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Track your results ~ why you need Google Analytics ~ why not, it's free!

By
Services for Real Estate Pros with MorSystems.com

Knowing the details of your website traffic is a must, especially to track the results of a marketing campaign. As a mortgage website provider, I must say that we too use this amazing tool to track our website traffic, and recommend it to our clients.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. We use this tool to see how many visitors come to our website on what days, where they came from, (if they directly typed in our website address, if they came from activerain, facebook, twitter, directory, email campaign, etc. on what date). If we send out a postcard or advertise in a magazine we can track to see if it brought in more visitors or not. If you take out a newspaper ad, create ads on craigslist, exchange links with a referral partner etc. you can see exactly how many people found your website from specific sources.

Here's a few snapshots of a client's google analytics account:

 

Google Analytics traffic sources for mortgage website client

Direct Traffic - visitors that knew the website address and typed it into their address bar.
Referring Sites - other websites that had a link to your site such as activerain, linkedin, twitter etc.
Search Engines - self explanatory ~ visitors coming from searching for your website in google, yahoo, bing, etc.

From there you can see more detail of what referring sites sent visitors to you, what search engines people used to search for you, and the keywords they typed into the search engine to find you. It's helpful to know what people type in a search engine to find you so you can work on your search engine ranking for those keywords and you can get an idea of what other keywords may be important to get a better ranking on:

 

Google Analytics keywords for mortgage web site

 

You can see what keywords people typed in search engines to find this client's website, and what webpages they visited within the site:

Google Analytics page views for mortgage web site

 

You can even see worldwide, nationally, state wide and city wide how many people visited your site over a time period!

Google Analytics map

These are just a couple things that Google Analytics shows you, you can see how very powerful this information can be for you to improve your keyword rankings, track your marketing efforts, and see what webpages people are most interested in.

 

Sign up here for your free Google Analytics account: http://www.google.com/analytics/

 

Comments(5)

Michael Kitsch
Coldwell Banker - Katy, TX

I think this is an extremely useful too.  It gives very important info and is very friendly to helping you get the info you need.  Thanks for the reminder

Jun 06, 2011 02:26 PM
Shelly Whitworth
MorSystems.com - Carmel, CA

You're welcome, and the other important part is to log in and USE the tool afterwards!!

Shelly Whitworth
www.morsystems.com

Jun 06, 2011 02:30 PM
Mike Wong
Keller Williams Realty Southwest - Sugar Land, TX
Realtor: Commercial, Residential, Leasing, Invest

Shelly..... AWESOME BLOG! Thanks for taking the time to explain it for everyone to understand. Did I mention AWESOME?

Jun 06, 2011 03:07 PM
Steve Stenros
Poway,La Jolla,Del Mar,Mira Mesa,Carlsbad,Escondido,Temecula - San Diego, CA
CREIA MCI, ICC, ACI Home Inspector,San Diego

Thanks for the useful post, Shelly! I have bookmarked it (it's late- going to bed now).

Jun 06, 2011 06:26 PM
Shelly Whitworth
MorSystems.com - Carmel, CA

Mike, thank-you I'll keep them coming. Steve, thanks for bookmarking!

 

Shelly Whitworth
www.MorSystems.com

Jun 08, 2011 02:54 PM