This has been a very difficult and different Easter to any other we have encountered. With all church activity temporarily (and understandably) halted, the principle way that the church can communicate with its parishioners is through its online activities. Father John has done a wonderful job of making sure that all the Sunday and Easter masses are broadcast via Facebook and this activity has led to us almost doubling the number of followers on that channel and it has had a knock-on effect on this website.
In the past we have shared the stats from this website to let people know where visitors have come from, the amount of traffic we have per month and some of the top pages that people are looking at. With that in mind I thought I’d share with you some of the stats from the past month.
Visitor traffic to the website
This month we have seen a MASSIVE increase in visitors to the website. If you compare April this year with April last year (when Easter also fell), you can see that the number of visitors (unique not total) was much high 898 vs 493. However, the really interesting stat is that the number of views shot up from 1545 to 5638.
Why did this happen?
Three main factors were at work here:
- We published every mass over the Easter Triduum on the website (some people don’t have Facebook but do have Internet access ad so can view the services o this site).
- We published the Mini Retreat on to the website every day.
- We told people about what we publishing on the website on Facebook.
Content
The most visited page on the site was, obviously, the home page. The primary reason for this is that people knew that they could view the Live Mass directly from the home page, even though the mass was published to its own unique page every day. The way the site is built means that the latest post (this week posts have mainly been about the Mini Retreat or to broadcast live services) will always appear on the home page.
Interestingly, the ‘Mass and services this week’ and ‘Parish newsletter’ pages are second and third in this list. This happens week in week out but is still encouraging that people are still checking it out. The first live mass we did on Facebook (we did trial YouTube if you remember) that we did along, with Palm Sunday mass and the Easter vigil also appear in this list – notice that the post telling people about the Easter Vigil Mass (with 224 views), has more views than the live mass itself (142).
Countries that visit our site
I always find it fascinating to see from which countries around the world people who have visited our website come from. The map above only shows traffic for the month of April; if we were to look at the entire year we would see even more pink on the map.
In terms of the top countries that sent traffic to our website here is some of that list:
I think that in the future you will see us continuing to use the website and Facebook even more to communicate with the parish. I will share the Facebook activity at some time and that is EVEN MORE INTERESTING and illuminating.
