I find that tracking stats for my websites (analytics) to be addictive. It’s almost like a video game for me. The stats show a complete analysis of who, when, and how visitors find the site. In fact I was spending so much time reviewing stats that I had to set up a schedule where I only review stats that I have to set up a schedule where I only review the stats once a week.

I usually use Google Analytics (free) to analyse my site traffic. It requires placing at tracking code in the html of your website.

NO WEBSITE STATS AVAILABLE!

It was to my dismay that until recently I was unable to access statistics for three of my clients. They are all under the Century 21 Canadian platform, which gives every office and agent their own website. The issue was that I couldn’t get Google Analytics to work on these sites. They told me they were tracking the data themselves and would later make this option available at a later release. This release occurred the other day when they released the traffic analysis system to the companies and agents. So after many months of work, I can finally see the stats to back it up.

It was interesting for me to finally see what was working and what was not for these clients. For perspective two of these clients are real estate companies and another real estate team, all from Century 21 Canada.

Below are some of the observations that I made from the statistics without giving away too much specific info:

REAL ESTATE ANALYTICS REVIEW

Visits – No matter what kind of website you have, you always want to take note of how many people are visiting your site. A huge number of visitors is obviously not worth the same as highly targeted and convertible visitors. This is hard to determine but this can be aided by other stat categories, such as the ones below. It was interesting that my long time PEI real estate client has been getting double the amount of traffic as my newer Vancouver real estate client despite the substantially larger market in Vancouver.

Referring Sites – This is usually the next set of stats that gets my attention. This is where your website traffic is coming from. What sites and search engines are sending traffic your direction. You always find something interesting in your referral traffic. Some sites you never thought of may be sending you large amounts of traffic. Because of my company’s concentration on search engines, I usually concentrate on how much traffic Google is bringing in. My Vancouver client is relying on 50% of its traffic from Google which is a pretty high percentage of leads.

Search Phrases - Finally, I check the search phrases that users keyed into a search engine to find the site. This shows you if your search engine optimization efforts are working but could also point out search phrases that you may have overlooked. A lot of the search phrases for my clients had a variation of Century 21 and then the region. This tells me that the C21 Brand is being searched for people looking to buy in the region. It’s also interesting for individual agents or in this case the PEI Gold team to see users are finding them by simply Googling their name.

Another stats category that I usually view but which was not available through the Century 21 system is the location of the visitors. For example, if potential buyers are out of province or out of country. This is good information to know so you can further targeting certain geographic areas with Google Adwords or online classifieds.

How much emphasis to you put into reviewing your web statistics and what stats do you concentrate on?