Nov. 4, 2009 - Measuring the Success of your MLS Public Listings Website

Following is a follow up article to the comprehensive "Study of Multiple Listing Service Public Listings Websites" I performed earlier this year - http://www.realtown.com/mattcohen/blog/2009-mls-web-sites-study

One of the most important elements of an MLS listings web site is to have a feature that reports on the effectiveness of the site back to brokers and agents. HAR.com did a great job of this by implementing STAR (Strategic Traffic Activity Report) and IRES has produced its ColoProperty.com Usage Reports. When planning your future effort or evaluating your current one it is important to consider how you are implementing such reports.

Typically, reports show the following overall site statistics over the preceding month, quarter and year:

• MLS subscriber leads (email, phone, text, etc.)
• Hits
• Page views
• Visitor Sessions
• Unique visitors
• Average minutes spent on site
• Total visitor minutes
• Times listings viewed

Going beyond the site-wide statistics, reports to subscribers - broker and agent levels as applicable in your market - should show their own statistics over the preceding month, quarter and year:

• The number of times their listings were viewed - this could be interactive when viewed online and allow drilldown to a real-time breakdown of traffic by listing by date
• The number of click-throughs to their web site
• The number of times their email was viewed (requires use of click-to-see email addresses)
• The number of times email was sent to them via the web site
• The number of phone calls made to them (requires use of phone redirect)
• The number of text message leads sent to them (requires text message feature)

Ideally, these types of reports should be available via subscriber logins to the web site and also 'pushed' to subscribers who have listings on the site via email on a monthly (or at least a quarterly) basis.

There are many other aspects of the MLS public listings web site value that need to be communicated to subscribers - but ensuring that these type of metrics have visibility is a good starting point.

Nov. 4, 2009 - RE: Measuring the Success of your MLS Public Listings Website

Good info Matt.  Is this similiar to Googles Analyics?

San Antonio Real Estate

Nov. 4, 2009 - RE: Measuring the Success of your MLS Public Listings Website

Liz - Google Analytics will tell you most of the site-wide statistics but really falls short for the broker/agent specific statistics. Google Analytics would need to be augmented with web application functions that collect the other data types oulined in my blog post.

Nov. 4, 2009 - RE: Measuring the Success of your MLS Public Listings Website

Thanks Matt for the feedback.  This is something I'm going to research further since I think it can provide a great value.  Again Thanks for the Great Post.