You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere
Some of you will recognize in the title an old Bob Dylan song title. You may be old like me, or just well educated.
I recently learned that this is true to a great extent of my blog readers — you ain’t going nowhere. I’ve been getting into Web Analytics lately — the art of probing into your web site traffic to find out more about your web site and what your visitors are doing or not doing. The reason for looking at that, of course, is to make the web site better, which in our cases means to help more people search for and buy or sell houses.
Hopefully using someone on my team to do it, because then I get paid, and this frees up time for more blogging.
You thought I was just sitting here blogging because I like the green pasty monitor glow my skin gets. Well, yes, there’s that, too. But really the main thing that frees up time for blogging is the fact that some of you buy houses. Well, not some of “you”, per se, because as we said above, you ain’t goin’ nowhere. One of the first things that stands out from the web data is that blog readers have a high bounce rate.
“Bounces” is web analytics lingo for looking at a single page then leaving the site. Sort of the HTTP version of “wham bam, thank you m’am”.
Well, what can I say — you’re welcome. And don’t call me “m’am”.
Those of you who are old like me are probably thinking that a more appropriate tune comes from the Shirelles. “Will you still love me tomorrow?” Well, maybe so, but that would be a return visitor report. You can have a high bounce rate and still be loyal as heck to reading your one page.
Actually, I’m not sure you need web analytics to figure out that blog readers aren’t the biggest category of buyers (percentage-wise), but it’s nice to see my hypothesis confirmed in the numbers. Visitors to the site who are just clicking from growabrain (my thanks to them) or following some blog roll link are a different breed of cat from those who actually type in “Sacramento Real Estate” or the like into google (thanks to them, too). Not that having a readership is wrong, mind you. What kind of writership would I be without one?
And not everyone who leaves here goes out looking at tee shirts or the like. A few of you have checked out some of our search offerings. (BIG thanks to you).
I think I should get that old search image right up on top of the blog — in case someone really in their heart of hearts is clicking through from growabrain and just kicking, drinking some coffee, killing a few minutes in between freecell games and the like — you know, being a blog reader (I am one, so I know how it goes), and then all of a sudden god forbid has a minor stroke or something and decides she needs a house in Sacramento right now and let’s go search for one and then call the PLUS Team Realtor®.
Here’s old Sparky now:
Let’s face it, you missed him, didn’t you? I know I did. I like how he reminds me of Johnson Smith catalogs, or maybe Monopoly.
