

How often should you track?

I recommend checking Google Analytics at least once a week for 15 minutes and once a month for close to an hour.  Honestly I check multiple times each day, but that’s not necessarily healthy and the best use of your time.

 

So let’s get to the meat of the post: where to start.  Here are the practical 1st steps if you don’t yet have a Google account.  If you like many people already have a Gmail account you can use your Gmail credentials to setup your Google Analytics account as well.  Here are the steps:

1) Go to http://Google.com/analytics and setup your account

2) Add your website or blog as a property: Instructions here.

3) Install your tracking code into your website or blog: Instructions here.

With these 3 simple steps, you’re all set and ready to start tracking traffic on your site.  Know that Google Analytics can only track traffic from that point on and can not track back traffic.

Now, what should you begin tracking first?

When you first open your Google Analytics report for your blog or website make sure that you are in the “Standard Reporting” section and this should be what you see on your screen:

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1) Check the Graph: The first thing that I always look at is the graph checking for spikes or dips in traffic.  I want to know what might have caused a spike or dip in web traffic.  You can put your cursor of the tip of the dip or spike and it will give you the specific day that this took place.  We will discuss later how to dig into these peaks in more detail, but you will likely be able to pinpoint it to a specific post or link that led to the spike.

2) Visitors: The next thing I look at is the Total Visitors number to see how many people all together have seen the site.  The total number will count people multiple times if they visited your site multiple times through the designated time frame.  I then look just below it the Unique Visitors to see how many different visitors came to the site (everyone is only counted once in this number).  The pie graph just to the right of this will display then how much of your traffic is new visitors vs. returning visitors.  It’s important to see if your audience is primarily the same people or if you have a great amount of traffic that are new visitors.

3) Time on Site: The other very important thing to look at on this page is Avg. Visit Duration which will tell you how long people stay on your site on average.  You can also see if they browsed your site looking at many pages or primarily just looked at the 1 landing page.  These numbers will tell you how engaging your content is and how appealing the other links/pages on your site are to visitors of the site.

These quick tips will get your started and tell you a great deal about your web traffic, but know that this is just the beginning of all that you can track and all of the value that you can gain from understanding the behavior of those who visit your website or blog.  Google Analytics can be an incredible tool if you learn to use it wisely.  I look forward to sharing with you all that I am learning and would love to hear from you as well.

Please share how often you use analytics and what questions that you might have about Google Analytics specifically.

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Where I’m Learning

December 8, 2012 — Leave a comment

I believe strongly that leaders are learners.  We all learn in many ways both from experience as well as from other leaders and innovators via many different platforms.  I receive the question often of where I am learning and ask it even more.  I will likely make this a monthly post and look forward to hearing your responses as well.  Here are some of the key places I go to learn currently:

Books

Deep and Wide by Andy Stanley

Platform by Michael Hyatt

The iChurch Method by Jason Caston

 

Magazines:

Fast Company

Outreach

Church Executive

 

Blogs:

Michael Hyatt

Mashable

Ed Stetzer

 

Podcasts:

Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast

Social Media Church with DJ Chuang

Catalyst Podcast

 

So where are you going to learn and grow as a leader? Any of these same places? I would love to know!

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The WordPress Plugins that I Use

October 1, 2012 — 2 Comments

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I’ve made several posts about why I love the Standard Theme for WordPress so much, but thought I should also share about the plugins that I use as well.  So here’s what I use and why:

Shareaholic: my brother-in-law introduced me to this plugin and it has been one of my favorites.  I’ve tried many share widgets, but this one is head and shoulders above the others.  It also includes a Recommendations feature after each post which automatically looks at your post and all other posts and recommends similar posts to the reader.  This is an awesome plugin and I honestly saw my traffic double after just 2 weeks of installing.

Akismet- don’t even wait to finish reading this post before installing this plugin if you have not already.  Naturally your blog comments will get cluttered with Spam and Akismet fixes this issue immediately.

