“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, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you” — Matthew 28:19-20

Matthew gives us a call to action and we measure our success by the number of disciples brought to our Lord.

By applying the same principles to our online communications, we can ensure we effectively achieve our Lord’s call to action.

Having a website for your church has become as much of a requirement as having a listing in the phone book. They’re essential for people to find you.

But once they do find your website, what action do you want them to take?

Do you want them to look at your Sunday service times? Sign up for your newsletter? Volunteer for a ministry?

What you want your visitors to do can help you get the results you want from your web presence. Having a well-defined call to action on your website means you can direct your users toward your desired action and measure how well you achieve your goal.

Driving people to your action is best achieved by a simple, clear call on your site.

A distinct button that says, “click here to register” or “visit us” is a good example of a call to action. When a user clicks on the link, you know that your website has achieved its goal.

Measuring the success of your call to action is easy with Google Analytics. By adding a tracking code, you can track how many visitors came to your site, and most importantly, how many of those did what you wanted them to do.

You can track visits to a given page, clicks of a button or downloads of a file, or you can define your own custom events to track.

By identifying clear and measurable goals for your website, you can design your site and content around driving traffic through your calls to action.

Once your goals are clearly defined, measuring success is just a matter of setting up analytics and tweaking your site until it is performing the way you want it to.