I use Google Analytics of course. You just cannot go forward without knowing what happened already! It is so great to have such a useful tool available for free! I was a Google fanboy in the past. I have a bunch of concerns about their products now, but still use and abuse all of the free useful stuff. Here is a graph of past search engine traffic for VirginiaBeachResidence.com. I can look at which Panda or Penguin update hit on which date and figure out what is raising or lowering traffic and try to do something to take advantage of it. I target over 1200 local keywords. at one time, I was on the first page for over 600 of them. Now that Google has been updating their algorithm, they can see that the content was a little thin. I am one person, after all and massively creating content takes time.
You can of course measure many other things with Google Analytics. A very new feature is to see how visitors interact with social media. I am happy to see that people are using the social media tools I have installed more and more often. I can measure where all the traffic comes from and spend more time there. Like craigslist is still a big traffic driver, However, it is starting to dwindle. Agents are spamming the board so much, that traffic from there is waning. As I work harder and harder to get Craigslist traffic, I am still getting less and less traffic. I know that I have to have some eggs in other baskets, so-to-speak. I would never have know without Google Analytics. The Google product has the capability of recording where all of my registrations come from. However, my site, provided by Onjax/ Pureagent does not have an event that happens every time someone registers. Therefore, I cannot record, in Analytics, when someone registers, and where they came from. It is on my list of feature requests to Onjax.
I can see which pages are doing well as landing pages! I love that! I saw that one of my more landed upon pages was Ashville Park Homes for Sale. I wasn’t overly targeting it, however, I was getting Google traffic. So I spent some time putting content on that page that was more likely to convert. And with the better content, it is also more likely to hold ranking for the keywords in Google! Thank you Google Analytics!
I can check which times of the day I get more Craigslist traffic and be sure to have more ads during those times. I can See which ads work better and therefore design better ads. I can see which social media posts drive traffic and which ones don’t. I can see that I have traffic from other countries! now I know that people on Military bases are looking for houses in this area! That is a very highly coveted demographic! I can see that more and more people are coming to the site on iPads, and make sure that my content looks great there! There are so many reasons to be on Google Analytics. You just need data to improve your site. No doubt.