In 01-04-2005, I had a post called homemade website. Now almost 4 months later, it really has taken of! I know this sound unbelievable, but so far in March we had according to our Statistics over 57 000 hits! We can through our web statistics see where our clients go on the website (Which page visited). So we direct our marketing text to these pages.

We could from early see that the Newsletter part was the less visited so we removed it.

The last 4 weeks, we had an average of three listings EACH WEEK! Our ph. 717-552-1000, it is keep ring to midnight!!
To everyone out there that do not believe in Internet marketing...

Looking at my site's stats month to date for March I see I've had 130,061 hits but that only translates to 4,749 unique visitors.

What's a 'hit'?? Each time someone visits your website each page view and each graphic, file, image, etc. on that page would count as 1 hit. so if your website had 1 page, 1 picture, 20 graphics, and an audio file each visit to that page would be counted as 23 'hits'

A more reliable indicator of traffic is unique visitors which are tracked by IP address. Each IP is only counted once.

Here's a fairly good source that tells much more about this.

http://www.opentracker.net/en/articles/hits-visitors-pageviews.jsp

However for me the proverbial bottom line on websites, no matter how many hits, visitors, page views, etc., etc., is how much actual business did it generate that you can get paid from and use the money to pay bills, eat, buy stuff, etc.

If you're actually getting 3 real, saleable listings each WEEK from your website that's better than 'good', that's phenomenal. If that keeps up you will have the absolute most productive real estate website I've ever heard of.

As you see, I have very advanced statistic system.
This is the menu I can chose from.

Host report is IP adresses.

Report
Navigation

General Summary
Quick Report Summary
Monthly Report
Weekly Report
Daily Report
Daily Summary
Hourly Summary
Domain Report
Organization Report
Host Report
Failed Referrer Report
Referring URL Report
Referring Site Report
Search Query Report
Search Word Report
Browser Report
Browser Summary
Operating System Report
Status Code Report
File Type Report
Directory Report
Failure Report
Request Report

Pretty basic stuff really, makes good water cooler conversation to wow the rubes.

Here's mine.

But after all is said and done what matters most to me with a successful real estate website is how much business did it bring in and how much commission dollars did it generate.


Summary
When:
Monthly history
Days of month
Days of week
Hours
Who:
Countries
[] Full list
Hosts
[] Full list
[] Last visit
[] Unresolved IP Address
Robots/Spiders visitors
[] Full list
[] Last visit
Navigation:
Visits duration
File type
Viewed
[] Full list
[] Entry
[] Exit
Operating Systems
[] Versions
[] Unknown
Browsers
[] Versions
[] Unknown
Referers:
Origin
[] Refering search engines
[] Refering sites
Search
[] Search Keyphrases
[] Search Keywords
Others:
Miscellaneous
HTTP Status codes
[] Pages not found

Lke Jim says, the term "hits" is a meaningless term.

Back in the "olden days" of the web when a web site was basically one really really really long page without graphics, a "hit" actually meant something.

All it means nowadays, like Jim said, is that "some" file on your web site was opened. More important are page views or unique visitors, and web stat programs aren't completely accurate about those.

yeah, unique visitors are a better tell of how your site is doing. A huge webpage can generate several hits on it's own.

I am frustrated with my website. Not much movement, not much return. I found a new blog for the frustrated! http://websitefrustrated.blogspot.com
rk

Greetings,

On Monday we received 4 listings!! When we meet with the client, we present a market plan. Integrated in our marketing plan is our website.
This has shown to be success.

Hello,

What methods are you using to drive people to your website? Advertising? Web optimization? etc?

Thanks,

Ann Banos
Echelon Propeties
1-512-773-0580

Greetings,
I just received this one. I assume since the stats are mentioned, it has been read on this forum.
All what this "author" has been writing might be true, but it is unprofessional.
What the professional forgot...she/he left their IP adresss.

ProductOrService: I_want_to_buy:
I_want_listing_info:
Have_sharon_berry_contact_me: x
Name: NOT a customer
Title:
Price_Range:
Email: Wouldn'tbother@aol.com
Phone:
Remote Name: 24.41.2.180
HTTP User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O;
en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.2
Date: 09 Apr 2005
Time: 04:17:33

Address:

Honey: 1) Your site stats are completely off. Can't be. You don't know what
you're talking about. 2) This site is a mess. Unprofessional.
Abominable. 3) Get help with grammar and English. Your English and grammar
are horrible. You sound unprofessional.

I agree, very unprofessional and childish. Don't sweat anonomous messages sent through you site or else you'll go crazy

Hi,

Thanks, Did some research. This ip adress belongs to IP Address: 24.41.2.180
Hostname: user-0c2i0lk.cable.earthlink.net

People who claims to be professional should perhaps reconsider their status?
Thansk for your nice comments Rich@vtws . It warmed.

Hello,

What methods are you using to drive people to your website? Advertising? Web optimization? etc?

Thanks,

Ann Banos
Echelon Propeties
1-512-773-0580

would like to answer what we do to attract new business through our website:

1. You must have a dynamic website. This means that the content has to be changed on a daily basis. A static website is like old news or a bad cowboy movie. Seen it once seen them all.
2. Second and most important! It has to be a part of your market plan on how to attack the market. When we meet the client we tell him/her about the website, we offer the client unlimited number of pictures. We offer to burn a digital movie with all the pictures on CD/DVD of their home. We go the extra step to make the client understand that a successful sale is based on VISIBILITY for the buyers.
3. For every house we list we burn these CD’s. These CD’s is put in folders for the public with labels that they are welcome to visit sharonberry.com or call.
4. As we speak we have more unique visitors than we would manage to reach on a daily basis with the local newspaper! Our website is interacting with public.

That's all very nice but it still doesn't speak to the question: "What methods are you using to drive people to your website? Advertising? Web optimization? etc?"

Specifically:

Do you use a web optimization group to position you in search engines??

A 'pay per click' service???

Sign riders???

Print ads???

Thanks in advance for your answers.

Greetings,

Sorry for not being specific enough.
On our listing we have the Sign for sale, with a buckets of CD's with info about www.sharonberry.com
It is on our flyers.
And Sign riders.

We get lot of hits from Realtor.com.

We do not have Pay per click service

No ads in the local newspapers at all.