It’s been a long while since I posted about traffic on RCG. Two reasons come to mind… One, I’ve been swamped in starting my new job and never got around to updating my excel sheet and two, I knew we weren’t seeing much growth, so what’s the point 🙂
However, I took a little time out tonight to play around with RCG stats and I was actually surprised (in a good way!).
First I’ll give two charts and then I’ll explain what I learned from my research. The first chart looks at visitors and the search engines that they are coming from, while the second chart compares the growth in unique visitors to the total visitors to give an idea of how many people are returning to the site on a regular basis…
[photopress:unique_visitors.png,full,centered]
[photopress:visitors_per_month.png,full,centered]
- While traffic may not be growing exponentially any more, we’re still gaining new unique visitors at a relatively healthy clip. (If you take out all the Zillow-hype related traffic in February of this year, then the chart would look a lot more like exponential growth! 🙂 )
- Google provides a majority of our unique visitors (almost 15K hits last month alone) and far outweighs any other traffic source (it is all organic traffic as I don’t spend any money on AdSense).
- MSN and Yahoo still have not figured out how to parse through the glut of Seattle real estate content in order to drive more traffic to RCG! 🙂
- The ratio of total visitors to unique visitors has always hovered between 3.0 and 4.0. This tells me a fair number of people continue to return to RCG and it increases as we attract more unique visitors. It also tells me we haven’t found the viral “secret sauce” that causes either a ton of unique visitors (who could care less about a majority of our content) or a super sticky feature that causes new visitors to come back at a higher rate.
- 61% are using Internet Explorer, 23% are using Firefox. The rest go using “Unknown” (8%), Safari (4%), and others…
- The top 10 search phrases (like [Seattle Real Estate] and [real estate blog] account for a combined 7.2 of all search engine traffic. The other 92.8% of search engine traffic comes from more obscure phrases. (Think Long Tail!)
- Traffic is highest around lunch (between 11am and 2pm).
- Mondays get hit the hardest while Saturdays are the slowest days on RCG.
- Seattle Bubble (404 hits), Ardell (399), and Bloodhound (384) are the three blogs that sent the most traffic to RCG in August!
- Google analytics tells me that of all the unique visitors in August, 1,333 had been to RCG more than 200 times!!! (4,710 unique visitors have been to the site over 25 times).
OK, I am really new to this whole Blogging thing?? I am a Realtor, in a very small town in WI, half of our clients don’t even have computers yet, however I believe it is a growing trend and this is something I really want to get a jump on! If you can provide me with any information I would greatl appreciate how you got started with this!
I would pass you along to all of the posts we have on RCG that we have tagged with things like “advice” and/or “blogging”, but I just found out (and have been working all morning to solve) that the tagging plugin I use broke when I recently upgraded WordPress…
In general, I recommend getting your feet wet by doing three things:
1) sign up for a free wordpress.com blog
2) try blogging for a little while to see if you like the process (If you don’t enjoy blogging, you’ll never get much out of it!)
3) get people to notice your blog by linking, linking and linking some more.
Alison,
I would also suggest checking out other Realtor blogs to get a feel for what topics they write about. The biggest “push back” I get from our clients about blogging is that they don’t know what to write about.
Here are a few ideas of what to write about:
– your listings
– neighbourhoods you work within
– local schools/shopping/etc
– market conditions
Hope that helps.
Dustin,
Do those numbers include spiders/bots from search engines?
Nope.
Visitors and bots are kept separate in my stat counter.
http://tinyurl.com/hnh8q
Interesting site comparing hit counter statistics in Seattle.
Congrats on your continued growth, RCG. I enjoy the wide variety of content your contributors consistently produce. Keep up the good work!
Paying websites would kill to get growth like this!
Dustin,
While I know that the site attracts all kinds of visitors, I am finding that my clients read it more before and while in the process of buying a house, and less once they close escrow. So part of the reduction in visits, is simply that they accomplished the objective that brought them here in the first place. They still read it, but less frequently.
For example when I asked “Polly” to read “As Good As It Gets”, she replied, I already have…FIVE TIMES! LOL. She did that before she contacted me. She still reads, but less frequently while in escrow and will likely read it less when she is busy packing and getting settled in her new home.
So from my perspective, her reading it less is not a bad thing, just a natural course of events.
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Stats are always fun to see and I think it is great that you share them with your users.
D-
What stats program are you using to get your detail reports?
I have been shopping around, now that my own stats have raised an eyebrow.
Jim,
Try Google Analytics it is no longer in beta and it is one of the best I have used.
http://www.google.com/analytics/
Sorry forgot the link!
Jim, the host I’m using provides a nice stat package that I use for any long-term comparisons because it is the only service I’ve had throughout the life of RCG. However, I also have MapStats and Google Analytics installed. I use MapStats to check the site out in real time (although I hear there are better packages out there!) and I use Analytics for all the in-depth stats (like visitor loyalty).
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