Understanding Event Tracking in Google Analytics: A Guide for Real Estate
As a real estate professional, you know the importance of understanding your website analytics to gain insight into how users interact with your site.
You may be unfamiliar with event tracking in Google Analytics and how implementing it can provide valuable data to optimize your site and better meet user needs.
In this guide, you will learn what event tracking is, why it is useful for real estate sites, and some tips for utilizing event data to improve your website and marketing efforts.
What Is Event Tracking in Google Analytics?
Event tracking in Google Analytics allows you to track how users interact with your website.
It captures data about the specific actions visitors take, such as clicking buttons, submitting forms, playing media, and scrolling.
This data provides insights into how people are engaging with your content and can help optimize the user experience.
Custom Events vs Default Events
Google Analytics comes with default events to track actions like pageviews, screen views and clicks automatically.
However, custom events allow you to track actions unique to your site. You can create custom events to track things like newsletter signups, contact form submissions, video plays, social shares, and more.
Why Event Tracking Is Important for Real Estate Websites
Event tracking in Google Analytics allows you to see how users are engaging with and navigating your real estate website.
You can track events like when a user views a property listing, saves a listing, requests information, or schedules a showing.
This data provides insight into what content and features are most interesting and useful to your visitors.
With this information, you can optimize your site to focus on the types of listings and content that generate the most interest.
By analyzing how users move through your website and where they drop off, you can identify points of friction in the user experience that are preventing conversions.
For example, if many users view listings but few actually save any as favorites or request more information, there may be an issue with how listings are displayed or how contact forms are designed.
Fixing these issues can significantly increase conversion rates and lead generation.
Best Events to Track for Real Estate Websites
Some of the most useful events to track include:
- Viewing Property Listings: When a user views details for a specific property listing, track this event. Monitor which listings receive the most views to determine your most popular properties. You can also see which listings may need improved photos or descriptions based on few views.
- Conducting Searches: Track when visitors perform searches on your site and log the keywords and filters used. This helps determine what types of properties and amenities your users are most interested in. You may uncover certain property types or locations you should feature more prominently on your site.
- Downloading Content: If you offer content for download on your site such as market reports, neighborhood guides, or home buying checklists, track when these are downloaded. Monitor which pieces of content are most popular so you can provide more of that type of information. Also, use content downloads as an indication of a lead’s level of interest and follow up appropriately.
- Applying Filters: All real estate sites allow visitors to filter search results by parameters like price, number of bedrooms, square footage, etc. Track which filters are used most often to get a sense of what is most important to your users when viewing properties. You may find that you need to adjust how certain filters and facets are displayed on your site to make the experience as relevant as possible.
- Forms
Tips for Optimizing Event Tracking Performance
Keep event category and action names consistent
Use the same event category and action names across your website to allow for valuable trend analysis. For example, always use “Submitted” as the action for forms, “Clicked” for buttons, and “Viewed” for content impressions. This consistency produces data that can be compared over time.
Add event labels for context
Include descriptive event labels to provide additional context. For the “Contact form submitted” event, the label could be the specific form name or page. Labels allow you to analyze and optimize specific events in more detail.
Track events on all site pages
Add event tracking code to all pages of your website, not just high-traffic ones. This provides a complete view of the customer experience and helps identify issues that may not be obvious. It also allows you to monitor the impact of any changes made to the site.
Review and optimize regularly
Check your Google Analytics event reports regularly to see how events are tracking and look for any issues. Make adjustments to the events as needed to ensure the data is as useful and actionable as possible. Event tracking optimization is an ongoing process just like the whole real estate SEO.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.