When people ask about getting more traffic to
their site, I usually ask, “What’s wrong with
the people who are already on your site?” I say
this because most of the time the answer to more
leads is not more traffic —it’s better
conversion.
Imagine, for a moment, a bucket with lots of holes
in it. It doesn’t matter how much you pour into
the bucket, it’s not going to hold water unless
you patch the holes. Your website is the same as
that bucket, only instead of leaking water, it
is leaking cash. Without the right tools, it's hard to spot the holes so that you can fix them.
Using Analytics to Find the Holes in Your
Bucket
Each site visitor leaves a footprint of their
visit. This information consists of everything
from how they came to your site, how long they
stayed on pages, where they left, what town they
live in, what type of computer they were using,
and even the monitor resolution they have.
Why is this important to you? Because armed with
this information you will be able to easily
refine your site to correct errors, to make it
more user-friendly, and to better customize it
to your target market. For example, your stats
may tell you that you have a large number of
visitors from California using high resolution
monitors and the very latest computers. With
this in mind, you can create a section on your
website geared towards affluent people in
California that are planning to relocate to your
area. There is even technology available that
allows you to dynamically show a separate
homepage to these visitors from California.
(Stay tuned, that’s a topic for another
article….)
Using the Right Tools
While there are many website statistics packages
available for purchase, why not save yourself
some money? A free product that I use
personally, and is one of the most robust
packages out there, is Google Analytics. But
just because it’s free doesn’t mean it’s
limited. Quite the opposite is true, you can
spend days reviewing the data and still not get
though everything! Getting Google Analytics on
your site is easy —just sign up, have your web
developer add a few lines of code to your site,
and you’ll be on your way to finding the
"holes".
Now It’s Time to Start Patching
So what happens next? Now that you have all of
this data, what do you do with it? First off,
you shouldn’t do anything with it. After all,
you’re a real estate agent, not a statistical
analyst. Sure, it’s okay to keep up with
“snapshots” of your site’s performance, but you
will find yourself burning up countless hours if
you get caught up in all the data. So what’s the
solution? I recommend scheduling a quarterly, if
not monthly, call with your web marketing
company to have them review with you the results
of your analytics, and to discuss their
recommended action steps based off of the data.
This is a key point. Don’t just talk about the
stats; make the changes as a result. After all,
analytics without action is simply a waste of
time and money.
Here are a few key points to cover:
-
Discuss
overall “snapshot” of the site - Are things
trending up or down? Have there been any major
fluctuations? Are these fluctuations related to
other forms of marketing?
-
Define
trouble spots - What areas of the site need
improving? What is the problem? Why is it a problem?
What can be done to fix it?
-
What is
working? - What seems to be going well?
Which of the calls to action are providing the most
leads? Can we duplicate this on other areas of the
site?
-
Implementation strategy - What changes need
to be made based on the analytic data? What strategy
is best to correct the trouble spots that were
defined? Remember: Being armed with this information
does you no good unless you implement the changes!
-
Results from
previous changes - Has there been a change
in the analytics since previous site corrections?
Have those changes had a positive effect? Has it
caused other problems in other areas of the site?
Watch Out for New Leaks
The only constant on the Internet is that it’s
always changing. Your site visitors’ habits,
markets and web trends are always fluctuating.
But analytics with action can keep your lead
bucket patched and full!
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