Tag archive for "analytics" | Blog.PropertiesOnline.com

Simple Analytics for Small Business Agents

Analyzing web traffic is a lot different for a small business than a national or multinational corporation. As a real estate agent, you may be working for you and you alone. That means that the responsibility for generating new leads – home buyers and sellers – falls squarely on your shoulders. Making effective marketing choices and attracting more clients has a lot to do with knowing where your customers and leads actually come from. Here are some simple analytics for small business agents.

In the real estate industry, referrals are king. Sellers and buyers alike are more likely to trust an agent who they’ve found via a referral, and more likely to go from a lead to an actual client. But what about those potential customers who don’t have a referral to fall back on? Well, statistics show that the #1 place they go to look for a real estate agent is online.

Online searches can provide you with a wealth of information, if you take the time to track and analyze the results. For a small business, understanding simple web analytics can be incredibly helpful. In addition to helping you understand your customer base, you’ll be able to see if and how your website is contributing to your bottom line.

The number of visitors your website receives is a great place to start. This number grows more relevant over time, as you begin to track patterns in its rise and fall and correlate them to any marketing efforts.

Knowing where – geographically – your visitors come from is CRUCIAL for small businesses and real estate professionals specifically. You’re not selling a commoditized product that can be shipped to buyers anywhere. You need local traffic, specific to the area you serve. You may get thousands of visitors to your website every day, but if they’re not living or wanting to live where you’re selling homes, they’ll do you no good when it comes to leads and conversions.

The next step is knowing where your visitors come from – as in, how did they end up on your website? Did they type your actual web address? Find you after using a search engine? Were they referred by your blog or one of the social media sites on which you have a presence? Did they get to your site after scanning a QR code they found on a yard sign or flyer? Knowing what works and how people find you helps you fine tune your access points.

Where do they go? Knowing the bounce rate of your visitors (visitors who leave your site without clicking through to a second page) can be incredibly helpful. If your bounce rate is high, you can assume with some certainty that people aren’t finding what they’re looking for when they land there. This can be for simple reasons, such a geographic discrepancy, in which case you can update the text on your site to be more specific.

Beyond Google Analytics

An important part of running a website – any website – is periodically checking your website statistics. After you’ve done everything you can to promote your listing website, including search engine optimization, craigslist posting and social media marketing, you need to check and see if your efforts are paying off, and fine-tune your marketing efforts accordingly. Google Analytics is an amazing tool that can help you track all sorts of facts about your website.

Google Analytics is an invaluable tool for analyzing your website that delivers enterprise-class web analytics for free. In fact, if you have a website and aren’t using Google Analytics, you’re seriously missing out on some critical and usable information.

Installing Google Analytics on your website can help you to track how visitors arrive at, interact on and follow calls-to-action, giving you an insider’s peek at the functionality of your website.

But you may feel like it’s time to supplement or verify the data you get from GA with something more. So where else might you take a look?

Get nosy with ClickTale, by watching them as they navigate your site. Where do they go, where do they place their cursors, how many clicks do they make, how long do they stay on each page? You’ll never have to guess again.

Use CrazyEgg to rapidly find links on your site that aren’t leading to conversions. Then remove or change them.

Use Listing Domains as a full-service web marketing shop, complete with live, advanced website statistics.

Use Woopra to build a comprehensive, real-time profile and timeline for every user, tracking them from anonymous visitor to converted unique customer across multiple devices.

4Q gives you the ability to use four question surveys to capture, analyze and qualify your customers. It has been called the “best free qualitative analytics tool on the market.”

More live, real time stats on visitor origin, content, searches, and more can be found using GetClicky.

Learn which keywords are most important on your site with Keyword Envy, by tracking your website’s performance.

Scope out your competition with SEOQuake, and find out important nuggets of information that may help explain why they rank higher than you in search engine results.