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Statistics play a very important part in assessing what and how well a church website is doing. Some of this may be available from the web hosting company, but when articles are stored in a database it may not be possible to tell much more than that a user read an article. When this is the case, it is necessary to store a count of the number of times an article has been read as part of the database.
There are two things that can be gained from the number of hits that is stored in the database. The most obvious thing is the number of times the article has been read. This is useful information to have. You might find that an article has been read 2374 times, but that only give you part of the picture. The number of hits is basically the distribution of the article. It may build over a long time or a short time. Using the number of days since the article was published it is possible to determine the popularity of the article. Divide the number of hits by the number of days to get the hits per day. This can be done with a database query. If the article has been available for 555 days then it has 4.28 hits per day. Another article might only have 72 hits, but has been available for 18 days, so it has 4 hits per day.
An article that has a higher hits per day count is more popular. Some will have a high count initially but it will slow down. For these, the hits per day will decrease after the initial surge. Other articles may have a more consistent level of interest. Others may start out slow and will increase some over time. The difference among these pages is often determined by where the page is located in the site and how many other pages link to it. It the page is the primary source of information about a topic then it may have a higher hit per day count. If the information will expire in time then it will have the most hits early on. If the information is will not expire then the hits will grow to some level and stay fairly constant. In some cases, word of mouth can cause the hits per day to increase over time.
If a particular article stands out as being very popular, it can be helpful to build on the success of the article. Articles that are popular are setup in such a way that they are reaching people. It is best to wait for a few days or weeks to allow the data to settle on some articles. There are two reasons why an article may have two hit rates. One is that it is not high enough in search results. This may be due a lack of links to the article or because the article is competing with other articles that are highly ranked. Another reason an article may have a low hit rate is because no one is really interested in the topic it covers.
It is not necessary to know why some articles success and some don’t when trying to build on success. To build on success, just create articles that cover similar topics and have links coming from the same places. As a website builds popularity as a whole, the other articles that didn’t seem to work before may become more popular. When that happens it is time to start building on their success as well, but until then it best to focus on the successes.