Real Estate Website Statistics Are Valuable if You Use Them

What value is there in the analysis of real estate website statistics? If you want to see eyes glaze over, mention website statistics or analytics when Realtors are talking about online marketing.

Most of them spend their days dealing with numbers related to transactions and client deals. Spending their nights dealing with statistics and numbers on their website traffic isn't something that gets them excited.

It's interesting listening to these conversations, as many real estate agents and brokerages are very interested in creating content for their sites and working for better search engine positioning. "Keywords," "Key Phrases," and other SEO-related terms are the topics, and content that works is desired. So, what can you learn from your site's analytics or onboard statistics that will help?

Step 1: Find Your Stats

The first step is to find where your analytics are captured and reported so that you can begin to use them to improve your website and generate leads. You may be using Google Analytics, so you can go to that dashboard and find your statistical reports. Google Analytics may be reported on your website backend, or you may have another statistical reporting resource.

Step 2: Learn the Reporting Tools

This doesn't take that much time. You want to see the ways that you can view your visitor data. You want to learn how to quickly view the number of visitors to your site for different time periods. Other important data includes:

• The pages where they arrive on your site
• The pages from which they leave your site
• The number of visitors
• Visitor demographics: age, gender, location, etc.
• How the visitors move around the site
• Where they come from: search engines, search terms, direct traffic, etc.

Those are the basics, though there will be many more data points you may want to investigate later.

Step 3: Understand Their Value

Each of those data points yields valuable information that you can use to improve your site's content, navigation, and ultimately your SEO clout. Once you understand what the data is telling you, it becomes clear that you can use it to your benefit.

Where Do They Come From?

Sure, you want to know if you're getting visitors from the search engines and the search terms they're using. However, are you trying to figure out where those "direct" visitors are coming from? Those are the ones who typed in the URL to a page on your site to get there, or they have it bookmarked in their browser.

You'll only be able to get value from this data if you begin to plan for it. These visitors are almost always coming from another of your marketing efforts, usually offline. If you begin to create pages that are targets of specific marketing, you begin to see where your offline marketing money is best spent. Create a URL for each of your offline marketing campaigns, and then you'll see what's working.

What Do They Do on the Site?

Other than your IDX search page, you should be concerned about "bounce rates." Google considers a bounce as a visitor that arrives and leaves from the same page. This is going to be a high number for search pages, as they are used over and over by regular visitors. However, other pages that have high bounce rates tell you that the visitor either didn't find something of value, or they didn't see a reason to explore more.

If you can see the path visitors take, you can gain valuable knowledge of what they find interesting. Example: A visitor arrives on your homepage and clicks in your navigation to a page explaining the transaction process. If you have a high number of visitors taking this path, you may want to improve the content on that page and add or strengthen the call-to-action there to get leads.

Where Are They Located?

Are you assuming mostly local visitor traffic? Is that assumption correct? If you find that you are getting a significant amount of traffic from out of your area, especially out of state, do you have the best content to inform these visitors about the area? They aren't local, so maybe you need to do a better job of showing them your market area, from homes to shopping and entertainment.

There's a hidden bonus in this strategy. Out of area traffic isn't being influenced by their friends with recommendations for real estate agents. They aren't in your area, so giving them what they want on your site will make you the first call when they're ready.

Other Demographic Data

Age can tell you something. if you're getting an increase in traffic from younger age groups, you probably should take a look at your first-time buyer content to be sure that you're meeting their information needs.

Your real estate website statistics are valuable if you just pay attention and take action based on what you see.

To view the original article, visit the WebsiteBox blog.