Fast Secure Contact Form- I don’t know if this is the best, but it works for me.  I tried a couple others and this one was just simple and easy to use.  It’s nothing fancy and that’s probably what I like the most about it.

Feedburner Email Widget- this like the Contact form is really just simple for me and simple for the users.  I can’t confidently say that it’s the best option for you, but it does work for me.

I would love to hear form you what some of your favorite WordPress plugins are.  It still blows me away all that is out there on WordPress and that so much of it is FREE!

 

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1 More Reason to Love Standard Theme: SEO!

July 27, 2012 — 1 Comment

So I’ve talked about this recently, but the more I dig into the Standard Theme the more I love it!  I’m in no way an expert when it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization), but I do know how important it is.

Take a look at traffic that comes to this blog:

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Curious what color represents what traffic source?

Here’s the answer:

Blue- Direct (people that type in http://nilssmith.com)

Green- Google

Orange- Facebook

Yellow- Facebook mobile

Honestly, I’m surprised to see how little traffic comes from Twitter, but that’s not what this post is about.  22% of the traffic would not be visiting this site if it weren’t for the Search Engine Optimization that Standard Theme built into this WordPress theme.  My guess would be that many of the direct links likely found NilsSmith.com via Google as well.

Check out this feature below the Standard Theme built into the template allowing writers to add a Meta Description to each post:

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This seems like a small thing, but I’m telling you this meta description is key to people finding you online.  If you want a blog just for friends and family, SEO isn’t important.  If you’re looking for a platform to grow and reach people all over the world, SEO features such as this are critical!

I promise that I don’t work for Standard Theme (although I’d love to), but I will admit that I do get a commission if you buy the Standard Theme linking from this site.

I really don’t share this info though to make a buck.  I honestly love the Standard Theme and think you would too!

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Learning to Post Consistently

July 26, 2012 — 1 Comment

The past two weeks have provided a great learning curve for me when it comes to posting consistently.  I have had this platform for a couple of years, but never fully committed to it.  I was confused about the purpose of this platform and how to effectively use it to encourage others.

Two things recently have inspired me to begin investing more time on this blog:

1) Reading Michael Hyatt‘s book, Platform, and how he has built his platform through his blog

2) Encouragement from others interested in learning from my experiences in Online Ministry

 

Through this inspiration I have quickly learned a great lesson: POST CONSISTENTLY!

 

In the past I generally posted 2-3 times/month.  In the past 2 weeks I have posted 6 times and take a look below at how that has affected my analytics:

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My new system is to complete 2-3 scheduled posts each weekend with 5-6 Drafts in process at a time.  This also leaves flexibility to add time relevant posts that I can draft and post sporadically if I would like to.

Becoming consistent is new to me, so I would love any tips/tricks you might have when it comes to blogging?  How much is too much/too little to blog?

 

 

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Media Social highlighted by Church Marketing Sucks

January 28, 2012 — Leave a comment

 

I’ve been a big fan of Church Marketing Sucks for several years and was extremely excited to see that they were highlighting Media Social and CBC Online in a post this week.  If you haven’t yet read the article, I hope you’ll take a minute to read it here.

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Interview in Church Executive Magazine

August 6, 2011 — Leave a comment

I’m honored and excited to share with you this article from Church Executive Magazine.  The article, titled Six Trends in Staffing, was written by my friend William Vanderbloemen of Vanderbloemen Search Group.  Below is a portion of the article that includes his interview with me, but I hope you will take the time to click here to read the entire article in this month’s edition of Church Executive.

Nils Smith: Church hires social media pastor

Last year Community Bible Church in San Antonio, TX, with weekly attendance of 21,000, hired a pastor of social media, Nils Smith, and credit some of their growth to leveraging these forms of communication and building relationships. William Vanderbloemen had a brief interview with Smith, who previously served as a youth pastor for eight years, and six months as a college and community online pastor before transitioning to Community Bible Church.

