Seth Siegler is the cofounder of Simplistate, an eco-friendly, virtual real estate brokerage. He is also the owner and founder of Robot Workshop – a real estate technology solutions company specializing in IDX and PPC based lead generation. You can find his real estate industry blog at www.sethsiegler.com. We are also pleased to announce that Seth will be speaking at Real Estate Connect NYC 2011 in January!

I’m a Google Analytics junkie.  I check it several times a day and obsess over the stats on all of my websites. (you should do the same…but maybe not as often as I do…)

One of the main stats I’m always trying to keep favorable is “bounce rate.”  Google defines “bounce rate” in the analytics help section as:

Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert.

I’m always tweaking my home page to minimize bounce rate and increase “time on site” stat.  With that comes the ultimate question: “What is causing my bounce rate to be high?”  I’ve found a few things that lead to high bounce rates and low times spent on the sites.

Let’s take a light-hearted look at my top five potential reasons for high bounce rate:

5.  Your color scheme causes retina damage or seizures.

4.  Your copy starts out with information about you being a Nigerian banker who wants to mail you a check in exchange for another check.

3.  Your site requires a software download to work properly.  The file is called Trojan.exe.

2.  Upon landing on your home page, a video opens automatically, featuring a loud jazz flute soundtrack.  It’s hosted by Mike “The Situation” from MTV’s Jersey Shore.

1.  Your home page features your last blog post.  Its title is: “Welcome to the best sellers market in decades.”

In all seriousness, studying your site’s analytics is a great way to increase conversions and that’s what it’s all about.

Am I missing anything? What’s on your list?

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In a past life, I used to do a ton of analysis on website visitors and usage. Well, I still do actually, but for my own purposes. You see, if you run any website, this is something you need to pay attention to.

It doesn’t matter if you’re running a local real estate blog, a large multi-broker website or a massive real estate information portal – knowing what people are doing, where they come from and why they visit is extremely important. Using an analytics tool for your website is vital for growth and for increasing your business.

So, you know you need to do something, but the tool you use might vary depending up on the need. After all, there’s no reason to nail that picture to the wall with a sledgehammer. If you’re running a large site, and need to ensure that you get the best ROI, a tool that can do the heavy lifting for you is important. However, if you’re running a blog or small site, some basic information is all you need.

Many of us used to use server-side stat tools to parse our log files, however in this case I’m going to cover just the tools that use a piece of embedded Javascript.

Tools for Serious Analysis
Google Analytics
I use this for a number of websites due to it being a comprehensive tool that allows me to run multiple sites through the same control panel. It’s a free tool that gives you a great amount of detailed information about what users are doing and where they came from. You have the ability to create funnels and track usage down specific tracks. If you run Google AdWords, there is tight integration with your campaigns. One thing that I don’t like is that it’s not real time, it is updated once every 24 hours.

GetClicky (pMetrics is a white label)
A tool that was designed for people who make money through their websites. I added it here because I wanted to show a tool that had real time statistics and that also gives an incredible amount of detail on each user that visits the site. For small sites it’s free, but large sites can cost up to $5.99 month.

Specialized Tools
CrazyEgg
If you want to see a heatmap of where your visitors are hovering on your site and what they do, this is a good tool.

103Bees
Offers a much more detailed analysis of the SEO value on your site. What keywords are driving them and where you rank in the search engines for those keywords.

Mint
Only if you use a Mac. Personally, I like using Mint a lot for my blog. It gives me a quick overview of what’s happening.

FeedBurner
This is a good tool for monitoring your RSS feeds if you have a blog. They also provide some very useful tools that help syndicate your content. Their web statistics package is very strange though – the numbers just don’t add up. Stick with their feed tools.

WordPress Stats Plugins
If you run a WordPress blog, and you want to install a simple plugin to do this for you, try WordPress.com Stats, WP-Stats, or Open Web Analytics . If you would like tighter integration between FeedBurner and Google Analytics that generates WordPress reports, try the Google Analytics and Feedburner Reports Plugin.

[Updated: pMetrics is just a white label of GetClicky, a much more reliable alternative.]

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Keeping track of your site traffic is critical for any webmaster or web marketer. For a real estate professional taking their business online it’s going to be just as critical. At a minimum, tracking your site statistics can tell you who has visited your site, where they came from and what they looked at. It can also do much, much more.

Dustin posted at length on this subject recently, as his analysis of Rain City Guide’s traffic revealed some quite interesting trends.

To get started, there are a number of free options available to the webmaster, Sitemeter and Statcounter are two basic hit counters that I’ve tried and would recommend for very top level analysis. They offer very basic information; number of visitors, referrers and the like, and are a great way to quickly check out who’s coming to see you. Your web host will likely have some sort of traffic analysis package for you to use as well.

Performancing Metrics 

If you want to move up to more detailed analysis, have a look at Performancing Metrics, which is designed specifically for bloggers. (It’s from the guys who also make the wonderful Performancing blog editor plugin for Firefox). What I really like about Performancing Metrics is that it allows you to track multiple web sites from one account and even gives you an RSS feed of your statistics, which you can then subscribe to and get real-time updates of your traffic. The information is also presented in a very easily digestible format and gives you a good snapshot view of visitors to your site.

Google Analytics

If you really want to drill down into analyzing your site traffic, try Google Analytics, which just recently opened its doors to everyone. Prior to that, it was a closed beta that I was lucky to be able to take part in for the last several months.

Google Analytics is data smack for traffic junkies. There’s just a ton of information that you can dig around in. Honestly, far too much for me to recommend it for most webmasters – I even found it overwhelming at times. However, if you’re comfortable dealing with all the numbers, graphs, charts and diagrams and crave every detail from your last hit, then Google Analytics is the one for you.

The great thing about all of the options I’ve mentioned is that they are all free. Just be ware, all of them require you to cut and paste a small line of HTML code into your site template before they can begin tracking your visitors, so if you’re on a hosted platform like Wordpress.com or Blogger, you may have some problems.

Mint 

More recently, I have been playing around a paid product called Mint. Dubbed “a fresh look at your site,â€? Mint is the product of designer Shaun Inman, and costs $30 for a one site license.

Mint is a privately hosted traffic tracking package, meaning you need a free SQL database and some room on your server to host it. Once installed (just like the others, you need to place a snippet of HTML code in your site) Mint goes to work.

I really like Mint not only for its beautiful design and clear and concise way of presenting all the required information, but also the fact that it’s incredibly flexible and extendible. Because it’s built in PHP, Mint allows you to install plugins (dubbed Peppers) that allow you to customize the installation to exactly your requirement and greatly extend its base feature set. Check out PeppermintTea for all the current Peppers that are available.

Mint’s $30 price tag might be a turnoff to some. But it was definitely worth it in my books.

CrazyEgg

Finally, another fun site I’ve been playing around lately with is CrazyEgg, which offers you a unique way to track what visitors to your site do once they get there. CrazyEgg tracks the number of clicks that each link on your site receives and then presents that data is a visually interesting way.

CrazyEgg’s overlay view color codes the number of clicks on each link and with an expandable button shows you a percentage for each one.

Their heat map view, darkens your site and shows you (much like an infrared image) which parts of your site are “hotâ€? or not.

Any of these options will serve you well in tallying visits to your web site. I’d encourage you to play around with them all to see what mix works best for you.

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