Google Analytics is one of the best real estate marketing tools you can use to understand your website. Not only is it an incredibly useful website analytics tool, but it’s also free. Utilising its capabilities will provide you with great insight for your online marketing strategy.
It may seem daunting at first, but once you get it figured out, it provides very beneficial metrics on your audiences’ behaviours and location, your most viewed pages, you website page views, etc.
It’s very user-friendly; you merely need to know how to understand the reports, which ones are most helpful, and where to find them. And, in this post we’re going to tell you all of that!
This tool allows you to go really in depth and build custom reports, but before you get to that level it helps to understand some of the basic reports. Here are the most essential Google Analytics reports, what they tell you, and where to find them. This should help you get started and take a deeper look into the analytics of your website.
Google Analytics Reports to Start With
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Channels Report—Where Your Website Traffic is Coming From
The “channels” Google Analytics report will show you how much traffic you’re getting from direct, referral, social, email, and organic search.
How to find this report: Audience > All Traffic > Channels
You’ll likely see several ways that viewers are getting to your site each month. Ideally, your SEO-strategy will yield you great traffic for long-tail keywords, but that’s not always the case since everyone is competing heavily for the top spots on search results pages.
You’ll be able to see if people are finding their way to your site via the keywords you’re using as well as other search terms that are leading people to your site. You’ll also see the traffic coming from other sites and social platforms.
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Source/Medium Report—Channels That Helped Drive Traffic to Your Real Estate Website
This type of report can be found through multiple reports, but this particular one will segment where your visitors come from, how they found your content, and what channels bring in the most traffic.
How to find this report: Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium
So, you’ll be able to see which social sites help drive traffic to your site. For example, your report might show that 30% of your traffic comes from Facebook, which will give you a good understanding of how your efforts on Facebook are directly impacting your website traffic.
Another example might be if you notice that your real estate marketing email drip campaign brought in a lot of visitors to your site, this will help you make a decision around how much time to devote to this aspect of your lead generation strategy.
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Users Flow—The Path Users Take As They Journey Through Your Website
How to find this report: Audience > User Flow
It’s great to see your analytics and that your real estate website is getting the traffic you desire, but it’s also equally important to see where your visitors are spending most of their time.
User flow can be an enlightening and intriguing report to view, because it tells you the path that visitors take from page to page on your website.
For example, if most people enter your website from the home page and then go directly to your listings page, that means your viewers are pretty seriously searching for property. If your visitor goes from your home page straight to your blog, he or she may be looking to learn more and might not be as far along in the buyer’s or seller’s journey.
The user flow report is very helpful to understanding where your viewers are at and if you need to adjust your approach to targeting a particular audience.
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New vs Returning Report—A Comparison of New vs Returning Visitors
How to find this report: Audience > Behaviour > New vs Returning
Your goal for a successful real estate website should not only include driving traffic to your website, but keeping visitors coming back.
Creating fun and fresh blog content—including real estate videos—that is highly valuable is key to getting repeat visitors on your website. If you see that your bounce rate is high for first-time visitors or that repeat visitors aren’t visiting very many pages, you should dive deeper into what’s causing your readers to leave your site quickly and/or not return.
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Exit Pages Report—The Page Your Visitor Left Your Website From
How to find this report: Behaviour > Site Content > Exit Pages
You want people to spend time on your site, so they become repeat visitors, but you also want them to do so for lead generation. You want people to enter their contact information so you can capture them as leads.
It’s important to understand what pages your visitors are exiting your website on. If visitors leave your site through one or two pages without contacting you, consider modifying those pages in order to compel your leads to reach out to you.
You can tweak your pages by modifying the existing copy or form-fill fields, explaining your value proposition in greater detail, or including more social proof.
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Top Events Report—How Visitors Are Interacting on Your Real Estate Website
How to find this report: Behaviour > Events > Top Events
Events include things that your visitors do on your site. This includes: video views, link clicks, and filling out forms.
By monitoring these actions you can see what resonates with your audience and find new ways to improve their experience.
In order to track each event, you’ll need to add an event tracking code onto your website.
You can, for example, publish a real estate video on your home page and monitor how many views it gets and how far into the video people watch.
In part two of this series, we’ll discuss the remaining must-know Google Analytics reports for your real estate business.
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