I recently overheard an agent talking about their site and how it was getting over 1000 hits per month.  When I approached him and asked who the site provider was, I learned it was a provider that gave basic statistics to its users in the admin panel (which made me suspect that the stats were being misinterpreted by the agent).  I asked how many leads had come out of this and he said (paraphrasing) “I haven’t seen any yet but with those kind of numbers, it has to produce soon, right?”  I said, “Maybe.  Let me look into it”.  I asked the agent to look up all the stats and get them back to me.

The truth was, that the 1000 hits were accurate, but had nothing to do with how many people had come to his site.  When checking out the other statistics, I found the following:

o 1014 Hits
o 242 Page Views
o 75 User Sessions

What do these stats mean?  Well, it’s kind of like getting your blood pressure taken.  Each number tells you something about the ‘health’ of your site.  “Hits” refers to how many “objects” are accessed from the server that hosts the website.  That means, if your homepage has 15 pictures and 2 logos on it, every time someone ‘loads’ your homepage on their computer means 17 hits for the web stats.  This means nothing except to measure “bandwidth” – or how much information can flow at one time.  Because of advances in technology and infrastructure, no agent or broker site should have to worry about taxing available bandwidth, so the “hits” statistic is pretty meaningless to the real estate site owner. Bandwidth could be compared to total blood flow capacity in the human body. You never want to push the limits.

Page views and user sessions, however, mean everything for a web site owner.  This is the true pulse.  The amount of user sessions you have are the true number of visitors that came to your site.  The page views represent how many different pages of YOUR content they take the time to view.  In examining the above stats, you can see that, while the agent thought he had over 1000 visitors, in truth he only had 75 (as measured by tracking a visitors IP address they are accessing the internet from).

When looking at the ratio of user sessions to page views with the above stats, you can see that the average user session had just over 3 page views.  That’s not very good.  That means the average user only looked at 3 pages (which includes any home/listing views).  My goal when designing content is to get the ratio up to at least 8 pages/user session.  Imagine for every pump of the heart, the blood flows to parts of the body.  The more parts each pump reaches, the healthier the body.  If one pump of the heart could drive that blood to every part of your body, you are at your ultimate health.  So the pump of the heart is like a user session and for each user session, the more sections of your site they ‘reach’ the better your site is performing.

A good homepage will ‘propel’ them deeper into your site.  When good content is involved, a viewer will look at more pages, and that increases the chance they inquire on something they are genuinely interested in and the result is you get a good lead.  A lead where someone has asked a question they want an answer to and will answer when you call or email them.

What is good content?  That is the subject of another article but suffice it to say, you can write your own good content if you imagine yourself face to face with the prospect and use your experience to imagine what they really want to know.  Otherwise, we specialize in improving content in existing websites and can help anyone interested in having proven techniques applied to their internet plan…