As churches have rushed online many have been surprised at the number of views for worship services. Churches that used to boast 50-75 in attendance on Sunday Morning now have hundreds of views from a live stream or an uploaded video. And it would seem that we are reaching and
connecting with more people than ever before and many are celebrating.

I don’t want to be the one to deflate all the accomplishments of our churches and their online efforts. Yet to make sense of the number of views and all the data from digital platforms, there are some best practices.

First is to separate out the number of unique viewers from total views. This is easily done on YouTube, whose analytics will tell you precisely the number of unique views. This doesn’t separate out the number of times an individual may re-watch a service, but it does give you a precise number of unique individuals engaging with your content.

Facebook does not provide unique viewer numbers, unfortunately. But Facebook does provide the peak live viewers data during a live event, as well as 3-second viewers, 10-second viewers and 1-minute viewers.

You might have 133 3-second viewers, 84 10-second viewers and 50 1-minute viewers. Of the three numbers, the best to use for your data is the 1-minute viewers’ number as it reflects better the number of people who watched the service verse those who scrolled past on their feed.

Another data point to consider is your email analytics. Mailchimp provides wonderful analytics. You can see how many people opened a specific email and compare those results to your average open rate. It also provides which links were clicked on and who your top subscribers are. This provides great data in analyzing how many opened the order of service for any given Sunday.

Together using multiple data points I am able to better
ascertain a) which type of content is most effective in reaching beyond the church walls, and b) who many people I am effectively reaching.

This helps me better tailor my online offerings to meet the needs of those who are watching but also have an eye to broadening the reach of the Kingdom of God.