How does Google Analytics apply to real estate web pages?

Google Analytics is a freemium web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic according to Wikipedia

Integrated with AdWords, users can now review online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions (goals). Goals might include sales, lead generation, viewing a specific page, or downloading a particular file.

Google Analytics’ approach is to show high-level, dashboard-type data for the casual user, and more in-depth data further into the report set. Google Analytics analysis can identify poorly performing pages with techniques such as funnel visualization, where visitors came from (referrers), how long they stayed and their geographical position. It also provides more advanced features, including custom visitor segmentation. Wikipedia 

The whole objective from SEO is to drive traffic to your web site. Real estate agents blog, post on facebook, tweet on twitter, and put their message wherever they think someone will read. The issue is do you know if your message is being heard. Analytics will allow to do this.

Setting up an Google Analytics

Yes you need a Google account.
To start collecting basic data from a website or mobile app: Create a new Analytics account if you do not have one. Visit google.com/analytics, click the Sign in to Analytics button (top right), and follow the on-screen instructions. Set up a property in the account you have created.

You will be assigned a tracking ID or tracking code. This will identify the site that you are tracking. It will look like UA-12345678-9. You will put this in your web site. You may need to refer the web hosting provider. There are several different ways to insert the code.

How to read the Google Analytic report.

• Date Range
• Sessions – How many time has your site been seen?
• Users – The Users and Active Users metrics show how many users viewed or interacted with your site
• Page Views – A pageview is an instance of a page being loaded by a browser.
• Pages/Session  – You can think of a session as the container for the actions a user takes on your site.
• Average session duration – Average session duration is: total duration of all sessions (in seconds)
• Bounce Rate – It is the number of visits in which a person leaves your website from the landing page without browsing any further.
• % of new sessions – It is an estimated percentage of first time visits. It counts new users so by definition it excludes returning visitors.

What does this mean to me as a real estate agent?

Look at this report.

The MOST users that was on this site was 4 on March 23.
In 30 days, there were only 27 visitors.
They stayed on for an average of 37 seconds. All were new visitors.
Five whole days without a single visit!!

What does this mean? NO WEB TRAFFIC!!
When the visitors got there, there was nothing to see and nothing to keep their attention!

Look at the stats for this blog

The pages that have the most clicks are listed above.

What I find interesting is that the post about MRIS is the highest. Someone had to find that specific page doing a google search. It ranks even higher that the home page!! That is content driven. If I wanted to increase my traffic I would continue on blogging about MRIS and content around it.

How to keep them coming back for more

Give them reason to come. Just because you the coolest, best or largest real estate agent/company, does not mean that they will come.
This is not “Field of Dreams”. When they get there give them GOOD content to keep them.

If you are using an out of the box template that is provided to you and you do nothing to improve on the dull site, EXPECT the results that in in the report above.

Please for Pete’s sake don’t knock on my door and say “I’m not getting any leads”.
DUH…. I wonder why….

I’m glad that you asked…. this page uses analytics. I know how many times this page has viewed. Thank you for helping my google juice.

I must say that I do not claim to be a Google or Google Analytics guru or master. I have done my best to research this subject. If there are errors, please let me know and I will correct them.