How many people are googling for your church?

I did a little experiment with Google Adwords to find out.  Warning: some fuzzy math in this post.

I picked Thousand Oaks, Ca as my guinea pig.  I setup an ad campaign, and bid high enough ($0.75/click) to ensure my ad got the top spot for certain keywords.  

So nearly 200 impressions, or searches, for churches in Thousand Oaks, Ca in 7 days.  Interesting.    Extrapolating to a year, that's 10,000 searches on Google alone.  Google gets about 56% of all internet searches.  So about 18K internet searches for churches per year in Thousand Oaks.

This city has 126,000 people living in it.  So continuing the theme of fuzzy math, that's 1 internet search for a church for every 7 people.  So key takeaway - divide your city's population by 7: that's the number of internet searches per year for a church in your city.

I don't know how this compares to the number of people flipping through a yellow book for churches.  But I'm guessing the volume of internet searches trumps yellow book searches.  And it will only get more lopsided in the future.

I'm sure I'm making some pretty big assumptions here.  And I'm sure astute readers will point out some flaws in my back-of-the-envelope calculations.  But hey, its a blog post and not a white paper :)

Also, can someone educate me on the costs of running a yellow book ad?  It'll be a fun exercise to compare that to the costs of an Adwords campaign...

Comments

[Mike]

Or you could just use Google Analytics. It tells you exactly how many people get to you site from each search engine, what they searched for, etc. It's good information to have.

[joe]

Mike, analytics will tell you how many people clicked to your site based on keyword. But it won't tell you how many searches (aka impressions) a certain keyword or phrase has.

[Cynthia]

Thanks for doing our work for us Joe!

One of the key components your great experiment doesn't touch on that might be worth mentioning is the fact that age has a dramatic effect on early adoption. At least that's what diffusion of innovations data shows.

The significance for church leadership is this: young people, who are often seeking out church connections, are googling where as older folks, who likely have a history of established church ties, are using the yellow pages. Thus, google savvy-ness becomes even more weighted in it's importance for the next generation "searching" faith.

[joe]

Cynthia, great point. And I actually forgot you're in Thousand Oaks. I'm temporarily staying in TO... will need to visit your church sometime :)

I also picked Thousand Oaks for the concerns you brought up. My former home of San Jose, Ca would not reflective of an average US city - silicon valley folks haven't touched yellow pages in several years. They google for everything.

[Brian F]

Yellow Page campaigns are expensive. Our church spends around $1200.00 per month on print and web advertising. Google Analytics is also the way I view my web statistics. I am able to see exactly what was typed in the search engine where in the world they are from, and if they are a repeat visitor.

[Frank Johnson]

Great post, Joe. There are a couple of additional aspects of pay-per-click advertising I would love to see discussed:

1) When someone searches on "church thousand oaks", I would say they are most likely a believer looking for a new church, a believer visiting from out of town, or a believer who has just moved into the area.

While using pay-per-click advertising to promote your church to believers looking for a church is probably going to be effective, I wonder how we can use pay-per-click advertising to persuade unbelievers to consider joining us in our gatherings.

I know that Drew Goodmanson and Kaleo Church have had some good success using terms related to pre-marital counseling in San Diego as an effective draw for unbelievers, but I don't know if they've specifically used PPC ads.

I would like to see churches employing local PPC advertising around common life themes which are prominent in their geographic area, matched up with profiles of believers in their congregations who have encountered those common life themes and dealt with them effectively through their relationship with Christ. For example, if unemployment is a problem in a church's area, why not post in-depth profiles of believers in the congregation who have undergone long periods of unemployment. In the profiles, tell how their relationship with Christ helped them through the experience. Then use PPC ads to draw unemployed unbelievers to the profiles, which will hopefully lead to face-to-face encounters between the unbeliever and the believer around that common life theme?

2) In my day job as an internet strategist, we judge the effectiveness of PPC ads by the conversion rate associated with them - how much profit did we gain from people clicking on those ads compared to how much we spent? (that's a bit simplified, but ....)

For a church, a different metric should be employed. Not only how many people saw and clicked on the ad, but (in the case of the profile strategy I proposed above) how long did people stay on the profile, how many contacts came as a result of people clicking on the PPC ad and reading/viewing the profile, how many face-to-face contacts between believers and unbelievers resulted from the PPC ad/profile combination, how many unbelievers joined us in our gatherings as a result of the PPC ad/profile combination, and finally, how many were converted to Christ as a result?

And then, how can we get a handle on these sorts of metrics without reducing people to numbers and statistics?

I've done some PPC advertising for the Luis Palau organization and these types of questions are always the most difficult to answer. We can easily know how many people potentially saw the ad and we know how many people clicked on them. When we are recruiting volunteers, we know how many people filled out the online signup form after clicking on the PPC ad. But when we're trying to attract people to the festivals, it's not so easy to track how many people who saw the PPC ads came to the festival and then how many were converted after originally seeing the PPC ads.

[joe]

Brian, can you shed some light on how your ad budget breaks down % wise? How much is your yellow pages ad if you don't mind sharing? And are your web ads mostly PPC?

Frank, excellent points. If I was in charge of a PPC campaign for a church, I would totally tailor it towards the topic of the current message series to draw in non-believers.

Yep, PPC gurus view CTR's and conversion rates like a funnel. Kinda hard to apply an ROI model to a church as you pointed out. And I also agree it dangerously borders on reducing folks to numbers and metrics.

This would probably make for a very interesting blog post though... I'd love to explore that and hear your thoughts on it when/if I muster the courage to write about "The Return on Investment of Getting Visitors to your Church" :)

[joshMshep]

I say try Google Trends:
http://www.google.com/trends

At least you can quickly get a read on some info. For instance, in 2007, did people search more for "ted haggard" or "new life church"?
http://google.com/trends?q=%22new+life+church%22%2C+%22ted+haggard%22&ctab=0&geo=all&date=2007&sort=0

It shows that in Colorado Springs, people searched more for New Life Church, but that's not the case in other regions.

peace,
-joshMshep
Colorado Springs
www.myspace.com/joshmshep

[Joe Suh]

Josh,
Google Trends can certainly give you good relative data on popular keywords as you pointed out. But it won't give you data on low-volume "long tail" searches like "churches in San Francisco" Nor will it give absolute data, which my exercise was trying to uncover.

Nevertheless, Trends is a cool tool. Thanks for pointing it out.
joe