Every company has a website but not every business uses their site the same way. Real Estate agents primarily use their sites for publicity; to either build their own brand or raise awareness about specific properties they’re selling. This is different from ecommerce, which is mostly retail stores but can also include any site with online transactions. Ecommerce sites are trying to generate sales or purchase intent, which believe it or not is a little bit different than awareness. Lastly, blogs or news sites where content is the product look to build readership and engagement. This obviously requires different tactics and analytical priorities than selling a house.
Google Analytics (GA) is without a doubt the most important tool when it comes to understanding how people interact with your website and leveraging that behavior towards your business goals. No other software comes close. Because GA is so comprehensive, works for any type of business, and as such a significant market share it includes a lot of stats that don’t really affect many people’s individual company but they worry about them anyway. Most don't have time to understand every metric and cope by being happy when numbers go up and sad or angry when they go down. With the end of the month and digital marketing reports approaching this post will hopefully demonstrate a more sophisticated look at popular GA metrics and how they specifically affect real estate sites.
Traffic Metrics - Sessions Users And Pageviews
The first thing most companies want to know is how many people are visiting their site. This is called ‘traffic’ and expressed in GA as sessions, users, and pageviews. Though all three are broadly counting website visitors, they all mean slightly different things:
Pageviews are probably the simplest metric to calculate. GA records a pageview, anytime an individual page is clicked on or viewed. A single session can have multiple pageviews but a single pageview cannot have occurred in multiple sessions.
Sessions are any instance where someone is on a website. Any action a user makes on your site is part of a session as long as they remain on your domain. There are no limits to the number of sessions a single user can create in a day. The only way sessions end in GA are when the user exits the site, is inactive for 30 straight minutes, and at midnight when the date changes.
Users is GA’s attempt at counting the humans actually engaging with your site. The calculation is intense. A user can initiate as many sessions and pageviews as they like. No matter the business I strongly recommend comparing users to new users to see if the site is viewed by different people over time.
Ideally all traffic numbers go up but for real estate agents or any awareness campaign I’d pay the most attention to new users. New users shows the number of people who interacted with your site instead of the total number of interactions displayed as sessions or pageviews. Ecommerce sites care more about sessions assuming one person buying two things is the same profit as two people making the same purchases separately. Blogs emphasize pageviews since it shows what people actually clicked. Agents who have a blog on their site would do well to compare pageviews on different posts when deciding what to write next.
Real estate agents listing multiple properties on the same site should expect some gaps between pageviews and users. The more varied the listings the looser the correlation between pageviews and users. Someone interested in a 3 bedroom probably wouldn’t click on a bachelor listing even though the listing itself is probably awesome. This can be valuable for your own marketing efforts. If a certain type of property consistently has higher pageviews than another, you know your site does a better job attracting that type of buyer. In my experience sessions are the least important traffic metric for real estate sites, though they are still worth paying attention to. Since people tend to think over major purchases like property it’s normal to revisit the same page over a long period of time and from several devices. It is also perfectly understandable if a customer does not do this, making it difficult to definitively link sessions to closing a deal.
Bounce Rate - Don't Panic
Bounce rate is defined as “the percentage of visitors to a site who navigate away after viewing only 1 page”. I can’t count how many clients panic when their bounce rate drops. This is a symptom of GA being an analytics platform for every type of site. Bounce rate is hugely important to blogs or sites that make money from people visiting and engaging with multiple pages but less so to other types of businesses. In fact there are some situations where real estate agents should be happy about an increase in bounce rate.
Real Estate sites tend to have a few general page types, home, listings, contact, and maybe blog posts. Since it is technically possible to enter a site from anyone of these pages, they all technically have a bounce rate. That said, it only really matters on your homepage. The homepage is the only page on a real estate site actually designed to make people go to other pages. If someone gets to a listing from the homepage they did not bounce. Think about ideal user behavior. In a perfect world someone would call you right away after seeing your contact page. This would involve leaving the site and technically bouncing. The same principle can be applied to listing pages. Bounce rate is only recorded when users enter the site through that page. Again think what would happen in a perfect world, the user would leave the site and call you about the listing. You’re a savvy digital marketer who put partial contact info or software to track online real estate leads on every listing page enabling potential customers to contact you without visiting other web page. Since best practices for real estate agents turn some bounces into wins, a rising bounce rate could indicate more leads and improvements in site performance.
We are trained to panic whenever GA metrics go down. Keep your sanity and by remembering not all traffic stats are really counting the same thing and sometimes rising bounce rate means people are leaving your site to actually get in touch with you.
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