Today on the Fourandhalf blog, Nitu is showing us how to look at Google Analytics so you can take away a few key data points and check the return on investment with your Property Management website.
Google Analytics is a valuable and comprehensive tool. Every property management company owner should know how their website is working. Sometimes these analytics can be overwhelming, and that’s why we are here – to simplify it for you.
Main Hub
When you sign in, you’ll see a dashboard. The numbers you want to pay attention to are:
• Users
• Page Views
• Pages/Session
• Average Session Duration
• Bounce Rate
These tabs are pretty self-explanatory, except perhaps for the “Bounce Rate.” That tells you when a user goes to your page and then gets out without doing anything. So, whether a user is there for two seconds or two hours, you’ll know that they visited and left without interacting with the page.
Demographics
When you scroll down, you can see different categories and demographic information on the people looking at your website. The example we’re looking at in the video is one of our clients out in Florida, and you can see from their demographic analytics that they are successfully reaching their Florida clients.
How Users Flow Through Your Website
Next, over the audience tab, at the bottom you’ll find analytics for “Users Flow.” This is pretty fascinating because you get to see what users are doing on your page. You can track where they’re going and what they’re doing. In the dropdown near the top you can choose different tabs such as the “Medium” tab. You’ll get to see at what point users are dropping off on the pages that they reach.
At Fourandhalf, we always recommend each company has a Property Management Services page that includes a form for people to fill out. Your analytics might show you that this is the last page people visit when they arrive at your website. That’s why it’s essential to include a form on the Property Management Services page – sending people to a Contact Us page might be expecting too much from them.
How People Find Your Page
At the Acquisition tab, visit All Traffic and go to Channels. Here, you can see how people find your website. This will show you how you’re doing with organic search, and see how your property management SEO efforts are coming along. You will see that most people find your site off Google directly.
On What Pages Do Users Exit?
Under Behavior, go to the Site Content and Exit Pages. As I mentioned earlier, it’s important to check out Exit Pages to see if there are any alarming signs. You might notice a specific page that has a higher rate of exits than all your other pages.
Check Site Speed
One analytics tool I really like is Site Speed. Google values a website’s speed. They don’t want the websites they put on their search engine to take forever to load because they want users to have a good experience. This area on Google Analytics is a good resource for evaluating how well your website runs. Google also makes speed suggestions and tells you why your site isn’t running as fast as it could. You can forward this to your webmaster or do your own analyzing. Use the Google suggestions to optimize your page.
This has been a very brief Google Analytics tutorial for property managers. If you’d like to talk more in depth about what you can learn about how your website is performing, please contact us at Fourandhalf.com – Internet Marketing for Property Management Companies.
