Real estate is constantly evolving and so are the trends in technology. Today, when it comes to real estate, one of the biggest opportunities exists online. There's one platform that can give you all the insights you need to keep your real estate business running effectively: Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a powerful web analytics platform run by Google. It's an important tool for your real estate SEO that can provide valuable metadata on metrics and reports. Google Analytics can help you improve the performance of your website by providing insights into its users and their behavior.

Below we'll detail how to use Google Analytics to improve your real estate business.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that provides detailed statistics and analytics to help optimize your website for search engine rankings and marketing purposes. It is part of the Google Marketing Platform, which offers additional tools such as Google AdWords, for free as long as you have a Google account.

Google Analytics uses page tags to collect data from visitors to a website. A small piece of code, called a JavaScript page tag, is embedded into each page of the site. This code runs in the web browser of each visitor and sends the visitor's information to one of Google's data collection servers.

What can Google Analytics do for real estate businesses?

When it comes to data tools, Google Analytics is one of the most powerful and effective platforms available. And if you're in the business of real estate, there's no better way for you to collect information about your website visitors than by using Google Analytics.

Google Analytics allows you to measure the number of visitors to your real estate website, as well as the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. For instance, if you want to know how many visitors partner sites like Trulia or Zillow are sending your way, Google Analytics can show you.

The importance of real estate analytics, real estate SEO, and digital marketing has been proven again and again, which is just one of the reasons for this gap between those who know about analytics and those who use it effectively.

The Benefits of Google Analytics for Real Estate

The comprehensiveness of Google Analytics can be initially overwhelming, but understanding how to deploy this resource effectively for real estate program manager analytics metrics and reports should give you an advantage in delivering value to your target audience.

Increased website traffic

You can examine the specific channels that drove traffic to your real estate website by looking at the Acquisition tab in Google Analytics. The data in this section reveals how people found your website like through Facebook, Email, Google, and so on. Where to find the report? Check “Acquisition” > “All Traffic” > “Source/Medium”.

To determine which channels are most effective for bringing visitors to your website, you need to segment your traffic and identify where each segment comes from. For example, if 20% of your traffic comes from Facebook, that indicates that you are doing a good job in building your social media presence on Facebook.

According to Placester, even a small percentage of returning visitors, if it is high enough, can indicate that your site is proving useful to potential buyers and sellers. This means even 1% of visitors coming back 5 times in the last month is still a good number. However, if visitors leave your site by clicking a link on one or two pages, it is important to modify those pages accordingly.

Improved lead generation

Google Analytics can help you understand how channels interact along your conversion paths by showing you how your website's traffic sources contribute to conversions. Channels can include paid and organic search, referral sites, affiliates, social networks, email newsletters, etc.

To further improve your lead generation and conversion, here are three 90/10 questions from Hacking Real Estate Marketing that you can ask yourself:

• Which 10% of my pages lead to 90% of my conversions, and why?
• Which 10% of my traffic sources lead to 90% of my overall website traffic?
• What 10% of all my different audience profile types make 90% of my leads?

Testing for your target audience by applying the 90/10 questions above will help you better understand how channels interact along your conversion paths. 

Greater insight into your marketing campaigns

As you monitor your website's referral traffic, the first thing you’ll notice are the key referring sites that send you traffic, like social media profiles and directories, guest blogs, and online publications. The next thing you’ll see is the corresponding source/medium. For example, if Instagram is sending you a lot of traffic, use Google Analytics to get an idea of how people find themselves on your site.

For example, if one piece of content performed better than another, ask yourself questions such as: Does a higher click-through rate correlate with timing of emails sharing the content, social media posts about it, etc.?

Attentive research into the demographics of your audience allows you to create content and imagery that your audience wants thereby increasing direct traffic to your site.

In recent years, responsive design for real estate websites has become increasingly important. If a large portion of your site's traffic like 95% comes from smartphones or tablets, then you may want to consider upgrading to a responsive real estate website theme.

How to Use Google Analytics for Your Real Estate Business

Step 1: Set up your account

You can create an Analytics account by going to the Google Analytics home page (analytics.google.com) and clicking Get started today. If you already have a Google Analytics account, click Sign in to Analytics.

Step 2: Choose your goals

Google Analytics doesn't know what success looks like for your website. You need to set goals on your dashboard so that you can track performance and make adjustments as needed.

Step 3: Implement tracking code

Link it to Google tag Manager. The Google Tag Manager is a free system that enables you to gather data on your website and send it to other platforms, such as Google Analytics and also Facebook Analytics.

Step 4: Check your results

Now that you have set up Google Analytics and explored some ways to optimize it, you can begin to analyze your traffic and make adjustments to your website pages as needed. Starting from the left sidebar, you can view reports for Realtime, Audience, Acquisitions, Behavior, and Conversion.

Conclusion

Real estate is changing quickly. Moving ahead, you are likely to find that it's no longer enough to have a great website and real estate SEO; in order to remain competitive, you will need to understand your customers and make decisions based on their preferences. Google Analytics can be used to measure visitors, evaluate the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and track traffic sources. More importantly, the real estate analytics generated by Google Analytics will help you better serve your customers.

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References:

Bushery, M. (u.d.). 13 Google Analytics Reports for Your Real Estate Website. Placester. https://placester.com/real-estate-marketing-academy/google-analytics-reports-run-real-estate-marketing

Hoffman, B. (2014, August 28). Definitive guide to Google Analytics for real estate professionals: Part II - The Overview Reports. Inman. https://www.inman.com/next/definitive-guide-to-google-analytics-for-real-estate-professionals-part-ii-the-overview-reports/

Russell, K. (2019, January 29). Google Analytics for Real Estate Marketers – 4 Steps to Get Started. Fronetics Real Estate. https://www.froneticsrealestate.com/google-analytics-for-real-estate-marketers-4-steps-to-get-started/

Schnellbacher, T. (u.d.). How to Use Google Analytics for Real Estate and Not Fly Blind. Hacking Real Estate Marketing. https://hackingrealestatemarketing.com/google-analytics-for-real-estate/