As a real estate agent, the options for measuring interest in your listings used to be quite limited. For example, maybe you’d take out an ad in a local newspaper and track how many people contacted you about it. Or maybe you’d hold an open house and count how many people walked through the door.
Today, such approaches to gauging homebuyer interest just aren’t going to cut it. As the data illustrates, more and more homebuyers are making up their minds about the properties they’re interested in online before moving the conversation offline.
In this new real estate marketing landscape, real estate websites are the equivalents of shop windows: Prospective homebuyers show up to see photos and floor plans, to learn about neighborhoods and school systems, and to see if the agent (or company) is one that they want to do business with. So, how do you ensure that YOUR real estate website is a lean, mean, property-selling machine? The answer: get analytical.
With Google Analytics, you can measure the performance of your real estate website as well as the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Want to know how many visitors partner sites like Trulia, Zillow, or Realtor.com are sending your way? Google Analytics can show you. And that’s just one example. Once you have Google Analytics set up on your real estate website, you’ll be able to…
- Find out how visitors are getting to your site (Google search? Referral traffic? Direct?)
- Learn which of your pages are driving the most traffic and which are getting the most social sharing (Blog post? Homepage? Listing search page?)
- Discover what parts of your website are generating the most leads through conversion events (Contact form? Newsletter signup? Social sharing button?)
Armed with the new knowledge you gain from Google Analytics, you’ll be able to make adjustments to your website (and marketing strategy) to improve performance.
