BRER Real Estate Marketing Blog

This guest post was written by Sam Chapman who
markets Austin Real Estate and publishes the Austin Real Estate Blog. 

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I was looking through my website stats today and noticed something that I had not seen before.  It was the graph of visitor loyalty. 

Website Stats:  Visitor Loyalty

This basically measures how often people come back to my website.  The majority of visitors use the site once and don’t come back.  Many of these visitors probably find the site in  a search for some long tail terms, those searches not related to real estate.

Finding a website about Austin real estate rather than Hamilton Pool photos, for example, a visitor would probably look at the page I have for that subject, leave and not return.

People who visit the site 2-4 times, and that is a fair number of visitors, may find the site when searching a subject that returns a blog post and they may revisit my blog a couple of times.  Of course, these visitors could be looking for real estate in Austin and for whatever reason not come back. 

These might be people considering a move, real estate agents in other areas just checking Austin out, real estate agents who are studying my site to get ideas for their sites (yes, they really do this) or people just studying different markets for whatever reason.

The Thing That Caught My Eye

The thing that caught my eye was the number of visitors who spent time on my site 15 to 50 times.  When I compared this year to months prior to May, 2007, I noticed a big difference in the frequency  of people spending time on my site 15 to 50 times.

Then it hit me.  May of 2007 is when I switched from the Austin Board of REALTORS® IDX search to the WolfNet IDX search.  The ABoR feature isn’t a great search feature (no offense intended).  WolfNet is more feature rich and is more user friendly. 

The WolfNet search also allows visitors to save searches to come back to later and also to save listings as favorites.  These features provide a stickiness factor that wasn’t on my site before.

The number of people visiting my website more than 15 times after implementing an improved IDX search was up over 5 times compared to before.  That is a huge number.  The number of leads I have gotten since implementing a better IDX feature and the quality of these leads is also up.

Moral of the Story?

If you are a REALTOR®, you absolutely must have a website.  If you are a REALTOR® with a real estate website, you absolutely must have a great IDX search.
 

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If you’d like to see your guest post (and links to your site) on this blog, contact me today!