Google for Real Estate: Leveraging Google Analytics

You can't know what works and what doesn't on your website if you don't have a way to track your results. Google Analytics is a fairly comprehensive tool you can connect to your website to monitor traffic and other important metrics.

What is Google Analytics?

The more you know about the people visiting your website, the greater your opportunity to cater to their needs and convert them into clients. Google Analytics tracks and reports on a variety of metrics regarding your website traffic and audience.

Why use it?

Google Analytics collects information like how many people are visiting your website, what pages they're looking at, and what pages they're leaving your website from. Armed with this information, you can determine what your website is doing well and where it's not succeeding so that you can adjust your lead generation strategies accordingly.

How does it apply to real estate?

Audience Interests

The Google Analytics audience report includes a section on your audience's interests. This is a great resource to study for possible blog and social content ideas as well as niche opportunities. If a lot of your website visitors are interested in pet related topics or wedding information, you know to account for those interests in your marketing strategy.

Acquisition

The acquisition report shows you how people are ending up on your website:

• Direct traffic – Someone typing your web address into the address bar
• Referral traffic – Someone clicking a link to your website from a different website
• Organic search – Your website showing up in search results
• Social – People clicking links to your website from a social media site
• Paid advertising – Traffic created from ads on other websites

Knowing where your traffic is currently coming from can help you determine where you should focus your efforts to attract even more visitors to your website.

Behavior

Once a visitor arrives on your website, how long do they stay and do they ever come back after they leave your website? The behavior report can help you figure out statistics like which pages people are looking at, which ones they leave from, and how long they stay on any given page. If someone clicks on your neighborhood page and clicks away after two second, you know that your content or layout could use some work. If they stay for several minutes, you know you're onto something and can try to duplicate your results elsewhere on your website.

There is a lot of information you can glean about your website from Google Analytics—and as they say, "knowledge is power." For more information on using Google Analytics, visit their help site here.

To view the original article, visit the Homes.com blog.