A great website or blog can really elevate your business profile, bet you can’t wait to get it up and running. Well you don’t have to wait to start your social media programme, good groundwork can mean that the new site will arrive with a large waiting audience eager to see what’s on offer. A prime example is a comapany called Supaswap who used a competition on Facebook to get an early buzz going for their site.

A trading site aimed at the 8 to 18 age group, SupaSwap started a logo competiton on Facebook backed by Twitter, and soon had 3000 members and 300 great entries for the competition. The ripple effect from that meant that once the main site was launched, the company name was well known and talked about.

Now SupaSwap are utilising the full range of social media with Facebook, Twitter, Flickr , Google Profile and You Tube. A good lesson for us all in how to kick start your business.

SupaSwap website

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Have you ever wondered which are your most popular property blog posts? Or which search engine keywords are sending most visitors to your website? Or even what you could do to get more blog subscribers or enquiries from your real estate web site?

These are just some of the questions that you should be asking if you want to make the most of your real estate website and blog, and the good news is that by setting up Google Analytics on your website, you can find out all that and much more. The better news is that Google Analytics is 100% free!

Google analytics can also be integrated with your Pay-Per-Click campaigns so you can compare your PPC performance with your other site visits.

We’ve all wished to be a fly on the wall while visitors are browsing our websites, to see what they like and what they don’t, which pages attract their attention and which ones they close as soon as they load up, which properties people are most interested in and so on. The thing is that running a business website without knowing what’s going on is like dangling any old fishing bait in the hope that something will bite – untapped potential at best and at worst a complete waste of time. Fortunately, Google Analytics saves the day!

How does Google Analytics work?

When you sign up for Google Analytics, you get a few lines of HTML code that your web master will add to your property website (usually a couple of minutes’ job). From then on, your website will keep track of every time someone visits a new page and will send usage data to Google in an anonymous way that protects the privacy of your visitors.

By logging into your Google Analytics account from your web browser you will be able to see detailed statistics for your web site and generate fully customisable reports. You will be able to easily find out things like how popular your pages are, which sites send you most traffic, how much time visitors spend viewing each page, and what parts of the world they come from. But that’s just the beginning.

The really interesting part of Google Analytics is where you define specific goals that you want your visitors to achieve (like running a property search, filling in an enquiry form or subscribing to your property blog). This will allow you to not only monitor how often these goals are achieved, but also to follow the paths leading up to the action so that you can figure out what’s up with those visitors who don’t follow through to the end.

Practical examples: Using Google Analytics to improve your property website

Let me illustrate with a couple of examples. If Google Analytics shows that you are getting a good amount of traffic to your real estate website, but very few property searches, you can use the data to troubleshoot and find out what’s wrong.

Maybe your search box is in the wrong place, or it’s not attractive enough, or the form is too complicated and is scaring people away. You just have to make some changes to your website, wait for some more data to come into Google Analytics, and see if things have improved. And you can do this over and over again, building upon what works best to increase your conversions and your ROI.

Another example: let’s say you’re only getting few readers subscribing to your blog. It could be that your subscribe button needs a makeover. Or you could try adding a note and a link at the bottom of each post asking users to subscribe if they liked it (you can even try asking in different ways, to see which works best).Or maybe you could test the effects of dangling a carrot by offering a free property market report or other giveaway exclusively to readers who subscribe to your property blog. Every time you make a change you just need to wait a few days to gather enough data to see what effect it has had and go on from there.

Once you discover the kind of insight that software like Google Analytics can give you into what’s right and wrong with your real estate web site, you’ll never look back! If you’re not using analytics already, check out analytics.google.com, or contact us at Sorted Sites if you need help getting started.

If you are already one of the enlightened real estate website owners using Google Analytics, you might want to get in touch with us anyway to find out how to make the most of your website’s data and use it to your best advantage!

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