How Does Your Website Perform Compared to Your Competitors?
Understanding how visitors interact with your website is critical information to have. How can you improve your sites’ functionality, if you don’t know what needs to be fixed? Two primary metrics to watch are average time on site and average pages viewed per website session.
By Paul Salley, Manager of Marketing Strategy & Business Development
Average time on site is simply the amount of time a user spends on a website in a single session or visit. REAL Trends has analyzed hundreds of top brokerage websites across the country, including traffic behaviors through Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free tool that every brokerage should use to monitor web traffic and activity. Through this research, we learned that the average time spent on a brokerage website is between five and six minutes. Average pages viewed per website session are the number of pages on your website a user looks at in a single visit. This average for brokerage sites is 7.15 pages.
With this knowledge, combined with the fact that more than half of web traffic comes from a mobile device, can help you analyze your websites to see where you need to improve. Looking at the user experience through the lens of a mobile consumer will provide insights as to why a consumer may or may not be spending enough time on your site. If your averages are significantly lower than the national average for time on site or pages per session consider the following:
- Is my website enabled for a quality mobile experience?
- Is my website responsive for mobile?
- Do I have an intuitive navigation bar?
- Can I easily go to different landing pages on my site?
If the answer is no to any of the questions above, correct these basic elements immediately. Doing so will result in an instantly noticeable increase of time on site and page views.
For additional website and technology trends, check out the 2016/2017 REAL Trends Online Performance Study: https://www.realtrends.com/technology/tech-publications-studies/online-performance-study.
