PropertyMaps.com Blog

I recently dove deep in Google Analytics. I found a wealth of information but something really caught my eye. Not just that, it improved our website. If you log into your analytics account and view your website stats, under the content section is something titled “Top Exit Pages”. I’m sure everyone understands the usefulness of this tool but not even I understood the full potential at first.

Obviously when viewing your top exit pages, you see the pages people leave from the most along with percentages and information. If you put two and two together you realize, this tells you what pages people dislike or what is wrong with your SEO strategy. A big light bulb went off in my head when I saw this. Our top exit pages were delisted properties. Then I looked up our SEO stats. Users were searching for specific MLS numbers and found our properties. Unfortunately some of those properties were no longer listed on our site either because they were sold or canceled. This made our potential customers become discouraged and leave. We had hundreds of exits from the delisted page a month. Did these people ever come back? I didn’t know, and that was a problem. All I knew was that the exit rate was over 85% and the bounce rate was over 90%. They come in via search engine, see our delisted page, then leave.

So we had two options. Either we can try and get our content more actively updated on Google, or we could change the delisted page to keep users from leaving. So we attempted both and now the number of users seeing the delisted page is zero. Without the analytics I would not have noticed this problem. Our problem was mostly due to Google’s cache of data no longer available. So in a way this both helped to make our site a little better and benefited our SEO. So take a look at your analytics. Sometimes those numbers can tell you a lot more than you think.