Every real estate site or blog’s success can be measured in the usability of the site. Many sites today still concentrate on being pretty with special effects like Flash or AJAX, sound or video. While cool looking in most cases it’s not the most important factor that decides whether your site is going to fail or to succeed, usability is.
Bounce rate
The bounce rate is one of the most important usability metrics and thanks to Google Analytics it is easy to follow. 1000 visitors with a bounce rate of 95% means that in fact only 50 actually visited your site. So a site with a much lower visitor number AND bounce rate can be much more successful than a “stupid traffic” site with huge traffic numbers. Targeted quality traffic is the main key to a successful site.
Returning visitors
This should be obvious, only returning visitors really like your site. So the more come back the better, the more successful you are. One time search visitors and casual social media visitors are not the backbone of your site. The subscribers and returning visitors will be.
Pageviews per visit
Measuring pageviews is over hyped. If they land on the right page to start with then you have succeeded. Often bad sites require users to navigate through the site several layers to accomplish your goal not theirs.
Time on page
The time spent on a page can be read in many ways but you can deduce from it whether people just skim your content or read your whole article among others.
Time on site
It’s not always the longer the better but 5 minutes is in most cases better than 30 seconds, especially for a MLS search page or blog.
Next pages
To encourage people visit more than one page on a site we use internal links. Some of the links are links that we really want the people to follow such as “free CMA” or “list of foreclosures”. Understanding the “next pages” from a particular landing page we can determine whether the readers followed our advice or not and adjust our strategy accordingly.
