John Hall & Associates | Successful Agents | Greater Phoenix, AZ Real Estate Agency

RE Barcamp San Diego session: Google Analytics

On to the last session before lunch, I say that because at times it was hard to hear the presenters over my stomach, but I still got some golden nuggets I’d like to share.  Google Analytics (GA) was presented by Arizona REALTORS® (woot!) Kelley Koehler (@housechick) and Dave Smith (@daveintucson).  Y’already know GA tracks website traffic – we can move past that and get to the good ways to use it.  My lesson learned - set goals or you’re wasting your time.

Goals can be based on different measurements from the GA data, Kelley gave some examples.  One highlighted the difference between the Visitors stat compared to the Unique Visitors stat.  Let’s say your goal is to get lots of fresh traffic onto your site, but you have a low amount of unique visitors - chances are you’re not promoting your site enough to new people.  Get out there in new arenas and engage new people and create new ways for people to find your site.

Another way they talked about using the analytics is to see how well their call to actions are working.  GA allows you to watch the navigation path a visitor takes on your site. This is useful when you are testing different buttons, phrases, or whatever your call to actions may be.  When you  make a change you can see whether it was for better or worse.  Since website analytics will easily show you the highest ranking posts or pages on your website or blog – tweaking those pages will get you the most significant data.  Don’t be afraid to make changes to help drive traffic to specific destinations.

Their advice was not to worry about the time on site stat because with tabbed browsers, people leave pages open even though they are not using or looking at them.  They also recommended telling GA to ignore your IP address so your own visits don’t skew the stats.  And bottom line, if you’re not going to do anything but look at the analytics data, don’t waste your time.  Here’s some more analytics help to get you going.

Lunch!

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