These days having a website is everything. And in real estate this is as true as in any other industry. Nowadays, most people perform searches for agencies or properties online first and that is why real estate companies need to keep an eye on their web traffic, as well as analyzing it.
Marketing benefits
When you look at online marketing and how to bring more people onto your real-estate website – and thus bring your company more potential clients -firstly you need to ascertain whether your website is working properly. It also needs to look good, to make the best possible impression, and it also needs to be user friendly so that people can navigate it with ease.
Analytics
Website analytics will help you with all of this. Analysing your site traffic and what your visitors do, will assist you in working how to direct your marketing better, and to work our if your current marketing programs are effective. Marketing campaigns need to have goals and the achievement of these needs to be assessed for improvements. Unless you have website analytic information, you’ll never really get to the bottom of what is working for your clients and for you. But if you can use analytics to your advantage, this means that you can tweak and optimize your website to exactly what is needed to bring you quality traffic and leads.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics produces reports by assessing statistics and data pertaining to a website’s visitor traffic, the sources of that traffic, how visitors navigate the page and whether these visit convert into leads or sales. How can this data help you further? It can tell you several things…
1. Where your traffic originates
Google Analytics allows you to discover which search engine or external website brought your visitors to your page. For example, if you posted a classified advert online or you have an advertisement or a link on somebody else’s website, or a Facebook page, the visitors may have come through those routes. Once you know, you can capitalize on this information.
2. When site visitors don’t stick around
What is referred to as the “bounce rate”, tells you whether visitors just arrive, and then leave soon after. A bounce rate may also help you to identify any snags in your site navigation. Perhaps if you find that people are always leaving your site when they begin to view properties, then maybe your site isn’t user friendly or it is too slow, and people are just getting fed up and impatient. This could lead you to improving your site and making more people convert to leads or sales.
3. How long do people stay?
How long, on average do your visitors stick around your website? Google Analytics can give you data that shows exactly how many seconds people stay on each page of your website. For example, if people are only staying on your property page for 4 seconds, you know that they are not able to view any houses for sale in this time-frame. This could help you to test your pages and make them more friendly or attractive to the visitors.
4. Moving around your website
Google Analytics can also show you information about how people move from one page to the next on your website. It also tells you how they enter your site and how they get to the pages where you convert them – i.e. subscribing to a blog, clicking on a property or emailing for information. With this data, you can work out how you can make your website better by enhancing those pages where you want people to engage in conversion actions.
The benefits of analytics
By utilizing this kind of information to engage your clients online, you can easily make the necessary changes to your site. This way, you can also support other external marketing campaigns, as well as those you run online. It’s also useful to remember that it’s great to get a lot of traffic to your site, but if none of it is converting into money, then Google Analytics can assist you working out what is wrong and how to generate more quality leads.
Lead Tracking and Goal Setting
Quality leads are what every real estate company desires. Google Analytics will let you set up goals for the above-mentioned conversion events:
- Getting people to request information about a certain property
- Subscribing to your blog
- Sending you their contact details
- Asking for information
- Joining your Facebook page or following you on Twitter
- Sharing or emailing your pages or your blog posts
- Getting people to download a PDF brochure
A visitor who comes to your site and actually converts in one of these ways, can turn into an invaluable lead. For a real estate business to get interest online, means that they have opened a door to a potential deal. Once this has been achieved, you can then begin to hone your efforts and focus your energy on selling property to that person. So before you decide on a goal in Google Analytics, work out what the aim of your website actually is and what process a visitor needs to engage in to complete that goal. Then use this information to set up Google Analytics goals and measure your success through reporting.
Tackling changes
Analytics are a slow process. If you see a pattern developing, follow it for some time and don’t react too quickly by changing your site straightaway. Often it is worthwhile to follow trends for a few months, for instance, before you take decisive action. However, when you start to use Google Analytics to your advantage, you will soon see the positive impact it will have on your online lead conversion rate.
* Image Source: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/results.aspx?qu=analyze&ex=1#ai:MP900442414|mt:2|
Author Bio:
Entrepreneur and enabler, Tuhin Ghosh has been pursuing his dream of enabling business and catalyzing growth mainly in the education industry. He is the Co-Founder of PrepGenie, a test prep provider that offers exam preparation courses for GAMSAT, PCAT, HPAT, LNAT, UMAT and UKCAT to aspiring medical students globally.
