Analyzing your website traffic is crucial. It can help optimize your marketing efforts, improve usability, and most importantly, convert visitors to leads. There are many analytics applications available.
I utilize Google Analytics, which is free and easy to use. It is also integrated into many other Google products, including its AdWords advertising platform.
This post at the Google Analytics blog, "Back-to Basics: Non-Brand Keywords," offers a brief and easy tutorial on how to view your non-brand keyword traffic — this is traffic that comes to your site after entering search terms that do not incorporate your company name or brand name.
Here are the steps:
Log in to your Google Analytics account. Under "Traffic Sources," click the "Keywords" report. Select "Excluding" from the filter keyword menu, located at the bottom of the table, and type in your name or a company or brand name.
You can filter multiple words and phrases by using the "|" symbol.
As an example, you could enter: "your brand name|your city name real estate." Click "Go" to view your filtered keywords.
Plugging in my own company name and market area, I found this data to be extremely interesting. I discovered keywords and phrases that were hyperlocal and referenced neighborhoods, streets and points of interest in my market area.
You can sort the data by selecting the number of rows displayed or average time on site, or you can drill down even further by clicking a specific keyword. This information can be particularly valuable when developing content for your site.
I am always striving to find more efficient ways of generating reports and data, especially when analyzing listings syndication metrics. In some cases, this information is only available for a fee.
After generating some "Non-Brand Keywords," I decided to apply the same logic to generate a listings syndication report.
Here are the steps:
Under "Traffic Sources," click the "Referring Sites" report. This time, select "Containing" from the filter keyword menu located at the bottom of the table and type in the Web addresses of sites that you syndicate your listings to.
For example, you could enter "trulia.com|zillow.com|realestate.yahoo.com." Finally, click "Go" to see your filtered referring sites.
After your report is generated, create a shortcut and add it to the Dashboard.
The Dashboard shortcut will give you immediate access to your listings syndication data. This report contains a wealth of information including visits, pages, average time on site, property views and more.
It will also help you to evaluate which syndication sites are delivering the most traffic and yield the greatest return on investment.
Google Analytics is a robust application with countless reporting possibilities. These are just two simple examples that I hope you find useful. Do you utilize Google Analytics? If so, please share your tips in the comments below.
