Jan
22
Written by:
Chris Chodnicki
1/22/2008 9:23 AM
Today’s real estate market is definitely a buyer’s market. This represents a dramatic turnabout from just a few years ago, when sellers could simply list their property, name their price, and expect competing buyers to bid and even overbid for the opportunity. Our online real estate (i.e., our website) also has its buyers’ and sellers’ markets, in terms of the hills and valleys of site traffic and the effort we need to expend to keep our online properties hot.
Whether the objective is to sell something or relay information, the key purpose of the website is to attract visitors and entice them to take a specific action. In our real estate analogy, we know that superficial changes to a home (painting, removing closet clutter, etc.) can have a big impact on time-to-sale and price. The same thing goes for our online properties. When a new visitor lands on your site, you get less than 10 seconds to make an impression, and those key moments of engagement will decide whether they move toward the desired action or not. Therefore your first task is to make certain that your site “shows” well by properly structuring your layout, site navigation, and content in a clear intuitive manner.
Home listings are posted on a national database, which enables interested parties to search for properties by key details (e.g., location, home type, etc.), with an emphasis on key selling points. Likewise, our websites must be organized to allow search engines to spider and index our keywords and the pertinent content that people are looking for, with an emphasis on search-friendly features, such as blogs and forums. Optimizing a site in this capacity can be a challenge, but today there are advanced yet cost-effective tools that assist you in understanding the behavior patterns of your visitors. They provide metrics called Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that help you understand and improve your site experience in ways that surveys never could.
Customers have come to R2integrated (R2i) using a variety of analytics packages, so we’ve gained a good perspective of what’s out there. At a minimum we recommend the use of Google Analytics. The latest release of this free software includes advanced analytical tracking functionality and features based on Google’s acquisition of Urchin. Urchin has been the main competitor of popular tracking tools Web Trends and Omniture. It typically takes just a few minutes to include the Google Analytics JavaScript on your site, and within 24 hours you will begin to have KPI reporting.
The value of a given metric can rise or fall. Although unique visitors and bounce rates are still very important, the worth of page-views has taken a hit with the use of technologies like AJAX, which enables a user to view new content without refreshing the page. Below is a sample list of metrics we analyze to ensure our customer’s online real estate is used to its optimality:
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Page-views - Number of times a page has been viewed on the website.
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Unique Visitors - Number of distinct website visitors within a specified period of time.
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New Visitor - Number of first time unique visitors to the website.
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Repeat Visitor - Number of distinct website visitors more than once over a given time period.
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Top Entry Pages - The first page that a user accesses while visiting the website.
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Top Exit Pages - The last page that is accessed during a website visit.
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Referrals - The referrals indicate which sites are sending visitors to your website.
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Search Referrals and Keywords - Search referrals include visitors that accessed the website from a search. Search referrals include the keywords that were used in the search engine.
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Internal Search - Keywords that were used while using a site-hosted search.
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Bounce Rate- Percentage of website visitors that leave without visiting additional pages.
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Conversions - A conversion occurs when a visitor completes a specified goal of the site. By assigning dollar amounts to specific goals, site owners can begin to measure a visitor’s worth.
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Community Activation- Community uptake is measured tracking how many times a widget has been placed on a blog or shared within social networking websites.
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Heat Maps- Heat maps show the intensity of click patterns on a website and reveal navigational pathways throughout the website.
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Behavioral Analysis- Measure raw search strings inside search marketing or “pay-per-click” campaigns to reveal search behavior.
These metrics dictate the actionable tasks you can adjust that will make the difference between someone staying on your site for less than 10 seconds or becoming a qualified prospect. With your online properties, it’s best to act like a seller in a down market. Get your house in order: Use good analytics, get search-optimized, and engage your visitors with well organized site design, layout, and content.
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