Google analytics is essential for your funeral home marketing

In today’s digital age, having a strong online presence is crucial—even for funeral homes.

Why you need to track your funeral home’s website analytics

Your website is your 24/7 brochure – except you can see how many people are actually reading it.

Why should you care about your website’s traffic data? Think of it as a barometer for your business.

Did you launch a direct mail campaign? Host a lunch-and-learn session? Send out an email blast?
Check your website traffic data to see if your marketing efforts are making an impact.

How many leads are coming through your website? Is that number above or below average for this time of year?

Analyzing your website data can provide answers to these questions and offer insights into how engaged your community is with your funeral home.

How do you track website analytics?

Otherwise, we recommend using Google Analytics. It’s used by 50% of websites online today.

When should you set up Google Analytics?

TODAY.

The data isn’t retroactive—you can only start collecting data after installation. Without it, you’ll have no benchmarks until it’s been running for a few weeks.

How to set up tracking for your funeral home’s website

Here’s a great guide on how to create your Google Analytics account and set it up on your website. We recommend using the Google Tag Manager method for installing the tracking code.

Why Google Tag Manager? Once installed, you only need to add tracking codes through the Tag Manager interface instead of manually adding them to your website each time.

For instance, if you want to run Facebook ads, you can easily add the tracking code through Google Tag Manager without manually touching your site’s code again.

What metrics to track and what to avoid

What not to track

Your funeral home’s website will get a significant amount of traffic to the obituary section. However, this data isn’t particularly useful for tracking your business’s health. Obituary traffic fluctuates based on how well-known the deceased was, rather than reflecting public interest in your funeral home itself.

For this reason, we don’t recommend focusing on overall site traffic, as it will include obituary page visits. While advanced techniques can separate this data, it’s generally not necessary.

Where on your website to track data

To gauge interest in your funeral home’s services, focus on looking at the data on specific pages:

• Services – Pages highlighting what you offer.
• Pre-plan – Pages discussing the importance of pre-planning.
• About – Pages sharing your funeral home’s story and history.

Visitors to these pages are actively interested in your services and values.

How to filter your analytics by page

1. Select “Reports”

2. Under “Engagement”, click “Pages and screens”

3. Type in the page path in the search box. For example, if your “Services” page is located at beaconfuneralhome.com/services, you would type in “services”.

Key metrics to track on these pages

• Page views:
  How many times has the page been viewed? Remember, a single user can visit the same page multiple times.

• Users:
  How many individual people have visited the page? While the page may have 200 views, it might only have been visited by 50 people, with each visiting four times on average.

• Traffic source:
  Where is your traffic coming from? Possible sources include direct visits, organic search, referral links, organic social (from social media), paid social (ads), paid search (Google ads), or paid display (banner ads).There are multiple ways to look at traffic data.

  1. You can add a “dimension” in the “Engagement” -> “Pages and screens” report by clicking this + symbol.

2. Next, click “Traffic source”, then “Manual”, then “Session manual medium”.

You can now see the different traffic sources next to each page.

You can also look at the data in the reverse way by clicking on “Acquisition” and then “Traffic acquisition”.

1. Click the plus sign to add a dimension.

2. Select “Page / screen” and then “Page path and screen class”

You can now see the different traffic sources and page data. If you just want to see data for organic search, type “organic search” in the search bar.

How to filter your analytics by date

You can view and compare this data over specific date ranges, such as comparing the last 30 days to the same period one year ago.

Click the date range to select of the pre-configured date ranges or make a custom one. Click Apply to refresh the data.

To compare date ranges, scroll down through the date ranges on left and click the toggle next to Compare. Select one of the default date ranges or make a custom one. When you’re done, click Apply to see the comparison.

Play around with Google Analytics

We know this was a lot of information to take in. Often it helps to actually “do” instead of read, so open up Google’s demo account for Analytics and play around! Don’t worry, you can’t break anything.

We only covered some high-level metrics you would want to track for your funeral home website. There are many more reports and metrics within Google Analytics you may find interesting.

Conclusion

We hope this post helped you realize the importance of tracking your funeral home’s website analytics. It can be an extremely useful tool to analyze what effect your different marketing activities are having or simply to get an idea of the level of interest the public has in your funeral home.

If you are looking to stay connected with your community in a unique way, consider live streaming your funeral services. On average, 30-50% of those who watch the live stream are actually local to your funeral home!