I’ve discovered people are using church websites, specifically the online audio/video, to look for a church. If I just moved into this area, that’s exactly what I would do. I want to know if the pastor preaches sermons that are biblically based. And one of my criteria has always been the choir – if they look like they would rather be in a dentist’s chair, I will not return to that church.

Would I make the decision based on this alone? No. But we would have found our current church home much sooner.

For churches with the resources, I recommend posting some video, even if you can’t do it every week.

One could use log files to see if downloads were completed indicating that someone at least downloaded a whole audio file.

Another thing is we could look at the length people are on a page before they navigate away. This would indicate that they were on the page for quite some time and likely listened to some or all of a podcast.