Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
If you use Google Analytics to gauge the performance of your real estate website, you surely know how in-depth and detailed this popular website tracking tool can get. Understanding how your website ranks and how users are finding your site is a key element in generating even more traffic to your site, which of course is the best way to start selling more homes.
While it’s possible to spend nearly an entire day dissecting your website statistics using Google Analytics, you don’t need me to tell you that the bulk of your everyday routine should involve meeting with clients and showing as many homes as possible. So what are some of the best ways to measure how well your real estate website is performing? Below are the 3 best Google Analytics stats you should check on a regular basis:
1. Audience Overview
When first logging into your Google Analytics account, you’re automatically directed to the Audience Overview. Here you’ll be able to immediately see how many people visited your real estate website, the number of visits-to-unique visitors, how long users are staying on your site, and what percent of visitors are new visitors. Perhaps the easiest way to tell how successful your real estate website is doing is by seeing how many people are actually viewing it.
2. Traffic Sources Overview
After checking out your visitor stats, the next step is finding out how these visitors got to your site. On the Traffic Sources Overview page, you’ll quickly be able to see the keywords people used to search before reaching your site. This can help in understanding what you’re ranking highly for among major search engines and perhaps what you need to improve on. For example, if a large bulk of your website traffic reached your website by searching the keywords “downtown Chicago condominiums for sale,” you might want to focus your search engine optimization on other keywords in which you’d like to see a higher ranking. In other words, now that you are seeing sufficient traffic searching for downtown condos, try improving your SEO for other market segments such as townhomes or single-family real estate.
3. Social Overview
Social media is now considered to be a leading factor in driving more website traffic. Through business pages on various social media outlets, companies can now communicate to potential customers and consumers through status updates, tweets, and links back to their website through social media. Understanding what percentage of website traffic was referred by social media and which social media accounts are the most successful in driving that traffic is now made possible through the Social Overview page in Google Analytics. As social media continues to become more popular, these statistics will continue to become more and more important.
Joe Heath is a graduate of Indiana University and also holds a Graduate Certificate in Real Estate Development from Drexel University. After working as a Market Research Associate and writing published Market Snapshots for Hanley Wood Market Intelligence in Chicago, Joe now works as a Web Marketing Specialist and is a managing partner at Real Estate Web Creation, LLC.
