Prepping Your Website for the Busy Season, Part 2: How to Capture the Traffic

[This article is the second post of a four-part series on how to prep your website for the busy season. Look for the following posts over the next few weeks to make sure your website is ready for the rush.]

In our last post, we delved into the data and talked about the major trends surrounding summertime real estate traffic. We found that most buyers are on the hunt for a new home in the warmer months, which is no news to agents and brokers in the field. Now, we’ll talk about how to capture the traffic in order to grow your business.

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Google Cuts Keyword Data from Analytics: What This Change Means for You

Last week, as Google celebrated its 15th birthday, the search giant made two announcements that caught many by surprise.

One was that Google quietly switched to a new algorithm called “Hummingbird” about a month ago. This was a significant change that had (perhaps surprisingly) little fallout, so we’ll save that for another blog post and refer you here to learn more.

The other announcement that drew attention—and a big reaction from the SEO community—is that Google will soon be encrypting all search data in the widely used Google Analytics reporting platform. This means that detailed data about what organic search keywords were used to deliver visitors to your website will no longer be available.

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First Impressions of Google Analytics 5

As some of you may know by now, the new Google Analytics 5 user interface is upon us, all shiny and new.

As a long time user and fan of Google’s previous version, I’ve been gradually trying to integrate the new version into my workday. As a disclaimer, this post is geared towards people like me, who will need to go cold turkey for a while, in order to wholeheartedly embrace this new UI.  For anyone who is starting out with the new version, however: What you’ve never had, you won’t miss.

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The Goal of your Website – How to Measure Success?

Since it’s World Cup fever for the next few weeks, I thought it might be appropriate to talk about Goals. In sports goals are how we measure success, websites are no different. Earlier in the month we talked about Measuring Social Media’s Success, in that post we began to explore how to measure the quality of visitors from social media sites through engagement statistics. What we did not talk about is the punch line of engagement statistics, mainly goals. What can be murky is deciding what goals are, defining them and tracking them.

How does a site visitor complete a goal? Ideally, you want to direct visitors through the most important areas of your site to a desired outcome, which can be anything from reading a particular piece of information, calling you or filling out a contact form. The easiest way to measure a positive interaction with your website,  is by creating a goal, which can then be tracked through Google Analytics.

How do I track a Goal in Google Analytics?

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