What are your primary responsibilities? Launching CBC online which is our online church campus, as well as oversight of our multiple Facebook pages and Twitter account.

What is the average CBC online attendance look like? We launched the online campus about a year ago with about 200 to 300 weekly attendees and today we average about 6,000 to 7,000 people logging in each week. We have an average of more than 100 countries represented every week and to date we have had attendance from every country in the world except for 12.

What exactly is CBC online?
It is our online church service where we broadcast one or two worship songs along with the weekly message. We also have live chat that people can log into through their Facebook account and interact with each other around the online service. We currently have four channels or sites that we have launched and we recently launched a Spanish channel that has allowed us to become much more effective in reaching people in South and Central America.

We also broadcast our music online 24-7, in a coffee shop style space that allows people to log on and chat as well as listen to the great CBC music. Our most recent addition to CBC Online is the launch of our Online Lifegroups where people can login at the same time and watch a video teaching, have a time of discussion and prayer, and simply experience community online just like they might in a living room setting.

What does your typical day look like? I don’t know if there is such a thing as a typical day, but generally I log in and check the prior day’s stats, make sure that our volunteer teams are checking up with new online believers, check in with the folks who are managing our Facebook and twitter accounts, and I also meet with our media team to see what updates to our online content we are going to be making. Our process with our online ministry has been to create, recruit, train, empower and support. As we’re constantly launching new areas of ministry online we are in different phases of this process, but my daily focus has quickly changed from primarily creating to now doing a lot more supporting as we have built an incredible team of volunteer leaders.

How have you implemented FB and Twitter with the Online Experience? For the most part we centralize everything that we are doing online with our Facebook Fan Page, which acts as our central hub for communication. We use an incredible platform called Media Social [ mediasocial.tv ] that has been our primary resource in our online ministry that integrates video content closely with Facebook.  Generally people connect with us through finding a link that someone posted on Facebook, attend an online service, and then “Like” our Facebook page.

We make unique videos and various online content specifically for Facebook and try and maximize our page as a place for community.We have found that simply asking questions of the community has been the most effective use of the page in building community. Currently we have more than 45K fans on Facebook, and interestingly enough, we actually have more fans in the Philippines now than we do in the U.S.

What is the best piece of advice that you can give churches that are looking to create a social media or online presence? Take the step and start somewhere, start with a building and regularly updating a Facebook page or try broadcasting on Ustream.com. Initially utilize the free online resources available. Once we started our Facebook page, our fellow staff members got on and promoted it and it really grew and took off. It isn’t perfect and continues to be a work in progress.

You don’t want to put out a poor product, but sometimes you can refine and polish things so much that they never get released. There is the need for some experimenting initially and you will begin to figure out what works and does not work for your ministry.  — WV

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The 2nd Best Job out there is hiring right now!

July 9, 2011 — Leave a comment

A good friend of mine, Brad Russell, has been working on a project for several years now that is about to be unveiled to the public and you can be a part!  The project is a website called Faith Village and he is currently building his team as they gear up for their public launch in the coming months.

To call Faith Village just a website is a massive understatement though!  There are thousands of websites out there and you likely only visit about 5-10 on a regular basis.  In the next year, Faith Village will be one of those sites that you will visit on a regular basis.  It will be a new social network for faith resources and simply put, a virtual village.  To be honest, my description won’t do it justice.  I encourage you to visit FaithVillage.com to check it out and bookmark it to come back regularly as they get closer to launching the site in full.  If you have a few minutes, check out this video about Faith Village:

Introducing FaithVillage.com from Brad Russell on Vimeo.

So, to the 2nd Best job out there it is the Christian Living Editor at Faith Village.  This is one of several jobs like it that Faith Village will be hiring in the coming months.  If you are interested don’t hesitate to go ahead and apply.  Also, I would love for you to let me know so that I can recommend you personally to Brad.

Whether you apply for this position or not, make sure to pay close attention to Faith Village in the coming months as some exciting things are ahead!

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