Just like the traditional service we have in our buildings, we want to monitor who’s attending our online worship services. So now that our churches are mostly happening online, how exactly do we track “attendance”? We’re definitely moving into a new territory of monitoring metrics. To give us some ideas, here are some good ways given in our group page on tracking attendance for Facebook live streaming!
Comments:
“Currently we’re tracking 2 metrics: peak views and avg watch duration. We do this because they’re the only stats that translate 1:1 across all platforms we’re streaming to (Facebook, YouTube and Subsplash apps). I built a little excel spreadsheet on OneDrive and sync it to a PowerBI dashboard I made… We’ve only been streaming since June (yes, we were really late to the game). We average around 150+ online and 300 in-person weekly. Pre-Covid we were around 550-600 in person and didn’t stream.” Josh Strahler
“Currently we’re tracking: 1-minute viewers, peak, avg duration and minutes watched.” Whit Maxey
“We just have people check-in before they can watch the stream. That way they are checked in to the service along with the actual ‘in-person’ attendance. with a different tag so we know the difference. It’s all in sync with our database so we get much richer information about ages, genders, trends and other info, much better than just numbers If you’re using Facebook ONLY, you should try pushing your website as your main place to watch the stream, that way you have more control over the experience.” Cade Embery
“We track unique IP’s, or unique attenders, and only count those from 1 minute and up. But the key is average view duration and unique attenders. But we don’t really focus on Facebook because of its scrolling nature, people don’t stick around, so we intentionally redirect our people to either youtube or our online platform.” Ashley van der Walt
Conclusion:
Besides tracking your stream’s metrics, one of the easiest and most effective things we could do is create an attendance form and ask everyone to check-in. You may use Google sheets or other online spreadsheet databases that you can create forms with. It’s simple and reliable; you have to remind your viewers about this constantly. All of this advice could help you in tracking your attendance for Facebook live streaming.
