Oh, so That’s How It Works
It’s happening less often these days, but you probably still encounter executives or colleagues who have trouble wrapping their heads around newer technology(especially in Real Estate)—how something works, for instance, and what it can do for them. So if you find yourself trying to explain the ins and outs of Google Analytics to someone who has barely mastered email, Lynne Harrold comes to the rescue with an anecdote about analytics on a small scale.
In a few posts at her Marketing Analytics blog, she recounts creating an online shop for her mother’s handcrafted jewelry—and using Google Analytics to determine whether her mother should be making quite so many bracelets.
What Harrold found seemed to confirm her suspicion. “Visitors clicked on the necklace section more often than the bracelet section,” she says, “which indicates that necklaces are more popular. However, necklaces are the first section listed and it may be that the order is causing more page views. Thus, I will switch the order and check back to see if the pattern continues.”
Combining this information with sales numbers, moreover, it nevertheless helps to confirm that her mother’s energy might be best spent on necklaces. “I had thought,” notes Harrold, “that visitors would gravitate towards bracelets because they are less expensive; however, her online sales suggest that visitors are more likely to purchase necklaces even though they cost more.”
What’s the Point?: With a simple story about a very small business,
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I am excited to take this journey with each and every one of you. Each of you will have slightly different goals but one goal you all have in common is to get steady flow of business from the web. Over the next 30 days, this program will change your life.
So what is the “Are You Connected Yet Challenge”?
In a nutshell… The Are You Connected Yet Challenge is about teaching you how to get new visitors to your site. For a full 30 days, you will complete small tasks that will give you the knowledge and skills necessary to get noticed on the web, how to use social media to effectively promote your brand, run a pay per click (PPC) campaign to funnel visitors to your site, how to measure your results and more. The cost to you is ZERO. That’s right; this is going to cost nothing. The entire training program is free, no credit card required. All you I need from you is your participation and feedback.
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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.
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