Archive for the ‘Real estate technology’ Category

Ok, so first off. What is google analytics? Remember a website stats counter? That small line text on the bottom of webpages showing you how many visitors your site has had? Well it’s like that,…but on steroids!

Google analytics offers you an invaluable insight into your website’s performance. For example, when you send out a mailer, you can count the number of calls you get on your phone. But did it bring any more visitors to your website?

Which are your most popular pages on your website? Which are the least popular?
Which pages are the most common entrances to your site, which pages are the most common exit pages. Can you improve those?
Do you get more hits on your site from a postcard than a local newspaper ad?
Where did your visitors come from?
What keywords did they type in to find your site?

Google analytics answers these questions for you, and more.

Real estate website as a tool for your business

By tracking and analyzing this information, your website becomes a tool for understanding the effectiveness of your offline and online strategies.

If you can measure where and when you leads arrive you can begin to figure out where best your marketing $$$ are being spent. Say for example you were thinking about doing a series of offline marketing pieces. You where going to a regular postcard mailer, and an ad in a newspaper. By staggering the launch of each campaign, say by two weeks, and following the spike, or not, of hit on your site, you can compare the effectiveness of both methods.

Where are your are you visitors coming from?

Google analytics has this really nice pie chart that shows where visitors to your real estate website came from. They are all grouped into 3 categories: direct, referral, search engines.

Direct hits: these people came to your site by typing in it’s full domain into a browser. We can assume that they probably received an offline marketing piece, a post card, a mailer, a market update flier, a business card.
Referrals: these show the which websites feature a link to your website. These maybe self generated from your blogging, facebook, twitter account etc. Ideally they would be from other sites that link to you and your real estate website because they think you are fabulous!
Search engines: these show which hits came from search engines.

Ideally we like to see an even distribution between these 3 main sources.

Look out for the up coming “HOW TO…” on setting up analytics on your website.

So, you’ve waxed lyrical, you have created, another, informative, succinct, original blog post. You hit publish, and you can see it, live, online. Feels good huh.

So what’s next, sit back and await the comments? What if you could encourage more search engines to come and take a look too, rather than simply waiting for them to come by.

Though, it’s certainly true that your blog may well be already pinging, or notifying search engines of your latest post when you hit publish, you can be proactive about it also.

Here’s how, visit http://pingomatic.com/

There you can ping multiple search engines that your blog has been updated. Here’s how you do it…as usual in just a few clicks.

Goto http://pingomatic.com/, you’ll see this page:

Type in your blog name, your blog’s home page, and your blog’s feed address, (normally your blog address followed by /feed

Then simple hit ‘check all’ to check all the blogs you want to ping:

Hit, send pings.

Ok, so now you are done!

The last few days have seen a change in google’s homepage. Their ‘no-design’ aesthetic, of a simple logo with some basic default html blue links seems to have morphed into…well, bing?

I have often regarded google as a no design company. By no design, I mean, no aesthetic consideration. Clearly they are concerned with design, but I think its pretty much left at engineering design. However, aesthetically, and to some extent their user interface has always been exceedingly stark in their use of graphics or style.

Beyond Bing’s large photo homepage format, I haven’t found much of anything to convince me to use them as a primary search source, (outside of facebook that is, which is who power their web searches from withing the facebook castle walls).

Oddly enough, as someone who has always called for at least some graphic consideration at google, I find myself feeling a little non-plussed at this new direction. Perhaps the starkness of their interface in some way prepared me for the onslaught of the search results I was about to wade though.

Microsoft is announcing that they too are going to be launching an online version of their Office product. This is being seen as a direct target of google’s cloud “Documents” product, which though only registering about 5% of the market, is growing.

The new product from Microsoft will be available through their Windows Live portal, that’s hotmail for those who still use it.

The word is that with google soon be lauching their operating system, Chrome OS, in direct competition to Microsoft’s strangle hold of Windows, Microsoft are going after google’s “Document” products!

On the face of it I wouldn’t be too worried if I was google…

However, the major coup is that they are going to be partnering with Facebook to offer this as an app there.

On second thoughts, google should worry!

Google has updated their user interface this week, thats the bit you use, and a ton of stuff that you don’t see. You may have noticed a subtle change in the way it looks, (that always throws me, my first reaction is that i have some malware installed, which has redirected me to a scam site!).

Really, the update brings some of the features that were ‘snuck’ in last time to the fore.

Type in a search query and you get the same set of results in essentially the same format. This is google’s ‘everything’ set of data. What’s new is the left column.

At the top you have, ‘everything’, all normal so far. Below that, they have moved the Maps, Images, Videos, News, Blogs etc to a much more prominent position. This means that its going to be more likely that people are going to perform subsequent search variations, from their original entry search.

As a real estate agent, you should make sure that your online strategies try cover all of these bases. Make sure that your website and blogs are loaded with local images, town images, development images, videos of the above, (even quickies from your smart phone) and blog posts.

Below, the ‘everything’ navigation is another category, More Search Tools, this is where users can find the most up to date information posted to the web. You can sort your results by the time they were updated such as latest, past 24 hrs, past week, past month, past year. Latest may show your twitter tweets!

I’ll say it again, you have to be blogging!

If you haven’t already done so, I would highly recommend downloading google chrome today. It’s simply the best browser we have used to date. I like it for a series of very subtle reasons, the tabs, you can change their order, you can break them out into their own window, the fact that you can search from the same place you type in urls.

The fact that it just seems to know what you are looking for. I rarely get more than two letters into the url i am looking for and chrome pops up suggestions which are usually bang on.

I am sure my every click is being monitored somewhere, by something for all this to happen, and perhaps I am sharing stuff I don’t know that I am sharing, but frankly, I’ll trade that for a great user experience.

I can also sync by bookmarks from one computer to another.

Did I mention too that it was fast? Check this out…

I can’t see Microsoft having as much fun as this…and it shows in their product.